I Don’t Want the Best Deal Anymore

Why I finally canceled Amazon Prime

thisisbossi from Washington, DC, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I made my first purchase on Amazon twenty-five years ago. The retail giant has been efficiently mining my shopping addiction ever since. That’s longer than I’ve been married. In fact, my very first purchase on Amazon was a book about planning a wedding, an order I placed on October 23, 1997.

Over the past two decades, Amazon has molded me into the perfect customer, luring me with fast and free shipping, an endless selection of goods, and a seamlessly smooth shopping experience. They have effectively divided my shopping addiction into five simple and satisfying steps — ideate, click, buy, receive, repeat — over and over again, for more than two decades.

My desire to curb my robotic habit of buying whatever pops into my head is the biggest reason I didn’t renew my Prime membership.

But it’s so much more than that. I’m tired of Amazon. I’m sick of seeing their branded vans roaming my neighborhood. I’m chilled by the sheer number of Amazon boxes smiling up at me from porches, storefronts, and the backs of those damn ubiquitous vans.

I am thoroughly sick of Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s poster child and its billionaire founder.

So, yes, while there is a tangible cost to Prime membership that I could reasonably cite as my reason for quitting, there’s also an intangible cost to paying for Prime. Dropping Prime is a tiny act of defiance. For me, continuing to pay for the service is like casting a vote in favor of Amazon and against communities, the planet, Amazon’s own workers, and small businesses.

I quit Prime after fifteen years of dedicated membership because I no longer want to feed a machine that hurts so many people.

My decision to stop paying for Prime ultimately begins and ends with Jeff Bezos, a man whose experiment with digitizing consumerism has compelled me to scratch my itch to shop over and over again.

Bezos made a bet that he could create a store that sold everything. He predicted, back in the late 1990s, that one day anything anyone wanted could appear on their doorstep like magic. He won that bet, and now he’s the second richest person in the world. Good for him!