For about the past decade or so, I’ve been relatively vocal about my disdain for Amazon. This has mostly been due to what I believe to be the direct relationship between the popularity of Amazon and the atrophying of basic human interaction on a grand scale that seems to have infected the country like a particularly sad virus.
Last year, when those back-to-back stories of teenagers getting shot (and one killed) due to them simply going to the wrong house were reported, I couldn’t help but think that the number of paranoid people who might do something like this is clearly growing since basic skills like looking someone in the eye, reading body language, and forging collective trust are all going out of style.
Amazon is of course not responsible for this decay of mutual understanding; but since they make the acquisition of everyday items so “frictionless” (as someone who doesn’t understand the fullness of life might say), they make the maintenance of these skills unnecessary. Or rather, a fun elective in the University of Life.
Amazon Hegemony is what happens when the path of least resistance is taken every time. Convenience at the expense of the community. You hear people being obsessed with their “barista” because it's the only loose tie interaction many people have.
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But in the past few months, I’ve drastically changed my tune. In August, my wife and I moved into a house. Three weeks later, we had our first child. We needed a ton of stuff, and we didn’t really have time to go out and get every little thing. We also didn’t really know where to go. There was a BuyBuy Baby not too far from us, but it closed literally weeks before our daughter was born. Apparently people weren’t going to them as much. I wonder why.
There was however, one store that had everything. That would ensure we got what we needed quickly without having to schlep somewhere. That had reasonable prices, and let you know what other people thought of the product you wanted to buy…
Almost overnight, I turned into someone who never got a package with that black and blue delivery tape to someone who was awaiting the Amazon truck like a kid hearing their mom walk through the front door. Since August 8th, (I am writing this on January 3), we’ve placed 47 different orders, probably half of those having multiple items. Exactly 0 have been delivered with any sort of problem or delay.
We’ve made significantly less orders from other random sites and companies; I can think of multiple off the top of my head that we had issues with.
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Here’s what I have reluctantly come to appreciate and value about Amazon: In a world of incompetence, they are a shining example of competence culture. They tell you they are going to provide something, and then they actually provide it. These days, this seems to be rare. Customer service calls turn into group projects. Navigating the healthcare system is an exercise in online portal futility. Asking a store employee for help makes you feel like an asshole; it’s as if someone is doing you a huge favor to look up from their phone and do what they’re paid to do.
There is only one other enterprise that I frequent that I think exhibits a competence culture (that is even better than Amazon’s since it’s rooted in community); Deccico’s and Sons, a grocery store chain in Westchester County. I love this place more than I thought it was possible to love a for-profit enterprise I have no direct involvement with, and will be writing about it soon.
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Going out to stores, it used to feel like we were all in this together. Everyone was trying to get through the day, or to the weekend. It felt like there were more head nods, more small jokes between strangers.
If you needed something and it was my job to provide it, I would do everything I could to do so; with the understanding that the tables would be turned in some other situation, so it was in all of our best interests to try and be good at what we did. This was a world of mutual understanding.
Maybe it’s the phones (it's almost certainly the phones); maybe it's the wealth inequality (it's definitely that too); maybe it's the sense of collective mistrust that has infiltrated our national discourse partially as a result of those two things. Wherever it is, things over the past 10 or so years have seemed way more adversarial.
I no longer feel that we all operate with a built-in sense of mutual understanding.
Instead of trying to get through this together, it’s as if everyone is now their own. In this type of world, Amazon is always going to dominate and by doing so, it compounds the problem, empowering and encouraging us to build walled fortresses of nuclear families and roommates.
But again, Amazon actually does what they say they’re going to do, and doesn't make you feel like an entitled brat for wanting a quality transactional experience. In fact, they believe that is your basic right as a customer. The value of that is beyond infinite. It’s why the blue trucks are everywhere. It’s why I have come to accept their dominance over my free will.
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Myself, my wife, and daughter are all in this together. And to an extent, our extended family.
But is anyone else? Or are we all just building walled fortresses?
Excuse me, I have a delivery.