Life Without Amazon

Comedian Mark Maron has a bit on his latest HBO special where he laments how little we as consumers can do to limit the power of big companies like Amazon. In it, he imagines Jeff Bezos cruising on his $100 million yacht, tracking the number of subscribers to Amazon Prime, and saying, “Looks like we lost one.”

It can often feel as if we’re powerless, but as with so many things in life – being kind, giving to charity, supporting local political movements, disposing our toxic waste properly – it’s important to live according to one’s values. It boosts our sense of self, it provides a model for our children, and it potentially moves the needle of society in some small way.

My wife and I had been saying for over a year that we should really ditch our subscription to Amazon Prime, not because it isn’t a good deal – it is – but because we don’t really want to support powerful companies anymore if they can be avoided. After all, I cancelled my Spotify subscription last year without regret, and I wondered if life without Amazon would be equally unproblematic. There are a lot of online articles you can research about how to shop without Amazon, but I decided I wasn’t going to bother – just go in and get ‘er done.

So we pulled the plug to our Prime membership a few months ago, and you know what? So far it hasn’t been a big deal at all. I’ve had to search a little harder for some items, but I ultimately found what I needed, and sometimes at lower costs than I would have paid on Amazon.  Here are a few examples:

Audio cables: I tried Best Buy, Crutchfield and Audio Advisor, but none offered what I was looking for. But then a search led me to Sweetwater, where I’ve often purchased recording equipment. Turns out they provide some home audio accessories for the same cost as Amazon, with free shipping and quick delivery. Perfect.

Soap dispensers: we were unhappy with the ones we purchased at Target a few years back and wanted something that would last a while. We opted to go to a local retail store called Uncharted, which now has around ten stores nationwide. It’s a fun place to browse – exactly the kind of brick-and-mortar store we want to support.

Two healthcare items to help with my arthritis: this was trickier. Ultimately, I saved about $20 by not purchasing them on Amazon and instead ordering from Walmart. Now, Walmart is not exactly a local mom and pop store, but it’s still less than half the size of Amazon. Not a perfect solution, but it got the job done in a pinch. This example shows the limitations of trying to avoid behemoths.

Books: there’s been a lot of buzz about the resurgence of Barnes and Noble, which has reimagined its business philosophy and is adding dozens of physical stores. It’s funny how what was once considered the “Big, Bad Bookstore” is now considered an underdog. Still, I haven’t had a great deal of success finding what I want at Barnes and Nobel. Instead, I’ve went the used route, purchasing second-hand books through eBay, often from charitable organizations. There’s also a great local used bookstore a few miles from my house that I try from time to time. They don’t always have what I’m looking for, but sometimes they come through.

My experiment of life without Amazon has only gone on for a few months so far, but I already think it will last. If needed, I can imagine paying one month of Prime during the holiday season when we’re making a lot of purchases and sending them out of state, but I’m hoping we can even avoid this compromise. Give it a shot! We lived without Amazon before the late 90s, and we can do it again. Maybe when Bezos sees tens of thousands of people unsubscribing from Prime, he’ll start to pay attention.

The Space We Occupy

There was once a time when I could fit virtually all of my worldly possessions inside my ’85 Tercel.  When I made the trip to grad school in 1992, I even folded a mattress in half and wedge it into the hatchback, and for the next two years I slept on that mattress placed directly on the floor. Aside from my CDs and books, I had little else. Life was grand.

A few years later, when my wife and I moved into an apartment, then a larger apartment, and then our first home, much of our free time was spent purchasing items to fill the newly allotted space: a dining room table, an entertainment center (remember those?), dressers, coffee tables, couches, cribs and toys. Regular trips to furniture stores didn’t seem burdensome – it was a fun and rewarding experience to build our home lives together – but since those early days of adulthood, the frenzy of purchases has waned, with only an occasional tweak to freshen up the place.

We’ve now been living in our second home – an 1800 square-foot bungalow – for over twenty-two years, and a house that once sheltered a family of five is now inhabited by just my wife and me, our adult children living on their own. You would think that with three fewer people our home would suddenly seem enormous. Not so. The desire to occupy space with objects has been replaced by a different kind of desire: to occupy every square foot of our home with ourselves, as if we suddenly realize that our wings had been confined while raising children and now need to spread wide and reach into every square foot of our home, filling space the way our furniture once did, voraciously, insatiably.

