A couple of months ago, I saw the news about a group called the People’s Union organizing a one-week boycott of Amazon, and while I supported the intent, I was pessimistic about the approach. These kinds of easy, short-term actions against immense, entrenched interests never accomplish much. To make a difference, a whole lot of people would need to make a sustained change to longstanding habits. And how hard is that?
Not very hard. As an experiment, I tried to avoid buying anything from Amazon for the month of March. Two and a half months later, I’ve only ordered a few small items from them: specific things I couldn’t find at reasonable prices elsewhere. If you’re also fed up with Jeff Bezos’s stupid billionaire tricks, here are the main alternatives I used.
For relatively large purchases, see if you can eliminate the middleman. Lots of manufacturers now sell their products directly online, at prices near or below what you’d get on Amazon. Dealing directly with the manufacturer also eliminates the chance of getting the kind of gray-market, fake, or refurbished crap that often shows up on Jeff’s site. This is what I now do for major electronics, for example.
Second, consider buying from a small business. Living on the unfashionable side of Massachusetts, my local shopping options aren’t great, but we do have grocery and hardware stores. If they don’t have what I need on hand, there may well be a small business online that does. There’s also Etsy, where I’ve found everything from a vat cover custom sized to fit my resin 3D printer to a set of special dice for a weird tabletop game.
The next option is to buy used stuff on Craigslist or eBay. I’ve used both sites extensively as both a buyer and a seller, and on my new Amazon diet I’ve embraced them even more. After researching airbrushes for way too long, it finally occurred to me that there must be people who’ve bought beginner-level airbrush setups and then upgraded them later. Sure enough, I went to eBay and immediately found a bunch of great deals on used airbrush packages. Fifty bucks and a few days later, a compressor, three airbrushes, and associated tubing and fittings arrived on my doorstep. Everything in the setup works beautifully.
Finally, and an option more of us should ponder before any of the others, ask if you really need, or indeed even want, the item. The modern attention-fracking internet is fine tuned to make us think we want things. When I’m offline, though, I often find that stuff I thought I wanted a few hours earlier has become a lot less appealing than things I already have. So yes, I’m buying less from Amazon, but also just buying less. It feels good.
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