Missing the Point

I don’t want to write about Apple’s current woes, on either side of the Atlantic — but let’s go into the very similar antitrust arguments that get brought up around Amazon.

Whenever anyone talks about doing away with Amazon, or breaking it up, or whatever the facile remedy of the day is, I feel a shiver down my spine. Yes yes, relentless juggernaut of enshittification, strangling our high streets, enriching King Bezos one piss-bottle at a time — but Amazon got where it is by offering a service, and I worry that those drastic proposals do not really understand what that service is.

Let’s take a very concrete example that occurred just the other day in my home.

One of the problems of having kids is that they grow up. At first this is a relief: they can walk places and don’t need to be carried everywhere, they can verbalise their needs and emotions, and they gain control over their own bodily functions, requiring parents to deal with said functions less and less. Sadly this process eventually produces teenagers1, who go to parties that end at quite unreasonable hours, produce levels of chaos and smells in their bedrooms that have to be experienced to be believed2, and spend improbable amounts of time on their personal grooming, all appearances to the contrary.

That third point is the focus of our story today. The teenager who occupies a quite infeasible amount of space in my home has taken to borrowing my grooming products, and specifically my nail clippers. I did buy him his own set of nail clippers, but he promptly lost them (somehow) and resumed borrowing mine — and has now succeeded in losing those too. After some searching failed to turn up either set of nail clippers, I went online and looked for “best nail clippers”. Amazingly, this actually worked, once I had dodged all the obvious spam honeypots. Evidently there is not enough money in nail clipper affiliate marketing for it to be worth anyone’s while to spin up a ChatGPT instance, but I am sure they will get to it eventually.

Having settled on nail clippers from Zwilling as being the best fit for my needs, I went to their website to order a pair. I actually have an account there, because I own several Zwilling cooking knives and Staub pots — but the Italian site does not offer their non-kitchen product lines, and it’s the only one that will ship to an address in Italy.

So yes, I ordered the nail clippers from Amazon, where Prime means I don’t have to worry about shipping costs or import duties, and they will be here tomorrow.

Won’t Somebody Think Of The Nail Clippers?

I have any number of other examples like this. It’s easy if you’re in Brooklyn or Shoreditch or similar locales to say “shop at your local book co-op” or whatever. If you live in provincial Italy, there are bookshops, but their foreign-language section is a shelf in the basement targeted primarily at ESL students3. Sure, you can order stuff, but it’ll take ages and require at least two trips, which is all friction. It’s true that one of the joys of a real physical bookshop is that you can browse, but I don’t like reading in translation, and a lot of contemporary Italian fiction is either derivative, or literary navel-gazing of a sort that I don’t enjoy in any language.

Beyond books, even when I want to buy direct, most manufacturers charge for shipping, at least below a certain threshold which is way above the cost of a single pair of nail clippers. If it’s a US (or these days, UK4) -based manufacturer, there are also painful import duties to consider, plus another week or two for customs clearance. I will make the effort to get things shipped to my employers’ US offices when I have a trip planned, but that only gets me so far: whatever I buy that way has to be something that I don’t need urgently, that will fit in my luggage, and that can survive a trip in the hold or pass hand-baggage inspections.

Amazon bypasses all of these problems for me. I can buy a product like those Zwilling nail clippers that is otherwise simply not available to me, either direct from the manufacturer or from a bricks & mortar outlet within any reasonable distance, and it will be shipped to me for free, arriving the next day, with no customs hassle or extra payments.

The Algorithm Is Displeased

That’s not to say that there are no problems with Amazon. You can imagine the forest of other nail clippers that I had to wade through, whether sponsored or not, despite that fact that I had specifically searched for “Zwilling nail clippers”. As usual, none of these vendors were real alternatives to Zwilling, most with names made up mostly of upper-case consonants, and with entirely fictitious review scores and counts.5

Amazon has also taken to doing something which feels targeted specifically at me: they will take a pre-order for a book, and then on publication day, they will send me an email saying “sorry, we’re out of stock”. If I then go back to Amazon, I will find that the book in question is in fact easily available — from third-party vendors, at twice the price.

Finally, a less selfish gripe of mine is about Amazon’s delivery practices. Normal courier companies around here only deliver during the week. Amazon on the other hand delivers at the weekend too, thanks to their practice of outsourcing deliveries to armies of underpaid nominally-independent contractors. The thing is, I usually have things to do at the weekend, so I am rarely home. Several times I have thoughtlessly sent an order on a Friday night or Saturday morning, thinking “this will be convenient to have on Monday”, only to return home on Sunday to a missed-delivery slip in my mailbox. I would love to have an option for “do not deliver at weekend” during checkout, but instead I have to do the labour of setting myself a reminder to send my order on Sunday morning if I want to avoid ruining the weekend of some unfortunate delivery driver, at some inconvenience to myself into the bargain.

All this is to say that I am well aware of the deficiencies of the Amazon service and of its negative externalities. However, any discussion of those downsides needs to be counterbalanced by a recognition of what service it is that Amazon offers, and how users of that service would be negatively affected by its removal. I miss the bookshop where the owner could recommend the perfect book for anybody. We went to him for years whenever we needed gifts, and he never missed. But between the chain bookstores that opened in town, and of course Amazon, he took early retirement and shut up shop.

In the same way, I miss going to the record store and the curmudgeonly guys (for it was always guys) who worked there, straight out of High Fidelity — but my pocket money could stretch to maybe an album or two a month, whereas now I have all of Apple Music in my pocket. I love my musician friends, and I go to live shows as much as a busy life and a big family will allow, but streaming is just so much more convenient. We need a solution to the problem of getting artists paid that also preserves the user convenience of streaming, and we need a global delivery service that does not eviscerate local economies as a by-product. Supermarkets can coexist with greengrocers, and both can coexist with online shopping, as long as each concentrates on its strengths.

Being absolutist about these things helps nobody, and puts you in opposition to plenty of people like me who are broadly sympathetic, but also want to see their own needs recognised.

🖼️  Photos by Handy Wicaksono on Unsplash

  1. Insert joke here about how lots of people want a baby, but inexplicably nobody ever says “I want a teenager”. ↩

  2. Any complaints on this point will be received with hollow laughter and sarcastic commentary by said teenagers’ grandparents, who remember well the state of the bedroom of the teenagers’ own parents at that difficult stage in life, to which I can only say: sorry, you’re right, again. ↩

  3. And it’s even worse in languages other than English, of course. ↩

  4. Thank you, Brexit. ↩

  5. One of the many problems of enshittification is how hard it makes it to talk about the thing itself. I went back to the Amazon website to get a screenshot, but (presumably because the Amazon recommendation engine now has me tagged as a buyer of Zwilling nail clippers) all the fly-by-night vendors are (mostly) banished from the results, which now show me a bewildering array of increasingly specialised nail clippers and related products from Zwilling. If you search on your own Amazon account right now, you will get a third, entirely unrelated set of results. ↩