Breaking Up with Amazon

Hi. This page will be written in a much less careful way than my regular posts, and I will be updating it occasionally as I make progress. I’m creating this page to hold myself publicly accountable for this step.

I have decided to start untangling myself personally and professionally from Amazon.

For years, I have known that by shopping from Amazon, I was supporting a company that had problematic practices and hurt small businesses, but the convenience was too much to resist. To make matters more complicated, when I started Cult of Pedagogy, I signed up for Amazon’s affiliate program, which gives me a small commission every time someone purchases something through my links. This brought a modest amount of revenue in to support the work I do here, and I justified the practice by telling myself that as long as I was doing good work with the money I got, it sort of made up for the fact that I was supporting a company that caused much larger problems.

More recent developments have caused me to reconsider. These developments have made it clear that Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos is supporting the current U.S. administration, and while there’s nothing I can do personally to stop the harmful policies being enacted by that administration, at the very least I can stop my personal and professional support of a company that is contributing to them.

Adding More Friction

Something else landed in my lap the other day that kind of sealed the deal for me. It was this interview with Nicholas Carr on the Art of Manliness podcast (never mind the title please; it’s a long story how I got there). In this interview and in an excerpt from his book, Superbloom, in the Harvard Gazette, he talks about the idea of friction as something we need more of in our lives.

The basic premise is that by making everything so fast and efficient, technology is taking away our humanity, that we need more friction, more inefficiency, to slow us down and allow us to process information and maintain meaningful relationships. This piece by Abby Davisson develops this idea further by arguing that more friction builds more opportunities for in-person interactions, which we all need so badly.

So all of this is really helping me embrace the inefficiencies that will inevitably become part of daily life again as I move away from Amazon.

The To-Do List

Ending this relationship will be complicated and will take a while, and I may not be able to completely sever ties, but I’m going to start.

Done

Here’s what I’ve done so far:

• Cancelled subscriptions (personal): I have cancelled all of my Subscribe & Save items and started a Google Keep note listing all the brand names and other places I can find these items, ideally in local stores. One thing I have come to rely on with Amazon is keeping a record of what specific brands and/or models of products I have purchased in the past, and this makes it so easy to buy refills and replacements in the future, so moving forward, I’ll need to record that information on my own.
• Halted affiliate links (professional): With all posts starting with my March 2 one, I will no longer use Amazon affiliate links, but only link to Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores, and the book’s publisher, if the book is not listed on Bookshop. I can still earn a commission from Bookshop purchases, so if readers choose to buy from there, they will still be supporting this site in a small way.

Still to Do

Here are my next steps:

• Remove other affiliate links (professional): Over time, I will need to gradually remove the rest of my Amazon affiliate links from my past posts and replace them with links to Bookshop.org and the publisher of the books themselves. I have twelve years’ worth of content on this site, so this will take some time.
• Let my Prime membership lapse (personal): This one will be the hardest to get used to, because anytime I have to buy anything, I almost always go straight to Amazon for the free shipping. I will need to re-think how I do my shopping from this point forward, going local and in-person when I can, and directly to the manufacturers if I’m online, letting the people who create the products keep a lot more of their profits. I’m sure there will be days when I kick myself for making this decision, but that’s why it took me so long to do it in the first place.
• Reacquaint myself with my local public library (personal and professional): I’m embarrassed to say I have almost entirely forgotten that I can get books from the library. For free. Not only physical books, but e-books and audiobooks. It also turns out that the people who run the library in my town are amazing people I know personally, so the fact that I haven’t taken more advantage of this is a real forehead-slapper. Refreshing my relationship with this place will not only save me money (which will offset the higher prices I might pay for products and shipping from non-Amazon retailers) and make me feel better about not supporting Amazon, but it will also give me a reason to interact with a group of people I’ve always wanted to spend more time with. So many wins there.
• Get my kids off Amazon (personal): I’m not the only one in my family that has grown accustomed to shopping from Amazon. I have three young adults who basically make their own purchases with my Prime account. Still figuring this one out.

By the way, this announcement is not intended to shame or pressure anyone else into making the same decision. I’m at a point in my life where I have more time and energy to choose less convenient options than I once did, so this move will not cause me more than a little extra money, effort, and time. This piece by Dana Miranda offers a thoughtful perspective on the decision. But I also hope that if you are in a position to do something like this, even on a partial level, that you give it a try.

I’ll be back with updates when I have them. Feel free to comment below. Thanks.