on convenience and consumerism
I have a confession to make—I am a book snob. Not as in who I read or what I read, but the actual, physical book as material object. There are few things that bring me more arbitrary joy than a well-made, well-designed book, and no dumber thing that can turn me off a book than the way it is laid out, the dimensions, what paper it is printed on, or even the texture and weight of the cover. I have pet peeves like 200-page books printed on thick paper to make them seem larger than they actually are; line spacing that condescends to the reader and looks frankly ugly; and fonts that have no business being in print. I have Judging-A-Book-By-Its-Cover disease, except instead of just the cover it is the entire book.
I say this because a few months ago I was reading a book that I was heartily enjoying except—except—it was 900 pages. It was humungous, to the point of unholdable. Not only that, the margins were laughably small compared to the thick wads of text on every page. And the cover was so thin compared to the rest of the book's largesse that I was worried I would rip it just by holding it the wrong way.
So I went to my Libby app to see if I could borrow it in eBook format from my local library. No dice. And then, dear reader, I made the regrettable decision of purchasing the eBook version on Amazon. I am supporting a writer whose work I enjoy, I rationalized to myself, and perhaps that was true, but the proceeds that this writer will receive from this sale are negligible. The lion's share of revenue an author sees from their book sales comes from hardcover copies. And if I was being honest with myself, I made this decision for personal reasons—namely, convenience.
Buying this eBook on Amazon was a single decision in an infinitude of decisions that everyone on this planet makes every day, every year, every lifetime. Yet, the guilt I still feel about it reminds me that it is indicative of a problem that I have and often pretend not to have, because I want to be a Conscious Consumer™ and Steward of the Earth™.
In an article from The Atlantic, Ellen Cushing beseeches us to cancel Amazon Prime. In many ways, Amazon Prime is a miracle of logistics and value—value as in efficiency, as in getting the most bang for your buck. But it is also, as Cushing writes, “Amazon’s greatest and most terrifying invention: a product whose value proposition is to help you buy more products.”
The truth is, I have had a very comfortable life and more than that, a very convenient life. Those are slightly different things—comfort may be about happiness, joy, and safety, while convenience is more about speed, choice, and ease. Having what you want when you want it. There are few things in my life that I have been denied or denied myself—I might wait for it or realize I don't actually need it, but if there was some material object in the world that I truly wanted, I have always been able to get it. Needless to say, I have poor impulse control when it comes to things. This is perhaps the attribute about myself I am most ashamed of.
Prime and Amazon as a whole is the latest installment in humankind's history of instant gratification. The airplane reduced travel times from days to hours. Search engines have made information immediate and endless. Social media allows us to communicate instantly, and streaming allows us to listen to or watch whatever tickles our fancy with the touch of a few buttons.
As a young teenager, I used to painstakingly download every song that I liked from a YouTube-mp3 converter. I would meticulously manage my playlists and fill in each track’s metadata, downloading album artwork and then uploading it into iTunes, inputting the album, artist, and genre information by hand. Now, for the price of a latte at Starbucks each month, I can listen to as much music as I want and have it perfectly organized and labelled through a stemming service.
The difference between instant music and instant stuff is an infinite number of factors, all of which have some cost to the planet and to other humans. Cushing lays out these costs in the barest of terms—labor, logistics, transportation, storage, poor wages for delivery drivers and warehouse employees, the fuel that powers the vans and cars and planes that deliver our things, the warehouses with their humongous environmental footprint, and software (powered by cloud computing that exacts its own environmental toll) that micromanages every package and flight and worker.
The fact that shipping is free to us doesn’t mean it’s costless in actuality. Amazon offers free shipping because it has already built up the infrastructure to do at it relatively little cost to their bottom line—what is more valuable is the marketing tool of free shipping, which encourages more and more people to shop at Amazon and more and more people to sign up for Amazon Prime.
Free shipping is misleading. It lets us think that the cost to have things quickly is very low, when in fact the costs are quite, quite high.
What also makes me anxious about Amazon, and about our current e-commerce environment overall, is the boundlessness of it. It presents us with a paradox of choice. We think that by having more options, we will make better decisions, when really, the many choices paralyze us or confuse us into making wrong ones, or doubting the one we've already made.
I listened to an episode of a Vox podcast on the science of dating, and---kind of disturbingly---the host and the guest (a behavioral psychologist) compare internet dating to online shopping. Perhaps this is fodder for commentary on how the internet and capitalism have commodified everything, including our search for life-partners, but the host and speaker also make a good point that can easily apply to both shopping and dating---that it is now too easy to be obsessed about finding the perfect partner or possession, rather than finding a good one and making it work. We are too quick to look to the next big thing, or we require that something meet our mercurial high standards. We are no longer willing to invest time and care in cultivating relationships with what is accessible to us.
Along with books, I am picky about many things---for example, the size and color of the bag I carry or the way my pens write or the way my moisturizer feels on my face. Around December 2020, I decided that one way I would starting Taking Care of Myself is finally fixing my skin. I get shiny and I have some acne scars. I was pretty content with my overall appearance and any of its "flaws," but if I could just coax my skin into looking less textured and shiny, wouldn't that be grand? So I bought one moisturizer. And then another. Then another. Rationalizing that I would not waste a drop, because any that didn't feel or work the way I wanted it to, I would just use as body lotion.
