I stopped shopping on Amazon 60 days ago and here's what happened

Spirituality and Community are deeply intertwined with sociopolitics

I believe that money has a frequency to it and how we use it, just like how we use magick or witchcraft, determines whether it is ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ Just like saying ‘dark magic’ or ‘black magic’ are extremely colonialist and racist, saying ‘money is the root of all evil’ is based in archaic Judeochristian morality and norms meant to discourage the poor from trying to attain any amount of power through wealth.

Money itself is not bad, and having a lot of money is not bad, as long as what you do with it has a net positive. If I make $10 million and give away $9 million to good causes that help others in need, that’s overwhelmingly positive, right? But if I make $10 million and give away $500,000 to good causes, that $500,000 initially seems like a lot of money to most of us, but in contrast to what I made, its a small portion of the potential I could have given away.

After the election, which I just do not have the mental bandwidth to address here, and I am glad that I was still on hiatus from writing at the time, because I would have rage-written exclusively, I came to a realization that I was a bad consumer because of what I was doing with the money that I have left over to spend.

I was becoming the type person that I hated most. For context, I do try to support small businesses. I have been and still am a small business owner in multiple industries. I know the power of the individual consumer’s decisions to support a business and refer their friends and family.

But, I had lapsed into this comfortable apathy toward consumerism solely with my patronage of Amazon. Hi, my name is Sarah and I am a former Amazon addict. I think there may have been only a few days on a given month where I didn’t purchase something, and many days I made more than one purchase.

I do not even want to see the amount of money I spent there last year alone, and if I had to conservatively estimate, it was likely in the neighborhood of at least $20k, which includes a lot of household things like dishwasher pods and pet food, but also stupid and meaningless impulse purchases.

So back to the weeks directly following the election. The online discourse of billionaires infiltrating American politics so boldly and in the open through the MAGA party grew from a murmur to a loud cacophony.

Remember the good old days when our politicians were quietly bought by billionaires and we didn’t have to know about it, therefore didn’t have to face our complicity in both supporting those businesses owned by those billionaires and also turning a blind eye by claiming plausible deniability?

Well, we can’t do that anymore can we, now? Our president-elect is in the pocket of the world’s richest man, who has been accused of interfering in no less than three sovereign countries’ elections now, and as soon as the election was over, the other billionaires bent to kiss the ring.

The working class, which is all of us who do have to show up to work every day to make a living and we do not have a net worth over $100 million - so, yeah that’s you too, regardless of whether you want to think you’re not ‘working class,’ you are, my friend- began to realize just how bad things were and were going to be come 2025.

With people who have obscene amounts of wealth so as to make them virtually above the law having a say in how our government is run, nobody stands to lose more than us, the people. And the only thing we can do is to vote with our dollars.

Every year there’s some push for ‘no shop November’ or ‘no purchase January’ in response to the gluttony of American consumerism. But simply abstaining from purchasing retail goods for a month does nothing to the bottom line of billion dollar companies. They know you’ll be back, and they do not care.

And I am going to be fully transparent for a moment before I get to Amazon - I bought a Tesla 2 years ago (before Elon became an openly neonazi fascist). I drive 140 miles round trip every day for work and not only could I not justify the car payment and fuel cost, the emissions were staggering. Would I buy another one now that Elon is such a public embarrassment? Hard no.

But for now, I am not in a position to trade in a car that has virtually no resale value (google depreciation on EVs sometime and be prepared to be shocked), so when the time comes to get a new one in a couple years, it will not be a Tesla if the space clown is still associated with that company.

So back to Amazon. At the time of writing this, Jeff Bezos is worth around $236 billion. The average Amazon employee makes around $20/hr. Now, if you’re a millenial like me and you remember working as a waitress or bartender for something like $2.50/hr + tips, you’re probably thinking, ‘Wow! That’s actually great pay!’ However, based on inflation, the minimum wage it would take for a person to afford to live, which includes safe shelter, adequate food, transportation, and healthcare is around $32/hr.

Then factor in that most people have families to provide for and so on, and that $20/hr which is actually about $15/hr after taxes and social security come out, suddenly is nowhere near a living wage.

Yet, the guy who owns the company is worth over $230 billion?? He makes an annual salary of just under $2 million (that is paid directly from Amazon as a salary and benefits package), HOWEVER, here’s the kicker: he makes an estimated $7.8 million PER HOUR in stock he owns as the majority stakeholder.

Could you spend $7.8 million per hour? Maybe for a couple weeks I could, but I would run out of things to buy or trips to take, and the only reasonable and ethical thing left to do with that kind of money is to give it away. Literally nobody needs that much money.

And Bezos is only one of many billionaires or multi-hundred millionaires who make absurd sums of money and hoard wealth, while turning profits literally off the backs of low-wage workers.

So all of this discourse about the evils of capitalism got me thinking about my role. As someone who believes heartily in the color and frequency of the energy I put into the world being what brings things back to me, I certainly did not want to support the oppressive system that forces so many to labor under low wages in order to line the pockets of the already disgustingly rich.

I challenged myself to stop buying from Amazon, cold turkey. So beginning Nov 10th until now, there was only one time I made an Amazon purchase, and out of sheer necessity for a medicine my dog takes that I could not find an adequate local substitute before he ran out (I have since found an online retailer to replace that Amazon purchase going forward).

