Boycott Amazon! For at least a few days
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| Neverending loads of useless crap |
It’s not that I dislike Amazon, really. It’s more that I hate it. I hate it so much that one of my New Year’s resolutions was to refrain from ordering anything on the site during 2024. Like all my resolutions, I expect this one to last anywhere from a week to 10 days. Because a guy still needs stuff. But I feel like an empty gesture is better than none.
Why? No reason, really, except that site has gone from being really cool (circa 1998), to being really convenient (the last two decades), to being the world’s leading purveyor of cheap, useless crap (2023 to present).
When you search the site for anything now, it’s pages of poorly disguised ads for items of sketchy provenance that are distinguishable only by price. The reviews, long a helpful feature on Amazon, are now so vague, conflicting and numerous that they’re essentially meaningless. As this recent piece in The Atlantic points out, Amazon’s image as a reliable purveyor of reliable goods is faltering, weighed down by the proliferation of overseas vendors peddling junk at ever-lower prices.
I ordered some thermal coffee mugs not long ago, and the blue finish that sold me started flaking off after the first three uses. So tossing them in the trash was another thing to feel guilty about. And guess who has since been getting infinite ads for shitty blue coffee mugs? Folks, this is not the way we should live.
Then there are all those damned boxes. The wife and I went to drop off our post-holiday collection at the recycling center and found that everybody else had the same idea. People were hurling their Amazon boxes onto a box mountain so high that the boxes kept tumbling back onto the street. It was like Sisyphus, man. Except no boulder.
Anyway, trust me: Boycott this bitch. Support the little guys, like Walmart or Home Depot or Lowes. It might still be junk, but at least you can touch it before you buy.
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