Look I get it, it’s convenient. Man, is it convenient! You can literally get anything, and I mean truly anything, delivered to your door in sometimes under a day. That’s convenience like we’ve never seen before, but having the power and ability to do something doesn’t mean that you must use that power. There’s a nugget of wisdom you probably didn’t expect in a random blog post you stumbled upon… yet here we are.
We have the power to do quite a bit as a global society, but we must show restraint in some of these powers only to protect what makes us human. We could do everything by computer calculation, to the point that cars are driving themselves, but should we? That is the new place that we find ourselves as a society, and in the case of Amazon… I think not.
Let me explain, in order for you to get your package on time, there are people working to the brink of exhaustion at fulfillment centers to make that happen, and that’s not even considering the drivers responsible for delivering the goods, or all the people in between that had to stock the product, label the product, shop the product, sort the product, so on and so forth. For what? So you can get your bright pink tape dispenser on Friday instead of the following Monday?
I’m sure you’ve read the articles that dive much deeper into it, but I think sometimes it’s nice to look at issues like this from a more broad, top-down approach. We all know that Amazon fulfillment employees are mistreated and worked beyond what they should be, but what about other business employees?
By offering a marketplace that is so unavoidable, you are inevitably forcing other business into adhering to the model and sometimes forcing them to add a whole separate piece of the business to manage that they don’t have the resources or the manpower to run. Most mom and pop operations that want to do business on Amazon require a whole staff member to manage that operation, and since they frequently cannot afford to hire that person, they are forced to do it themselves, or else they won’t be able to keep up.
Some businesses that are online only, are also being forced to sell their product not only on their website, but also on Amazon, and frequently underselling their own prices. If you wanted to buy a premium phone case from Carved, for example, you could also buy it on Amazon for virtually the same price. However, this creates problems for the online vendor because why would anyone buy something from their website and pay full shipping, rather than getting it on Amazon and paying nothing for shipping and getting it the next day. But listing your products on Amazon comes at a price, so you make less money for each product sold, while sucking business away from your online store. It’s a lose-lose that companies are forced into.
Take a moment to consider the ramifications of your convenience, and let the idea sink in that even though we can get products from your computer to your door at breakneck speeds, it might not be something we SHOULD do… but is it too late? Are we too used to the convenience that we can no longer turn back, who knows!?