But by the spring, my medicine cabinet was sickeningly full and my skin looked just as it has for the last two or three years. I had fallen into the Capitalist Trap of thinking that finding the Perfect Thing (after hunting and buying and hunting and buying, spending hours and brain space thinking about what would be best for me and my skin type) would bring me some kind of fulfillment. You could argue that I was impatient---but honestly, even if I threw $1,000 into this hunt and found the absolutely perfect moisturizer, it would not be worth the dozens of plastic tubes and tubs and chemicals I'd leave behind.
One of the favorites that I ended up trying was a moisturizer from Korea. It is a cult classic on skincare forums and K-Beauty websites. It has to be imported from Korea, and---you guessed it---I purchased it on Amazon. With a gift card that I received from a relative, I reasoned. To not use the gift card would be a waste.
I am talking about Amazon specifically for the same reasons that Cushing talks about Amazon—our expectations for what is possible to want and the speed at which we can receive it is “bigger than Prime, or even Amazon, because Amazon is so big that every sector of our economy has bent to respond to the new way of consuming that it invented.” Free shipping is now the default, as are the low-low prices that are only possible because of opaque computer algorithms and economies of scale.
The problem of convenience and free shipping goes well beyond Amazon and Prime. I purchase snacks in single-use plastics because it is more convenient than cooking a meal or learning to make that same snack by hand. I purchase drinks because I am thirsty and I forgot my water bottle at home. I purchase an eBook on Amazon because I cannot be bothered to carry a physical copy in all its monstrosity when I inevitably get the itch to read it while on the go—never mind the thousands and millions of other, smaller books that I could travel with while saving said monstrosity for the times when I am home.
If it is easy, and it is cheap, and especially if there is no obvious proof of my purchase through which others can judge me, the temptation to simply buy something to solve a problem—instead of thinking creatively about the things I already own or deeply about the repercussions of the purchase—is very strong.
I am talking about this on the individual level because that is the level at which it eats at me personally. Of course, we need systemic change to change Amazon or get rid of it all together, but it is just that—systemic. My contribution to that change is predicated on the actions of others, on the balance of power, on the market and political forces that shape our lives just as much if not more than our individual actions. But what I choose to do and not do feels very much a function of my own strengths and weaknesses as a human being. That's my personal albatross.
Often, I look at these systemic issues and think, I am just one drop in the ocean. In the time that I decide to boycott Amazon, three more people will have signed up for Prime memberships. And more than that, our modern world is not built for ethical purchases. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Boycotting Amazon for my soap will mean I will probably buy soap from Target, another conglomerate that underpays its retail employees and sources its products from a mysterious labyrinth of suppliers and workers and raw materials around the world. There are hardly any chocolate brands that do not get their cacao from child slavery. It is impossible to know whether or not your purchase is 100 percent ethical because supply chains are so winding and opaque and endless and global. The economic incentives encourage everyone, from Jeff Bezos to the banana plantation owner in Bolivia, to cut costs. And there is hardly any regulation, barely on the national scale and near none any on the global scale. Having nothing, being an “extreme minimalist,” is one way to approach life and personal ecological footprint. But for most of us, our jobs and our families and our passions and our roles in society make that extremely difficult.
Moreover, ideas of "ethical consumption" are deeply intertwined with class and privilege, and how those intertwine with convenience. Cushing points out how free delivery and online shopping are boons to people with disabilities, people with irregular or long hours, and those raising children. Ordering groceries from Amazon may mean that a person hustling in two or three jobs can sit at home and relax for a precious twenty minutes, rather than making a long trip to the grocery store.
In terms of individual change, I can only do my best---a familiar refrain in all of my blog posts that try to wrangle with the Big Problems of our time.
Sometimes doing my best feels hopeless, but Cushing introduced me to another perspective. Rather than looking at what I fail to take away---the smallness of my impact on Amazon’s success---it is more useful to look at what I can give in choosing differently. Amazon will not collapse because I stop buying books there, but purchases at my local indie may help them stay afloat.
I will still buy silly things, give into my afternoon caffeine itches, and eat my Clif Bars and trail mix, because I am human and the world we live in is not built for intentionality. There are only so many things we can be intentional about until it runs counter to other things we want to be intentional about. For instance, in summer 2020 I worked for three wonderful organizations doing meaningful work, but I did not have the energy or willpower to buy groceries and cook three meals a day, the sustainable way. I drank a lot of Starbucks instead.
But I’m going to continue doing what I can and continue thinking about this, continue writing about this, continue airing my dirty laundry about what ridiculous purchases I make and the ridiculous reasons for those purchases, because I think I am settling on a kind of trifecta on how to deal with my own ethical and political hangups in my current world---
Education and accountability. Keep learning and keep recognizing when the talk doesn't match match the walk.
Do the civic and political work. Targeting systems has more of an impact than aiming for specific outputs or products.
Grace. If I truly am doing my best and the rest, my energies are much better spent Doing the Work than self-flagellation for being imperfect.
Thanks for reading and talk to you soon,
—Mia
read more
On the paradox of choice.
The podcast on the science of dating. (Vox Conversations)
Cancel Amazon Prime, Ellen Cushing (The Atlantic)
I talk a lot about my personal decisions in this post but I would also like to make clear that Amazon has also gamed the system for years and years to reach where it is now! Flouting OSHA guidelines in its warehouses (leading to dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries if not more), wielding monopolistic business practices, and misleading small businesses that have served as third-party sellers on the site. And also, Amazon has been granted millions of dollars in tax breaks throughout every single state in which it has set up shop, requiring everyday taxpayers to foot the bill for its ginormous warehouses and data centers. I highly highly recommend reading Fulfillment, by Alec MacGillis, for more on this.