Tilting at Amazonian Windmills

aka Why I've been avoiding shopping at Amazon since 2017

I do not shop at Amazon. I know this makes me an outlier.

If you follow me on Twitter you may see me use a hashtag #notresolutionsjusthabits. Every year I try to add new habits to my routine. And sometimes I try to break habits too. On January 1, 2017 I decided I wanted to break my Amazon habit. There were several reasons, most accelerated by living through the experience of the 2016 presidential campaign.

I had always resented Amazon’s predatory market practices, fully enabled by its board. Amazon was unprofitable for years, which didn’t bother their board at all as long as their revenue kept growing. And the revenue kept growing without becoming profitable because they undercut entire industries on price. It’s hard to remember now, because their pricing differential is barely noticeable, but that was basically their business model. Be wildly unprofitable in order to drive other businesses out of the market because they couldn’t afford to do same. (I may have also resented that I felt like profitability was a very selectively applied success metric for investors.)

During the 2016 campaign I was also disturbed that Amazon (and its subsidiaries like Endless.com and Zappos, etc.) sold Trump-brand gear and products, and that they advertised on right wing propaganda outlets. My issues pre-dated even being aware of many of the other problematic elements of their model and their practices.

This was a private boycott. I didn’t talk about it a lot. I enjoyed reverse-showrooming on principle, but quietly. I enjoyed proving I could live without Amazon, even during the pandemic. I enjoyed supporting creators and vendors directly. I enjoyed the money I was saving by not being seduced by Prime Day and daily recommendation emails.

But I’ll be honest, in 2021 I felt like maybe I’d done this private little boycott long enough. Early this year, when I needed something in a time-urgent way for my condo, Amazon was literally the only place I could get it quickly enough. I checked all the other sites. And I still wasn’t going to retail stores in person pre-vaccine. So I bit the bullet and bought something at Amazon.

And I thought, “maybe this is it.” I did what I did for four years, and maybe that was enough. I had proved I could do it. I knew my impact was a micro-drop in a massive bucket. It wasn’t like I made it some massive part of my vocal advocacy. Who would care? What difference would it make?

It’s not that I wasn’t aware of their union-busting work in Alabama. It’s not that I hadn’t heard some toxic workplace chatter from people I knew working for Amazon corporate. But still. Maybe enough was enough when it came to this?

And then last week Jodi Kantor (she of the NYT and She Said fame) shared her latest longterm big picture work in a networking group we are both members of. It examined the processes and procedures and actions of Amazon in relation to its warehouse workers…The Amazon That Customers Don’t See. There is so much that is disturbing in this story. But at the very heart of darkness is the perspective coming right from the top, Jeff Bezos himself. People as cogs, people as essentially lazy and unworthy, people best used as automatons until they wore out for whatever reason. This isn’t a story of what it takes to scale. It’s the story of what happens when you lack fundamental respect and decency and care only about scale. This was always Amazon’s story. And frankly this is Bezos through and through. He’s the guy who said he was funding space tourism because that was the only way he could see to spend as much money as he had. He had to figure out something to do with all his money, and one could only go out for so many dinners. (This when he could have housed the entire Seattle unhoused population in homes at the local median price and use only a tiny fraction of his fortune.) The callousness. They say in companies everything rolls down from the top. So Jodi’s story is unsurprising. And if nothing else, as I told her, it reinvigorated my commitment to tilting at that windmill in my own solitary, perhaps meaningless, way.

Just like I never tell every person they need to become #vegan, even if I wish they would, I don’t ask everyone to follow me on this Quixotic path. Even if I wish they would. But I do think people should know and make informed choices. I am well aware of all my failings as a consumer. I’m well aware how far from perfection my choices are. But this is one thing I do.

If you could have me make one ethical choice to support a private windmill-tilting position of yours, what would it be?

Last week-ish

In related news, Episode 60 of The Op-Ed Page podcast I tackled the recent ProPublica story that took advantage of a leak of IRS data to examine how billionaires in the US pay (or more to the point, do not pay) their federal income taxes. The real reveal is that the hyper-wealthy don’t have to “game the system” because the system has been gamed for them.

It’s fascinating to me how much the American people have bought into the “land of opportunity” branding to the point where some folks defend billionaires and their ability to avoid income taxes easily and legally, as though they’re afraid that’s going to be them some day. Combined with writer Anand Giridharadas tearing down the myth of “the good billionaire” at the expense of my favorite one, Warren Buffet, it was a bad week for people who believe that with a little more hard work and bootstrap-pulling-up billionaire-hood is just around the corner. Sadly, sometimes the unwillingness to see systems at work in creating and upholding billionaires, rather than just brilliance and hard work, is a component of why so many people secretly (and not so secretly) believe that poor people are also there only because of their own actions and decisions and (lack of) acumen and work ethic.

Meanwhile the new #ChildTaxCredit in the American Rescue Plan is going to start rolling out, and I’m excited to see it in action because I consider it to be a way of experimenting with Universal Basic income (UBI) without calling it that. And that’s a systemic change we need!

Take a listen, and let me know if you’re paying the middle class “wealth tax” that already exists with little controversy!

Coming this week-ish

When my friend Maria suggested that my podcast listeners might not know as much about me and my #originstory as my storytelling sometimes assumes, I may have taken her tooooo seriously, and I have been telling little parts of that story each week in my podcast. In order to make it helpful, not just self-indulgent (though, don’t get me wrong, it’s definitely self-indulgent) I’ve been extracting universal lessons from each stage I discuss. This week in Episode 61 we’ll get to the part where I went from being an admin in the marketing department of a high-tech hardware company to being Senior Director of Product Management and Product Marketing running team of product managers in the space of four years. Without an engineering background or any tech knowledge when I started. There are definitely lessons to be extracted there!!

Hey women-identifying friends who are FemTech or HealthTech founders: Applications open today for a no-strings equity-free grant from Women Who Tech, the brainchild of my longtime colleague Allyson Kapin. We all know the abysmal stats for women-led start-ups getting venture capital (little changed since BlogHer raised its first round in 2007, sad to say). So women founders end up finding many creative ways to develop capital. This might be one for you.

Speaking of under-served founders, if you’re a Black founder and a parent then you should be checking out the ParentPreneur Foundation, started during the pandemic by my friend James Oliver Jr. He is killing it in developing support for his community, and the Foundation has been doling out grants for months now. One of the things the Foundation does that I appreciate the most is that they specifically give grants to help Black parent entrepreneurs afford therapy. I don’t know of another entrepreneurial program that is that intentional about prioritizing mental health among founders. So get on over there and check it out!

Leave a comment and let me know your thoughts on all of the above. And as always I appreciate a share of this newsletter or my podcast. 

And if you think I can help you break through the things that are keeping you stuck or help you strategize your own advancement, you can always set up your first introductory 30-minute consult for free by booking it in my Calendly.

Have a great week-ish