The Amazon nomads
Roving merchants scour the country searching for odd and quirky items they can sell through Amazon, said journalist Josh Dzieza in It’s a life of constant searching, open sky, and nothing left to lose.
CHRIS ANDERSON MOVES through the Target clearance racks with cool efficiency, surveying the towers of Star Wars Lego sets and Incredibles action figures, sensing, as if by intuition, what would be profitable to sell on Amazon. Discontinued nail polish can be astonishingly lucrative, but not these colors. A dinosaur riding some sort of motorcycle? No way. But these Jurassic Park Jeeps look promising, and an Amazon app on his phone confirms that each could net a $6 profit after fees and shipping. He piles all 20 into his cart.
It’s not a bad haul for a half hour’s work, but it’s not great either. He consoles himself that he hit upon a trove of deeply discounted Kohl’s bras the day before as he left East Brunswick, N.J., on his way here to Edison. Home is still 300 miles away, in Tyrone,
Pa., and there are plenty of stores between here and there.
Anderson is an Amazon nomad, part of a small group of merchants who travel the backroads of America searching clearance aisles and dying chains for goods to sell on Amazon. Some live out of RVs and vans, moving from town to town, only stopping long enough to pick the stores clean and ship their wares to Amazon’s fulfillment centers.
The majority of goods sold on Amazon are not sold by Amazon itself, but by more than 2 million merchants who use the company’s platform as their storefront and infrastructure. Some of these sellers make their own products, while others practice arbitrage, buying and reselling wares from other retailers. Amazon has made this easy to do, first by launching Fulfillment by Amazon, which allows sellers to send their goods to company warehouses and have Amazon handle storage and delivery, and then with an app that lets sellers scan goods to instantly check whether they’d be profitable to sell on the site. A few sellers, like Anderson, have figured out that the best way to find lucrative products is to be mobile, scouring remote stores and chasing hot-selling items from coast to coast.
“It’s almost like I’m the front end of the business and Amazon is just an extension of my arm,” says Sean-Patrick Iles, a nomad who spent weeks driving cross-country during Toys R Us’ final days. It was a feeding frenzy Anderson and others also hit the road for. “I find the products, and then they mail them to people.”
Though nomadism offers competitive advantages, most of the merchants I spoke with cited more personal reasons for their profession.
“Freedom,” Jason Wyatt quickly answers when I ask him why he decided to quit his job as an aviation electronics technician, sell his house in Georgia, and buy an RV. “Janis Joplin once said—though I believe it was actually Kris Kristofferson’s song— ‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.’ And I found that that’s actually the truth. Your possessions, you don’t really own them. They own you. The more you get rid of, the freer you are.”
This is a not uncommon refrain from the nomads, who often have a complicated relationship with consumerism. Too much stuff can be a burden on the road, so they can find themselves living like ascetics amid the clearance aisles, servicing, in Anderson’s words, “literally the best product distribution system ever devised by the human race.”
At 32, Anderson is burly, with a youthful face and shoulder-length dark hair tucked behind his ears. His black shorts and T-shirt reveal tattoos of aliens, cats, skulls, and iconography from Radiohead and Misfits. Coupled with the white windowless cargo van he drives, the whole ensemble gives him the appearance of a cheerful roadie, one of the many jobs he’s briefly held.
Anderson adopted the nomadic life partly out of necessity. A restless person by his own admission, he dropped out of college three years in, getting all the debt without the degree. He started making jewelry—wedding bands and titanium plugs, like the Space Invaders ones he’s now wearing—but it wasn’t enough to live on. He worked retail. He worked in a call center. Then, looking for ways to sell his jewelry, he came across Amazon. It was a terrible platform for selling crafts. He couldn’t make things fast enough to meet Amazon’s requirements, but retail arbitrage looked interesting.
He moved to Tyrone, and the nearest Walmart was 20 miles away, so any shopping trips would have to be road trips anyway. He figured he might as well keep driving— to Wisconsin, to Florida, to Nevada. Today, he runs a warehouse, packing products for other Amazon sellers, and spends half his time on the road chasing product.
When you spend weeks on end traveling the strip malls and big-box stores of America, you start to appreciate small differences in what can seem like archipelagoes of sameness: the way the Targets get cleaner as you approach corporate headquarters in Minneapolis; the novelty of an unusually small Walmart in Indiana; the McDonald’s in Pomeroy, Ohio, that served pizza, the remainder of an abandoned experiment in the ’80s. How was the McPizza? “Bad!” Anderson says exuberantly. “But that’s not the point.”
INISHED WITH TARGET, Anderson stacks the Jeeps in the back of his van and gives the cart a shove, sending it rattling into its corral. Sometimes, he confides, when he finishes shopping late at night, he’ll bump his cart with his van to knock it into its pen as he leaves, a parting flourish in the empty lot.
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