Consumerism in the Age of Amazon

In this blog I want to expose the challenges, paradoxes, complexities, doubts, and contradictions a grocery shopper would have with ensuring that its choices contributing to the well-being of the planet and its inhabitants. While I am a proponent of making buying decisions that are contribution to the well-fare of the whole society, the planet, and the people, I am examining my own buying behaviors closely to see if I am really ready for "Common Good" buying. Kind of practice what you preach approach to advocacy. I realized that my own buying behaviors touches upon the identified ego-logical desires of human beings; the 6 "Cs" of comfort, convenience, consumption, certainty, control, and coherence.

I am not judging Amazon to be a "good" or "bad" buying because I don't know if each buying decision I make would contribute ultimately to the well-being of the planet and its inhabitants. Amazon have a strong "Sustainability" stance and positioning itself as pioneering a lot of sustainability initiatives. Amazon sustainability reporting must have a lot of KPIs around the outcomes of these initiatives. Yet, the impacts of Amazon operations is not necessarily transparent to a point where I can say that my own buying choices are truely good for the planet, the societies, and the earth inhabitants. I chose buying on Amazon app as a good example for the consumer behaviors particularly for Amazon Customers.

When I am using the app for buying, I am going for the comfort of buying from anywhere I am but most probably from home, with 1-click buy button convenience, and the certainty that the item will appear at my door steps by a specific time. I have control over the cost, as I am choosing between a wide variety of similar product offering, free or expedited delivery, and the ratings by the reviewers of the product. I am assured of the consumption of goods by Amazon easy return process, and the easy of getting a satisfactorily coherent replacement.

I am contrasting the satisfaction of the 6 ego-logical choices that I have identified above with another 6 eco-logical desires when I am buying my groceries from the Booth at Fresh Market of local farmer that uses permaculture farming practices and pays a living wage to the farm employees.

Changing my own buying choices would be faced with resistance to change my own buying habit for buying imported and frozen produce that is available online or in the nearby grocer year round to buy only seasonal produce. That is a reduction in choice, variety, and diversity. The paradox here is for example of buying only local may mean paying a higher price as most probably product produced locally is paying labor at least minimum wage(hopefully), while the produce from "Mexico" for instance is produced using poverty level wages (something like $2.25/day). The complexity here is that maybe buying fresh and local produce lies in the effort it takes to go to a fresh market in prescribed times and at certain locations or during a local grocer opening time, while buying off an amazon app can happen 2:00 am in the morning. Maybe the fresh market is far from you or the nearby market is not well advertised so you may not be aware of its location and timing. This restricts the time allowed for shopping of your grocery. The doubts here is about whether my local produce I am buying from the fresh market is going to help the local and regional economy as I understand it or the local farmer may use undocumented immigrants and still paying them poverty level wages or a bit higher than poverty level but lower than prevailing wages in the area. Small farmers does not have the technical or economical might to provide accurate and transparent account of their impacts as compared to Amazon who has an army of employees and consultants that can paint a picture of sustainability and green marketing propaganda. Another doubt is buying fresh produce from local or regional source would be better than buying frozen produced from Mexico. An argument can be made that if the US stopped importing fresh produce from Mexico 310,000 jobs would be affected.

The contradiction is for instance that Amazon perfected its supply chain efficiency to the point that the produce imported from Mexico would have less carbon foot print than the local produce bought from the Fresh Market. This argument is hard to believe but it still have currency in debates around logistics impacts. I would say that the best estimate would depend on the place of purchase, the location of storage and distribution center and the consumer.

When I started my iterative process towards advocating for "common good" buying I felt a huge internal conflict (as well as external conflict with my wife preferring Amazon over me going to Fresh Market). Here I am asking others to change their buying behavior and to stand out against mainstream buying behaviors which I am personally implicated in and conditioned by myself. The inertia of trying to renounce my own buying history (which is capitalistic in nature as I am capitalizing on the availability of frozen produce that was produced mostly paying poverty level wages to meet my 6 "Cs" of my ego-logical desires. My own resistance to get out of my own comfort zone and own up to my own arrogances that as a buyer I have no responsibility for my choices (aren't we living in a free-market economy anyways). My compliancy in buying a cheap product from Amazon that might have slipped through the crakes of controls that Amazon has to ensure that any products they sell are not a product of forced labor for example. I have to decenter myself-interest and my 6 "Cs" when I am making a buying decision.

This is a reflective inquiry for myself to ponder as a US consumer of Amazon.