Abstaining from Amazon emerging as a way of life
Blaze Cromwell, a cashier living in Washington, D. C ., doesn’t order from Amazon. com or shop at Whole Foods. He doesn’t watch movies or shows on Prime Video. He doesn’t own a Ring or a Kindle. And he doesn’t use Audible, Twitch or Zappos. He’s about as close as one can get to abstaining from Amazon entirely.
Cromwell, 24, began the work of cutting the company out of his life in 2017, after reading reports about Amazon’s working conditions and what he saw as generally “unethical practices .”
“I reasoned that financially withdrawing from Amazon. com, and later oni ts subsidiaries, was one of the most material things I could doasaworking- classperson with disposable income from time totime,” he said.
Leaving Amazon requires some determination, he said, but it’s less daunting once you get started.
“It’s a matter of people changing both their habits and expectations for their consumption,” he said. It’s not just a choice, he noted, but an ongoing “practice.” ( He has, occasionally, looked up titles on IMDb, an Amazon subsidiary since 1998. He’s in the process of finding alternatives .)
People have been advocating boycotts of Amazon for nearly as long as the company has existed. In 1999, programmer and activist Richard Stallman led one related to a lawsuit the company filed against Barnes & Noble to protect a patent covering “1- click” ordering, which he worried would stifle competition in e- commerce. ( The lawsuit against Barnes & Noble was settled, and the patent has since expired.)
There have been countless attempts to shed Amazon since: by authors and booksellers, political activists, labor organizers, my colleagues. ( Even the most determined abstainers find their limit when trying to eliminate Amazon Web Services, which counts among its clients thousands of other companies, including popular websites and apps, as well as The New York Times.)
Meanwhile, Amazon has grown into a company larger and more powerful than almost any retailer in the world. It directly employs more than 1million people. Its founder is a household name. It undergirds much of the internet. And it’s intertwined with politics by default, drawing ire from across the political spectrum.
Unlike in 1999, or even 2009, today the question of whether or not to interact with Amazon has already been answered for many people. The choice is no longer whether to enter the Everything Store. It’s about trying to locate the exit.
Most abstainers don’t suffer any illusions about what they’re doing; Amazon clearly hasn’t suffered from their absence, and their numbers aren’ t large enough to make demands — many more people are currently turning to Amazon than are turning away. Instead, for some, opting out of an increasingly ubiquitous and assertive Amazon offers a sense of control and agency, however slight
Chris Smalls is the former Amazon Warehouse worker whose March protest about working conditions at a New York, fulfillment center, and subsequent firing, turned him into a leader in the nascent movement to organize Amazon workers. He’s an activist now. He has planned marches on Jeff Bezos’ homes.
Amazon’s ubiquity, and the millions of habits its customers have formed, put Smalls in a strange position: appealing for empathy for a largely invisible workforce laboring through a pandemic, while sympathizing with Amazon customers accustomed to a relatively new convenience.
“Ten years ago we weren’ t ordering toilet paper from Amazon,” Smalls said. “Maybe that’s how long it will take to get over it, too.”