When did you last purchase an item or spend hours browsing away on Amazon? Unless you’re part of the 10% of people who don’t have access to the internet, I imagine it wasn’t so long ago. The website is the perfect creation: every product or item you have ever desired, previously only available in your dreams, there on a screen, waiting to be added to your basket. I recall multiple occasions of pestering my parents for a new Nintendo game, the latest addition to a book series or some toy that gave me pleasure in my childhood. No doubt it was online, despite the waiting and risk of being scammed, where my desires were fulfilled.
These anecdotes have taken place and will continue to take place billions of times around the planet. As however many people delight at receiving a new product every second, whether a necessity or part of a spending spree, consequences of this continual, repetitive action become inevitable. It is only recently that solutions to this craze have been properly discussed, even though Amazon, selling you everything from A to Z (hence the arrow), have triumphed for years. The Conservative chancellor Philip Hammond, part of a party not known for hiking taxes, has wafted the idea of an online retail tax – dubbed an ‘Amazon tax’ – into the public sphere. Given Britain has the biggest percentage of online shoppers in the western world, it is presented as a proportional measure to combat the changing shopping habits of Britain. I doubt it would make up for the miniscule corporation tax - £1.7m – paid by Amazon recently, despite booming, increasing profits. Similarly, the Advertising Standards Agency have declared that Amazon can no longer mislead the public over its next day delivery service, a prime part of its Prime membership. Though it is a key USP of the sales giant, I’m sure it plays a part in the dire working conditions faced by employees: timed toilet breaks, reports of 80-hour weeks, ambulances being called 600 times in three years to UK warehouses and even workers having to urinate in bottles. Those conditions are fit for no human. Yet more human concerns are present in the real effect Amazon has had on Britain’s high street. House of Fraser has only just been purchased in time by Mike Ashley, owner of Sports Direct. The collapse of Toys R Us and Maplin spring to mind, consumers preferring to buy their play gear and electric goods online or elsewhere. Though I have never seen a Poundworld store, they have also vanished, the abolition of these three chains creating a bubble of worry for more than 6,500 people. In all these high-profile news cases, it has been Amazon receiving the anger and blame for incidents. They are an unbelievably large corporation, easy to criticise (just like Tony Blair) and so as an organisation can suffer the blows that millions of non-free marketeers wish to strike. But that would be to simplify the multiple problems that have rightly arisen over the last few months. Digging deeper, I think consumers must bear some responsibility, both for the travesty of Amazon’s working conditions and the wider ‘death of the high street.’ We live in a modern age. For the vast bulk of Western citizens, we are used to items, things, products, commodities at our fingertips. Whether it’s hundreds of trashy TV channels, infinite restaurant, hotel and film reviews, an exquisite choice of villas to holiday in, cruises to explore, video games to play, books to read, provided you have the necessary disposable income, it is there. Click ‘add to basket’, insert your payment details and it will be there. No wonder next day delivery is so popular if we simply haven’t been used to rationing as a society. In an age of judgment, to conspicuously consume to impress is the new norm. This growth in commodities fits nicely then with the endless events – either out of choice or not – dominating our lives. When work is finished, there is a gym to attend, community event to organise, holiday to book, yoga to practice, cello to buy, film to review and bills to pay. Oh yes, all this combined with the domestic labour that unites all our lives, whatever social class we see ourselves. Why bother spending money and time browsing the high street if all the food you intend to buy is available online? There’s no reason to buy a book in store when I can grab an earlier edition at a cheaper price online, is there? Even shops do not help themselves with the increasing use of self-service checkouts, only encouraging less human interaction and more technological crazes. As you’ve probably guessed, I’m not such a fan of materialism, the ideology at the bedrock of Amazon’s world triumph. If people weren’t so desperate for resources, the company would never have done so well. Yet it is our obsession with growth (often strangely substituted as a measure for happiness), desperation for new products (The iPhone 7 can’t be that different from the iPhone 6S, surely?) and inability to be happy with what we’ve got that helps to fuel the mighty few tech companies. Whether it is an inevitable, unsolvable part of human nature and whether materialism can properly exist alongside abstract notions of community, compassion and altruism, well, only time will tell. None of these arguments make Jeff Bezos exempt from what he can do as the richest man in the world. Clearly, money should be spent carefully, but can anyone disagree with paying workers more for working fair hours, giving more to worthy charities and promoting small, independent businesses? Though trade union membership continues to fall in the UK, decreasing by 4.2% between 2016 and 2017, to have the protection and security a union brings can only be beneficial. That should be promoted and encouraged, a recognition that, whatever your position in the company, you have as many rights as the CEO. Fundamentally though, if the dominance of Amazon to recede, we as consumers must stop desiring perfection all the time and instead appreciate the authenticity and historical context of the vintage, yet vital, high street.
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