Ending a tryst during a pandemic
I’ve had a complicated, six-year, on-again off-again relationship with Amazon. It began when I first signed up for Prime my first year of college when it was free for students. Not only was Amazon not reviled then, remember that in 2014, hardly any tech companies had had their scandals. Airbnb was still cute and had not yet emptied Florence and New Orleans of their long-time residents. Uber was a neat concept that was to both eliminate private car ownership and de-congest our cities. Instead, it pioneered a new form of contract labor. The “sharing economy” still seemed like a plausible notion, rather than a ridiculous one. And back then, becoming a Prime member felt more like a young adult’s rite of passage than a tryst with consumption.
At Bowdoin College in small town Maine, Amazon met us first-year students with the warm embrace of 21st-century consumerism. Its logistical prowess mocking the geographic isolation that faced our campus’s mighty forebears. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow all knew a Bowdoin tucked away in the woods, far from modern comforts. Even Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix who attended in the 80s, was stuck with just Wal-Mart in the next town over. For us, however, we could command half a dorm of furnishings up the coast of Maine with a farcically small amount of effort.
By the second week of classes, all the stuff I needed — for my promised four years of rich learning, shifting of worldview, and forming of life-long friendships — had arrived. I got settled, my bedsheets tucked and a few socks hanging on my flimsy new clothes rack. One afternoon after I thought I’d received everything, I got a notification I had another package waiting for me. The mail center staff wheeled out, of course, a large box from Amazon. Inside were four professional accounting calculators; the kind that prints calculations onto rolls of thermal paper.
Calling customer service, Rahul, who listened to my story, seemed unconcerned. In Amazon’s vast supply chain, things inevitably get misrouted. He invited me to send the package back, shipping paid.
“I don’t have a printer though. Can you also send me a printer so I can print the label?” I said, laughing at myself as my new roommates politely laughed with me.
“There’s no problem,” he replied with disciplined courtesy. “You can do whatever you’d like with the items.”
Lacking ambitions in accounting and out of concern that those calculators could surely be in better hands than mine, I very ethically did send them back. Off the box went. Three days later, I got another email from Amazon. Their automated return processing department coded my box as a “gift return” and credited me $391. If this is how Jeff wins me over, that’s all good with me. I bought a pair of Blundstones and a chemistry textbook.
Our bond grew almost ideological in the ensuing years. I moved to Houston, a place I found irritating and confusing at the time. So much so that I grew a new sense of pride for my hometown, Seattle. This place’s salmon is fine, though my mom surely makes it better. And, in this more innocuous time, before tech grew insidious, I professed that “Amazon is a local business for me,” because guess where I’m from? Seattle. The place that brings all good things: airplanes, Pearl Jam, office software that isn’t free, franchise coffee, and yes. The magic store where you can get anything.
No matter where I moved — Florida, New York, Louisiana, Massachusetts, and back to Texas — knowing Amazon had my back made the world feel manageable. Everything was available, anywhere, at the same price, just two days away. But in 2017, Amazon outdid itself. I’ve still never had Netflix, but with Amazon, I finally had my chance for on-demand TV. I processed the 2016 election, in part, by watching Man in the High Castle, the series about a parallel universe in which the Axis powers won World War II. Living in New York at the time, scenes of Manhattan occupied by fascist Germany bore eerie new relevance as white people feared for their civil liberties for the first time.
The good feelings took years to wear off, but that they did. By 2019, the reality became too hard to ignore. Underpaid warehouse workers were refused bathroom breaks. My favorite bike shop closed, posting a sign saying “You win, Bezos.” The environmental cost of overnight air shipping and so many goddamned boxes clearly outweighed hope that it would offset fewer consumer trips to the store. If there’s anything a liberal education trains, it’s a righteous anger, so I went to cancel Prime. When asked why I was leaving, I was limited to 150 characters, inspiring just briefest of manifestos, so I focused on their labor practices. After hitting cancel, I was warned I still had unspent credit. This presented a real pickle: do I forfeit it, giving cash to the beast? Or do I just get one more thing that I really need? I settled on getting an ironing board, which I now use as a standing desk. I never ended up working a job requiring pressed shirts.
My protest didn’t last long. Three months later and no longer having access to a university library, I needed a book for a reading group: a certain collection of Urdu stories in translation. A copy was nowhere to be found, even after scouring the public library and bookstore-dense Cambridge, MA. I crept back onto Amazon and saw that there were thirty copies, new and used, of different editions and wear ranging Acceptable to Very Good. A pop-up offered me Prime for free if I came back. I acquiesced, reasoning that Amazon makes but small margins, if not a loss, on shipping hefty used books. I felt vindicated with our relationship being relegated to those terms. We build our lives by setting healthy boundaries.
