Amazon – can we live without it?
Can we of the Glebe break our addiction to Amazon?
Photo: Jennifer Humphries
Amazon – can we live without it?
By Jennifer Humphries
Full disclosure: I despise Amazon. I confess to having asked others to order a couple of items for me. But no more.
It isn’t hard to find reasons to dislike Amazon.
It’s run by a billionaire who clearly does not care much about his employees, the environment and individual privacy.
It’s unethical. Its employees make a minimum hourly wage and can barely take bathroom breaks. It busts unions. It’s unfriendly to the environment. While it reduced its packaging after complaints, it still generates a huge amount of waste and a vast quantity of returned items go to landfill.
It’s a behemoth with multiple tentacles. It’s Whole Foods, Goodreads, Audible and more. It wants to eat the lunch of small businesses and local shops.
It’s not just me. Many consider Amazon an uncaring beast, to be avoided or used sparingly. In the context of the U.S.-initiated trade war and the campaign to buy Canadian, I began to wonder whether local residents had reduced or even eliminated their Amazon shopping.
I reached out to neighbours via the Facebook group “Being Neighbourly in the Glebe, Old Ottawa South and Old Ottawa East.” Four residents and a University of Ottawa MBA student generously agreed to share their views.
Views from the ’hood
Nicholas Surges was wary before the trade war, but in March he cancelled his Amazon Prime membership. He continues to use the Amazon site as a catalogue, but he tries to order directly from the manufacturer. Some family members are reluctant to entirely give up Amazon purchases, so they are considering having one family member keep an account for niche items. “Amazon’s pitch is that we can’t live without it,” Surges said. “People come to rely on it and are reluctant to decouple even when the geopolitical reality demands it. But we can live without it and we can find other options that benefit our local community.”
LeAnne Parrish has cut her Amazon Prime membership although she hadn’t used it much. She is concerned that Amazon undercuts Canadian suppliers. She finds Amazon’s treatment of workers unacceptable and its recent closure of its Quebec distribution centres was obviously a case of union busting. Parrish’s Gen Z daughter is keen to purchase fashion from online suppliers but she orders directly from the source.
Caroline Horton was already trying to limit her Amazon use, which went up during the pandemic. She has always aimed to buy local. It’s not always easy: her nephews sent their Christmas wish list in the form of Amazon links.
“However,” she said, “since the antagonism of Trump and tariff threats, I’ve vowed not to use it at all. I cancelled my Audible membership and Prime, and no longer shop at Whole Foods.” Her go-to is buying local, shopping in bricks-and-mortar stores or ordering online from Canadian suppliers, especially in Ontario and the Ottawa Valley. “I hate giving Jeff Bezos any money simply for convenience,” she said.
Ellen Dickson offered this comment: “I was an infrequent Amazon user, but I stopped completely during COVID when Bezos put a “donate” button on the site [with donations going] to help employees who needed sick leave.”
MBA student Sam Pakparvar said his Amazon shopping habits haven’t changed with the trade war, citing convenience as well as price (60-70 per cent of products are cheapest on Amazon). He chiefly uses Amazon for electronics, especially niche products difficult to source elsewhere. For other items, he shops locally. Pakparvar said that Canadian sites are not well known and demonstrate “a failure of marketing.” By contrast, “Amazon is very smart. Plus they do market analysis on an industrial scale.” He also likes the product reviews which often include photos and videos. “I see this as a great competitive advantage which serves as a way of verifying the quality of a product.”
It’s a digital shopping world
A 2023 Statistics Canada report on retail e-commerce trends showed that online shopping as a percentage of overall expenditures by Canadians was on a growth trajectory before the COVID-19 pandemic but ramped up markedly in 2020 through 2021. In 2022 it declined but remained higher than pre-COVID. It’s hard to imagine the popularity of online shopping dropping off.
But it seems we will be buying considerably less from U.S. online vendors over the next four years.
A Leger poll conducted in early February examined the shift in Canadians’ shopping habits. It’s no surprise that 80% of respondents said they are significantly increasing their purchase of Canadian-made products. That said, just 40% plan to reduce or have reduced online purchases from U.S.-based companies while 32% would not do so (18% didn’t know and 10% said non-applicable). Fifty-six percent either plan to stop or have stopped travelling to the U.S.
What we are finding harder to give up are streaming services. Still, 28% of poll respondents said they have cancelled or plan to cancel U.S. streaming services such as Netflix and Disney.
Variations among the three age groups are relatively modest, though the younger group (18-34) is slightly less inclined to drop U.S. travel and more inclined to drop U.S. streamers.
The pleasure of being there
Shopping Canadian, digital or in person, is one thing. But what about buying local? Judging by the number of familiar faces I’ve seen on Bank Street and around, it seems we are pretty dedicated to our local business community.
Elbows up, Canada!
Jennifer Humphries is a board member and former co-chair of the Glebe Report Association and of the Glebe Community Association’s Environment Committee.
For more on reasons to avoid Amazon, take a look at www.wikihow.com/Avoid-Amazon. It details issues with human rights, environment and privacy, and touches on online shopping addiction.