My wife and I have our favorite spaces for everything: a space to listen to music and a space to play music. A space to watch most TV, another space for me to watch football.  A space to read for my wife, a space to read for me.  A space to sleep if we’re both resting peacefully, another space if one of us is snoring. A space to eat when it’s just the two of us, another space when we’re entertaining. All three bathrooms – one on each floor – are utilized, especially since late-night necessities arise with far greater frequency in our sixth decades. The only room we don’t occupy is my son’s old room, primarily because it’s still officially his room, decorated as it was the day he graduated high school, but soon that space will be fair game and we’ll remodel it for some other purpose. What exactly? Who know, but I guarantee that we’ll find something to justify absorbing this space.

Today when we have visitors, the house suddenly feels small, because these people are, um…IN OUR SPACE! What do you mean I can’t use this bathroom?  But I wanted to read in this chair, not that chair. I was about to make breakfast and you’re standing in my way.

How did our parents do it, raising families of four or five or six in a three-bedroom ranch?

If my wife and I are lucky, there will come a time when we have to downsize, discard items, and take with us only our most important possessions as we move into a one or two-bedroom apartment. Will our wings feel confined then? Or will we by then have figuratively clipped them, truncating our desire to stretch freely and inhabit multiple spaces? I hope the latter, but I fear that of all the challenging transitions we endure in a lifetime, this last step may be the hardest.

When Stuff No Longer Matters

A classic scene from 1999’s Best Picture, American Beauty:  Kevin Spacey makes a move on wife Annette Bening in the living room, and for a moment it appears that the two will rekindle what’s long been lost.  Annette’s character notices the beer in her husband’s hand.

A:            You’re going to spill beer on the couch.

K:            So what?  It’s just a couch.

A:            This is a four thousand dollar sofa, upholstered in Italian silk.  This is not just a couch.

K:            It’s...just...a...couch!  This isn’t life!  This is just stuff.   

I love that scene, and not just for the entertainment value; it beautifully captures what’s wrong with many people’s lives.  How many of us have become possessed by our possessions? 

Lately, I’ve pondered where our desire for “stuff” comes from, because after a decade of watching my kids accumulate books, Legos, jewelry and stuffed animals, it’s become apparent that collecting things begins early on.  Even for the very young, something about possession – of calling an object one’s own – is appealing, so that it’s not enough to just see a pretty rock on the Lake Michigan shore; the rock must be picked up and added to a collection of other rocks.  Whether this is a completely natural instinct or the product of a consumer society is open to debate, I suppose, but as a child, I possessed many things, and most of them cost nothing: rocks, pinecones, aluminum, pennies, beer cans, a bad attitude and shot-gun shells. 

(That last one is a bit perplexing.  Why my parents allowed me to wander unsupervised in the woods behind our home where people apparently shot loaded weapons is just one more in a long line of unanswerable questions about my youth.)

When we become adults, most of our childhood collections are discarded or stowed away in boxes, but we manage to fill the void with other kinds of collections.  When my wife and I moved into a bigger house in 2000, we had to fill it with something, and although we didn’t call our new purchases “collections,” they served the same function.  Instead of scanning the earth for rocks and pine cones, I scanned store shelves for paintings and frames, accents and knickknacks, not to mention storage bins for the collections of our children.  And unlike the treasures of my youth, these new acquisitions cost money.

Well into my forties now, the idea of accumulating more “stuff” is not only unappealing, it’s terrifying. What I used to consider important – my CD collection, for instance – I now view as little more than a nuisance.  I’m trying to stick to a new rule: if something comes into my house, something must leave my house.  It may lead to more yard sales, but it should also lead to less clutter and less stress.  And maybe it’ll even help me to avoid that impulse buy.

I recently read the following quote by Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut about growing older and how our views on possessions change over time. 

Several years ago, we sold our home and disposed of many things, including significant parts of our library.  Surprisingly, disposing of our cherished acquisitions collected during three and a half decades stirred not an ounce of regret.  After all, books are only things that join the grand parade of desire/ acquisition/ possession/ discard...having grown old, we stop acquiring things and instead acquire a growing indifference to them.

I wonder if we all grew indifferent a little earlier, if we might be better off.