If it's cheap and convenient, I'm not buying it

Thoughts on how we spend our time and money

Jan 28, 2025

Hello frens!

Let’s cut to the chase. I want to talk about your addiction to Amazon. I have wanted to talk about this for years, but this is the first time I feel like some people might be open to hearing it. Understand that I respect your decisions and you don’t have to answer to me for anything. But buckle up, because I’m coming for your Amazon Prime account.

As I wrote in my first post, I consider my values in every decision that I make. I think about where something came from before I purchased it, and where it will go when I’m done with it. I consider who my money is going to and what they’ll do with it.

I reckon my buying habits are pretty unusual. For instance, I have made nine purchases on Amazon in the past decade. Zero purchases in the past four years. I live a full life independent of Amazon1. (You can, too.)

I’ve been trying to imagine, what do most people spend their time and money on, and why? Where are the daily, recurring purchases made? Amazon, Walmart, Target, Spotify, DoorDash, UberEats, Ikea, Shein… When I look outside my household bubble to see what’s popular, I see a lot of value placed on what is cheap and convenient.

CONVENIENCE

Why is convenience valued so highly? Time is finite, so there’s an impetus to save time and cut corners. If you have a large family to manage or more than one job to make ends meet, or if you just gave birth or are dealing with a crisis, I completely respect that convenience would be something you value right now. Convenience can be a welcome and necessary relief.

When I call out convenience as an overarching value, I’m looking at my friends with one job (or less), extra income, one or a few or no kids or pets. What are you saving your time for? To doomscroll?

When you reach for whatever is convenient, are you thinking about where it came from, who profits from it, whether it’s good for you? Doing that from time to time is understandable, but doing it mindlessly or as your default is detrimental in so many ways.

CHEAPNESS

Again, if you’re barely making ends meet or going through a crisis, I understand you need to save money. Thanks to late stage capitalism, this is the situation for many people. I’m not talking to those people in this post. I’m talking to people who can pay their bills every month and have some money left over.

There is a big difference between affordable and cheap. When something is cheap, that means that people and resources were exploited in order to achieve the price. Someone else, usually both humans and the earth, is footing the bill so that you can cheap out. Moreover, what is cheap is not made to last, so we’ll all pay the price when that item breaks and ends up in a landfill, spurring you to buy another cheap one instead of fixing the one you have.

My bestie told me she was so busy with work that she bought a bunch of her Christmas presents from Amazon. She mentioned that she sent half of them back. Half of them, I asked?? I was dumbfounded. What was wrong with them? Mostly it was issues with poor quality or misrepresentation of the item (bordering on fraud). She didn’t even buy super cheap things. What astonished me was how normal it seemed to her that half of her Amazon purchases would be useless. Don’t we all know where our discarded items end up these days?

Cue images of the island of plastic twice the size of Texas that’s swirling around the Pacific Ocean, or the beaches full of fast fashion in Ghana.

(Photo: Muntaka Chasant/Shutterstock)

Let’s Address the Amazon Issue

Whenever I hear someone say, “You can get it on Amazon!” it makes my eyeballs roll into the back of my head. It’s like saying, “Air! Have you heard of it? It’s all around us!”

Yes, you can get probably almost anything on Amazon. It takes genuine effort to source purchases outside of Amazon. We get it.

Buying everything on Amazon is perhaps the zenith of valuing what is cheap and convenient. As soon as you buy into Prime, you have the sunk cost motivation to justify the expenditure by buying everything from Amazon. You get used to that fast shipping. Then you have no tolerance or patience to wait, nor any motivation to look elsewhere to buy what you want or need.

I won’t go into what Amazon has done to erode small business, cause harm to workers, pollute the environment, etc. There are many people who have documented this far better than I could.

Here’s what I will stand in my front yard and shake my fist about: Bezos is so rich that he had a $50 million dollar clock built underground on his private property in West Texas. That’s how much extra money he has.

I first heard about this a couple years ago from a friend who was doing work on the property. Despite my friend being quite honest, and informing me he had to sign an NDA about it, I still thought he must be pulling my leg. It sounded like something a cartoon villain would do. Then I saw the glamorous photo shoot in Vogue of Bezos’ fiancé wearing couture and lounging around their big, dumb clock.

I ask you:

If you had 50 million EXTRA DOLLARS YOU DIDN’T REALLY NEED, is that how you would spend it?

If you saw a GoFundMe for $50 million to benefit building an underground clock for a billionaire, how much would you donate?

Did you fund Jeff Bezos’ underground clock?

I myself did not fund the big, dumb clock. I feel very good about this fact.

Here, I’ll Say It:

Cancel your Prime membership. Stop buying everything off of Amazon. Go cold turkey! I’ll coach you through it in the comments. Or, tell me why not (I know some of you can’t wait to justify why you need it). Sure, your elderly relative needs it, or your housebound friend. Yes, online shopping is a godsend if you are disabled or live in a rural area. Yes, yes, all the exceptions because there are always justifiable exceptions. (Maybe not enough exceptions to build a $50 million underground clock for funsies?)

I’m talking to the able-bodied people who live in cities, have access to transportation and extra spending money and still have single toothbrushes overnighted to their house. AKA, many of my wonderful, beloved friends.

This is not about judgment, perfectionism or some sort of competition. Look, our society thinks corporations are equal to people; the odds are stacked against us. You do not need to justify your actions to me. I’m inviting you to consciously consider your actions and to be at peace with them for yourself. The most important person, perhaps the only person, you need to be at peace with is yourself.

You’re free to do what you want. If you can honestly look at your Amazon addiction as a continual, conscious choice that upholds your values - if you’re proud of funding that big, dumb clock - I won’t fight you on it. Go on with your bad self! This is a free will planet. But if you have been feeling a little like you maybe you want to break your addiction or explore other options, stick with me. In future posts we’ll talk about spending time and money in ways that feel good and do good.

Wise words from MLK Jr.

I started this Substack on January 20, 2025. MLK Jr. Day. I was trying to figure out how I could resist where the status quo in the USA has gone. With enough gerrymandering and algorithmic brainwashing, voting can lose some of its impact, no? (Though I will continue to exercise my right to vote.) What we the people haven’t addressed is the power of voting with our dollars. The power of how we collectively spend our time and money. I don’t think money and power should be consolidated to the few. There is enough out there for everyone.

I’ll end with a quote by Martin Luther King Jr.:

“…King also learned a lesson in Albany. ‘We attacked the political power structure instead of the economic power structure,’ he says. ‘You don’t win against a political power structure where you don’t have the votes. But you can win against an economic power structure when you have the economic power to make the difference between a merchant’s profit and loss.’” [Source: The 1964 article about Martin Luther King Jr. in Time Magazine, via the 1440 newsletter]

Vote with your dollars, my frens.

Mrs. Doe

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