Here is what I started doing to break myself of the habit of the mindless Amazon purchase:

Create a running list

I was already solid on the habit of using a grocery and to-do list app on my phone, so I simply extended it to include all purchases needing to be made within the next week, regardless of where. If you’re like me and you have developed a habit of planning well enough for household purchases, this is actually not difficult to do to plan a weekly or semi-weekly errand run to your local grocery or hardware stores.

Every day I leave work, I check the list to see if there’s anything on it I can stop at a local store on the way home to grab, so the list never really has more than 8-10 items at any given time.

Ask if its necessary

The impulse purchases were really killing me. Not just my budget, but because they were many times things I just did not really need. I would never consider a book an impulse purchase, but given that my stack of unread is in the hundreds at this point, maybe I needed to balance buying with actually reading.

I found myself online shopping many times for something and the sheer amount of steps to locate a retailer, create an account or even checkout as a guest was enough of a deterrent for me to decide that whatever I was about to purchase just was not necessary. I realized that the Amazon ‘Buy Now’ feature was literally built to bypass all rational brain inputs that would normally tell you you do not need this thing.

Find a small business replacement

My first choice was to find a small business either locally brick-and-mortar or online to replace the Amazon purchase. I wanted to ensure my money, when it was a necessary purchase, went to people or organizations who are the backbone of our economy (43.5% of the US GDP is from small businesses).

This part was actually so nice and I enjoy it because it forced me to leave my house, set foot in actual stores, and buy from actual people. And many were businesses that I had purchased from before my slide into Amazon addiction. But, I think the best part is knowing that while my small purchase may be just that, if many others in my community and outside it are also doing this, small businesses are seeing the gradual embrace of shopping small and local.

Remember that libraries and bookstores exist

As a bibliophile, books just have a whole vibe, right? I love bookstores and libraries and could spend all day in one. Yet, the thrill of ordering a book from Amazon on a random weeknight and receiving it the next day (and then letting it sit on my shelf for over a year before cracking it open) was real.

So I tried to find a reasonable balance between buying vs borrowing. For all fiction and romance, I had previously been using Kindle Unlimited, but in avoiding Amazon, that was no longer an option. My local library, with which I did already have a card that was not being used at all, uses Libby to ‘checkout’ ebooks and then download them to a Kindle app, free of charge. Sometimes there is a wait, sometimes not.

For purchases in which I want to hold a physical book while I read it, I use a combination of local bookstores, Abebooks.com and Thriftbooks.com. I am aware that Amazon purchased Abe Books and it is a subsidiary, so I try to use it less often, however, the sellers on Abe Books are independently owned bookstores, thrift stores, or collectors, and the majority of the purchase goes toward them (>90%), and in a world of ‘we are all guilty of consumerism’ and ‘there is no such thing as a 100% fair labor purchase’ I am still figuring out where the moral or ethical implication lies with this.

We will never be 100% guilt free in consumerism

To my last point, let’s say hypothetically I found an item to purchase that was 100% produced by a small entrepreneur and they were paid a fair wage for their labor to produce it, was every raw material they use produced with fair labor before it got to them? Its impossible to trace that to origin in many industries.

Was the laptop or smart phone I used to make the purchase 100% ethically made? Let’s not kid ourselves.

Was the internet I used to connect to their website ethically run, sourced, and carbon-neutral emissions? Not even close.

Decide what you are willing to compromise on

So I guess my point here is that we can become 100% guilt free consumers by going and living in the woods in a commune completely off-grid or joining our local Amish community, or we can begin to draw down our use of companies that use exploitative labor practices and/or are owned/operated by individuals who make staggering amounts of money while paying their workers substandard wages.

I am also not operating under the delusion that small businesses I buy from are not sourcing some of their raw materials from platforms like Amazon. It would be arrogant to think that I am somehow morally superior for my ability to cut them off, when a small business may have limited or no other options to get raw materials in their local area.

However, I am happy to say that now about 60 days in from dumping Amazon, I could reasonably see myself canceling my Prime subscription because I simply do not use any of it at this point.

As far as costs out of pocket, I find that Amazon does not have lower prices than retailers or small businesses, where you save is often the shipping cost if you have Prime.

If I am buying local, a quick stop on the way home at a store costs me nothing, or making an errand run on a Saturday may cost me time, but pays me back in getting to socialize, breathe some fresh air, and participate in my community.

Being intentional about my purchases and my time is important to me in 2025 and going forward and if we all want to fight the fascist sociopolitical hold that seems to tighten around our country every year a little more, we will need to have deep community and networks to lean on in order to not feel overwhelmed and hopeless when things get bad.

I hope this gave at least some people hope that there is something we can all do with the way we live and purchase.

I know there is a whole other subject of big businesses that contributed to the inauguration fund/presidential campaign fund that, by doing so, have openly supported racist, misogynist, homophobic/transphobic, and ethnophobic policies, and there are others who have worked to compile lists of those companies to avoid. (Costco and Trader Joe’s are not on those avoid lists, and will forever have my money as long as they remain bastions of progressive social thinking)

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I’m interested in your thoughts and any ways others have found to avoid giving their money to billionaires and exploitative companies.