The Case Against Amazon

Amazon touches every part of our world

Amazon has unbalanced everything.  This is not entirely Amazon’s fault - our own desire for speed, cheap products, and convenience at all costs have given rise to the company - but the reality of delivering on the infinite and immediate marketplace promise that Amazon has made is wrecking havoc on our economy, our definition of work, our bodies, and our environment.  

Amazon is remaking our world.  It has already remade our consumer experience: Mom and Pop stores have closed or radically remade themselves in Amazon’s image, as main street's around the country have been unable to compete with Amazon's convenience, speed, and range.  Right now, it is remaking our assumptions about the labor market and the need for human beings and our work, evoking the same struggles that industrial serfs and assembly line workers confronted in previous eras.  And it is starting to remake our fundamental environment, both changing the climate and drastically altering the physical makeup of hyper-local communities unlucky enough to be chosen as a location for an Amazon warehouse.  

​

Amazon is even remaking our brains.  ​​​​​​​​​​​​They've honed their platforms to maximize every little dark pattern and trick possible to keep us buying, regardless of the all the costs.  Whistleblowers within Amazon have told us what we already know from our own experience - that the platform is built to facilitate impulse purchases, and to integrate it's self into our lives with no friction to the point that all we need to do is have a thought about a product to have it arrive at our door.  No wonder it has launched a thousand memes about accidental overconsumption: cute if you can ignore the depressing signs of deep addiction being facilitated by designers and engineers alike.   ​​

​

Why target Amazon? Doesn't everyone do what they do?  

Amazon is so big, and holds so much market share, that they really do set all the rules.  If Amazon paid more to its laborers, the rest of the world of e-commerce would have to follow suit.  If Amazon created a model that was - perhaps - a tiny bit slower to get you a product, but didn’t grind down its employees' physical bodies, everyone else would have to adopt it.  If Amazon led the league in lowering the Carbon footprint of its fleet or its shipping, again - everyone would have to come along for the ride.   If Amazon developed a practice of engaging with the communities where it slaps down giant shipping warehouses, the damage to our social fabric on a hyper-local level could be ameliorated.  If Amazon cut down on the terrible crap that is so readily available on its marketplace, if the took financial responsibility for the waste that they produce, and if they removed their thousands of nudges driving us to buy more and more, we could massively reduce the flows of useless and harmful shit into our oceans, our landfills, and to countries with less developed economies.    

​

Amazon is the trend setter, and as such presents a clear and compelling target for any campaigns.  

​

We’ve been here before

Everyone should read the wonderful Consumers Republic by Lizabeth Cohen, (but not on your Amazon Kindle) a compelling history of the consumer movement in America.  It traces the ways consumerism – now something of a dirty word in this author's own reckoning – had roots in many progressive causes.  The ways that the role of purchaser for the home allowed women to use their consumer power as a part of a political awakening,

“the depression inspired tens of thousands of American women to join together not only to protect their families from a declining standard of living and other forms of exploitation in the marketplace, but also to safeguard society more broadly (1)" 

​

or the “Don’t Shop Where you can’t work” movement, where Black consumers refused to purchase from places where they were barred from being employed because of the color of their skin.  

 “Touch to the quick the white man’s pocket.  Tis’ there his conscience lies’ they helped create a model for retaliating against discrimination (1)” 

But core to the analysis of the consumer movement is Cohen’s recounting of a schism within the movement.  In the early 1900s and then again in the 1940s as World War two was ending, there were two ways that the Consumer Movement was evoked and two things that it meant.  

One, her "citizen consumer", was “responsible  for safeguarding the general good of the nation, in particular for prodding government to protect the rights, safety, and fair treatment of individual consumers in the private marketplace”.  The other, the purchaser consumer, saw consumption in any form as their patriotic role to promote the general welfare.  

The types of movements mentioned above, from housewives boycotting raised meat prices to Black consumers pushing back against private marketplaces that excluded them, fall squarely under the citizen consumer model, where as the purchaser consumer fundamentally transformed the American way of life through the pursuit of material goods, driving mass consumption and (eventually) economic inequality and the fracturing of society along gender, class, and racial lines. 

​

We can't ignore this problem - we now know too much.  

​

Upton Sinclair wrote his seminal work The Jungle in 1906, and without spilling to much more digital ink here talking about its value and history, we can say it works very well as a metaphor for the failures and successes of the early citizen consumers and as a very compelling metaphor of where we are today.  

First, the successes: Sinclair’s work shed light on the horrors of the meatpacking industry, and sparked a social movement that forced improvements in the quality of the meat products available to Americans and eventually led to the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act and the formation of the FDA.  From the socialist-leaning perspective that this site espouses, this is an unalloyed good!  

Yet, when asked to reflect on his own work, Sinclair is said to have observed that “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach”.  He was hoping to shine a light on the horrible working conditions and the brutal practices within the meatpacking industry, and ended up alerting people to a problem with the quality of their meat products.  

And how does this reflect today?  The Jungle was a moment when consumers woke up to the notion that perhaps there were some problems with just getting the cheapest possible product - that they had a real stake in the ways that product was produced and what it took to get them readily available meat at the lowest possible price.  

We might not have a single splashy publication with the breadth and reach of Sinclair’s novel, (though maybe we do have a collection) but consumers are starting to realize that we’re at a similar moment with e-commerce.  Reporters, documentarians, comedians and even Amazon workers themselves are cataloging the disaster: The ways that the convenience of getting things delivered to our door at speed comes at a cost to human bodies with workers ground down in the warehouse and drivers peeing into cups; The ways that paying the lowest possible price for goods comes at a cost upstream, to labor and to the environment; The ways that the expansion of the network of warehouses and fleets of trucks comes at a huge environmental; and the ways that all of these costs are being disproportionately carried by black and brown communities.  

Just like in the 1900’s, the consumer has come to expect a marketplace to deliver at a certain quality and at a certain speed… but we’re all starting to see how that’s not sustainable.  

So What? 
 

The question for you, dear reader, is which consumer movement will you be a part of?  We can’t afford to be purchaser consumers, whose greatest, most patriotic duty is to buy things.  We can’t be swept up in the monthly economic statics (good or bad) about jobs created, consumer purchasing power, or inflation.  We must - at least in our relationship with one of the biggest-bads our economy and the world have ever produced - be citizen consumers.  We must start by eliminating our own relationship with Amazon, and educating ourselves about how to survive in a world that has tilted dramatically towards the ease and comfort Amazon provides.  From there, we must work with others - not to shame them in their purchasing decisions, but to build the empathy that Sinclair laments from his efforts more than a century ago.  Our choices are causing harm: in the grinding work in Amazon warehouses and driving delivery vans, in the carbon costs of the break-neck rush to deliver things aver faster to our doors, and in the multiplicity of environmental justice costs being born by the specific communities unlucky enough to have a warehouse placed in them.  

Plus, like… Bezos is spending that money on giant penis-shaped rockets for him and his billionaire friends, he's actively destroying democracy and putting his finger on the scales through his ownership of the Washington Post, and he has decided that he's chill with Trump as long as he gets some big government contracts...  So, it’s not like the front man for this shit show is particularly compelling.