It was when I clicked “buy” on a pink female urinal – a total steal at £9.99 – and the fifth Prime purchase I’d made that week, that I started to wonder if my Amazon addiction had gone too far.
When I first started using
Amazon
around 15 years ago, I was single, lived in London and would use it occasionally to buy CDs and books. When I checked back, I spent a grand total of £53.02 that year. But two children and a move from London to rural Scotland later, and my Prime habits have snowballed.
The pressures of juggling work and a family, together with the irresistible next day deliveries, have formed the backdrop to a shopping habit which, in the last year, saw me spend £1,558.78 on items ranging from Pritt-sticks and tick-removers to cooking utensils, and toys.
Add
my husband
’s usage in to the mix, with purchases ranging from exciting stuff like an external hard drive to a lawnmower, and the spend for the entire household in 12 months jumps to £3,671.17.
We had unconsciously justified this dependency in part on the busyness of our lives – time-poor working parents seduced by convenience. And, in part, on our location; we live, and work, in a village that boasts little more than a pint-sized Co-op, a podiatrist and gift shop offering a variety of delightful, but not exactly necessary, homewares. The nearest shopping hub is a 40-minute round trip away, not somewhere you can easily pop to in your lunch hour.
When confronted with an endless stream of children’s birthday parties, I’m hardly going to gift a four-year-old a sports pedicure or a £50 scented candle. The most obvious option is Amazon.
The kids have run out of drawing paper. Shove it on the order. Travelling to a far-flung place where access to toilets are limited. Better buy a female urinal (the plastic funnels that allow women to pee standing up). Planning a children’s birthday party while balancing long hours at work. All the party paraphernalia is just a mindless click away.
And so on and so forth; brown boxes with the ubiquitous smiling arrow delivered day after day to meet our familial needs. A fleeting dopamine rush at ticking another thing off the list.
My spending on Amazon feels embarrassingly high
We’re not alone, of course. According to e-commerce platform Pattern, 93 per cent of UK shoppers use Amazon, with the retail giant delivering a staggering 2 million items across the UK every day.
But with the average UK consumer spending between £600 to £1,200 on Amazon annually, mine feels embarrassingly high. I comfort myself with the assumption that most Amazon users are town and city-dwellers with more choice on their doorstep but as my orders have racked up over the years, so too has my nagging sense of unease.
When the packages peaked around Christmas time and a beleaguered Amazon driver told me he had no time to buy his own kids presents, my guilt did too.
I could no longer ignore the fact that my shopping habits were helping to sustain a business built on the exploitation of workers’ rights and contributing to the rampant consumerism that is destroying our planet.
This, coupled with Jeff Bezos’ genuflection to President Trump and deeply troubling move to control the
Washington Post
’s opinion pages, inspired me to act.
It was time to ditch Amazon. A protest so miniscule against a tech giant so big, it is insignificant, maybe, but at least it would ease my conscience and perhaps I might learn something in the process. But could I do it? And could I get my equally reliant husband to do it too?
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Yes, as it turns out. Admittedly, said husband wasn’t delighted by the prospect, but he was reluctantly willing to give it a go.
We have saved money – and stopped expecting to have everything instantly
The most surprising thing is, it’s been relatively easy. Sure, when the school suggested we get our son a water bottle with measurements along the side (don’t ask) I simultaneously agreed and panicked. Where would I purchase such an item if not on Amazon?
There followed a sort of Challenge-Anneka scenario where I sped down the road, flailed around the shops and emerged victorious from a Tesco Superstore. It wasn’t exactly supporting an independent business but it was satisfying nonetheless and made even more so when a brief scroll through enemy territory revealed I’d saved £3 in the process.
This was my other revelation –
like 51 per cent of Amazon users in the UK
, I assumed it’s cheaper too. This is a falsehood. When I turned to World of Books recently, I was pleased to make a £7 saving in the process. In avoiding Amazon when replacing our toaster, we saved over £30. Toiletries too, can be bought for the same price elsewhere. Admittedly, the giant Allosaurus we bought our dinosaur-obsessed youngest for his recent birthday would have been £10 cheaper on Amazon, but we reasoned that the savings we made elsewhere cancelled that out.
It hasn’t been all good. My husband, a volunteer Beaver leader, needed to bulk buy paper bags for an Easter egg hunt recently and given his commitment to the cause, embarked on 28-mile round trip to purchase them. Given two or three Amazon delivery drivers pass our door every day, environmentally it felt like a bit of an empty gesture.
But giving up Amazon has forced me to be more considered in how, where and when I spend my money. I had blindly become caught up in thinking I need things instantly. I realise now, I don’t.
I have a working list of things we need for the house and garden. For more urgent items, I’m trying to incorporate it in to journeys already planned or, at a push, alternatives online. Other items I’ll sit on for a while because, frankly, there’s no rush. We still haven’t bought the fungi killer our lawn desperately needs but given we’re resolutely bad gardeners with very little time to tackle it, we can wait.
I will need to plan more but have been picking up tips from a friend locally who has proudly bought only one item – a last-minute Halloween baboon costume – from Amazon in the last year. When faced with a spate of birthday parties, she goes to a shop to bulk buy presents. Something I had never previously considered.
It’s been 46 days and counting and I’m determined to continue. I feel better for it, not just because I’m sticking one to the man, but because I have slowed down my spending, saved some money and learnt some valuable lessons in the process.
I can’t speak for my husband though…