I’ve bought more from Amazon than I care to admit. Tidy brown boxes have brought me, at some point, push pins, watercolors, running socks, vegetable peelers, pot grippers, a space heater, cough drops, a bed frame, and a Casio watch. Each time at Whole Foods, I’m asked if I’m a Prime member and thereby eligible for discounts. Despite knowing to expect savings of a dollar at most, I still pull out my phone like a sucker and scan the barcode. Willingly sharing, not just what I buy online, but also the kind of eggs and oat milk I like. This access into my habits has allowed Amazon’s homepage to be embarrassingly prescient in anticipating my whims. Why yes, I do need a teapot; I broke mine last week. Of course, I want to spend five minutes browsing different color and strap permutations of Crocs. And yes, my fridge is lacking Halloumi and my pantry needs a top-up of oatmeal.
It does bring some relief, though, that Amazon still has not the slightest clue about how to recommend me books. Since I go to reasonable lengths to prioritize finding books locally and in print, I leave Amazon in the dark about a significant part of my life. I get a Kindle e-book only when I would rather not be caught with it. And conveniently, I had accumulated a healthy stock of Kindle credit over the years, earned one dollar at a time each time I declined two-day shipping.
This has created two parallel libraries. On the one hand, print volumes I keep on my shelves and the other, ones I allow only to exist digitally. My shelves have only my favorites I’ve retained across five moves. Mindful of the impression my shelves will give my guests (or these days, those whom I’m talking with on Zoom), I’m comforted that my selections underscore, I suppose, my literacy. I’ve developed a section on civil rights and labor, another for cookbooks, which sit next to my books on art and architecture. A corner for political theory I supposedly read in college and smaller sections for fiction, world religions, and works-in-translation. On my bottom shelf, next to my printer, are the books I haven’t yet given away.
Beyond even this group lies the heap that is my e-book library. Far from Amazon’s mastery of my taste in stuff and groceries, I’m amused it thinks it knows my supposed literary interests. What? No, I don’t need help managing stress at work. Or complex relationships in the modern era! I mastered Chicago style in my sophomore year. And no, I’d rather not read Barry Goldwater’s reflection on the conservative conscience. But alas, Amazon harbors no personal prejudice. If my shelves are a shiny exterior visible to friends, Zoom interlocutors, and prospective love interests, my cave of e-books — on leadership, pop psychology, biographies of strange people, and YA fiction — belong there, too, alongside the Bhagavad Gita and Walt Whitman. By harboring my cave, Amazon has probably just come to know me more deeply.
In all, it has been six years of this strange dance. Six years of Amazon learning too much about me and me increasingly depending on its breathtaking ability to make anything appear. This age of Covid-19 has been traumatic most of all because of the loss of trust we can have in even the most basic of normals. When was the last time I gave someone a hug? This time feels, in some ways, the most appropriate time of all to be able to to get stuff without leaving the house, when the comfort of buying things is one of the few levers of control we have left.
The past six years have gradually unearthed troubling things about the real cost of Amazon’s magic, but this pandemic has laid them bare in a way that errs on the absurd. My supposed friendly hometown company has become an empire. And while now may be an inconvenient time to quit, no amount of on-demand printer paper or peanut butter pretzels can hide the reality that Amazon’s practices are unabated even in a humanitarian crisis. Today’s May Day strike is just one of many strikes Amazon workers have called in recent weeks. It’s also an inconvenient time to be needlessly cruel.
Warehouse workers, who are crammed in tight quarters while others are advised that home is the only safe place to be, are paid but an additional two dollars per hour in hazard pay. The company has aggressively quashed organizing: going as far as deleting workers’ calendar invites, creating algorithms to track unionization risk, and strategizing to undermine worker leaders with personal attacks. Amazon’s engineers are at home and offered telemedicine mental health support; warehouse staff are urged to not talk about their health for fear it will cause panic.
There are often few good choices if we decide to consume at all, but in that I might consider I have enough stuff. Just a few years ago, it was possible to squint and believe that Amazon’s human costs were not merely in service of profit, but the short-term price to pay for a better, more streamlined world. But this was also before the company’s founder started building rocket ships. When we could say “innovation” or “disruption” unironically. In this time where nearly all work puts someone at risk, perhaps the risks ought to be borne partially by me. Maybe buying things ought to entail more friction rather than less. If I genuinely need something, it feels appropriate for it to require me putting on a face mask, pants, and even some shoes. I will have to decide if I should really ride my bike to a still-open essential business so that I can sort my very essential problems, in person.
