I don’t have an Amazon account. I fear that if I get one, the convenience and affordability it encourages will ruin my very fragile relationship with brick and mortar shopping. Amazon, for most people, has become deeply integrated in the way we live our lives and who could blame anyone for wanting to opt for an easy way out from stresses of day to day living?
Amazon sells from rope to soap, the portal sometimes seems to have an infinite slew of options for all of everyone’s needs. If that wasn’t enough, it has found a way to rope in consumers looking for other entertainment services. Its accessibility, affordability and multifaceted consumer-centred approach make it hard for many people to live without it. In some places, if you order by a certain time, you may get your purchases before the day ends (this applies to weekends as well).
Nevertheless, it is the affordability mixed with digitalization for many that somehow further drives one away from being able to humanise the services that are being offered. It becomes easy to not be able to think about the environmental impact that makes these services possible. It becomes easy to accept/turn a blind eye to dehumanising behaviour towards delivery drivers and accept things for what they are as long as you have done your part by paying for the product.
What is often overlooked when discussing the ease that digital consumerism brings is the long term costs that accompany it.
Individualism
Sure shopping online has its own version of hedonistic features but it still removes us from the social side of things which is so central to bonding. While it mainly encourages only one of our senses, it also sets up even more to constantly compare ourselves to the most heavily edited photographs specially airbrushed to create the perfect image to influence how we should see ourselves. Mannequins in the store don’t exactly have the same amount of leverage on us psychologically.
Blindsiding artists, garment workers and designers
Clothing is now more disposable than it has ever been. It is so cheap that one can buy articles of clothing for less than the cost of a meal. When we go into stores or form relationships with those who work there or produce the item, we are able to attach a stronger sense of value and respect to those involved in the process of getting the goods/final product to the consumers. Online shopping doesn’t do this. Even those online design features create a glamorised and green-washed image of the people behind our clothes. We constantly see this with the incredibly popular fast fashion retailer Shein, whose employees sometimes work 75 hours per week for meagre wages.
There are lessons to be learned from convenience even if it has always benefitted us and that is nothing is actually ever truly convenient without a cost. Our unquenchable thirst for convenience is rewiring us to become even more selfish and individualistic all while allowing those who provide the source of it to become further emboldened and to expand. This is evident in Amazon’s newly launched designer clothing tab for the European market.
