i dare you to quit amazon prime 😉

i bet it's easier than you think

I dare you to quit Amazon Prime. I bet it's easier than you think. 🫶🏻

Over 180 million people in the United States subscribe to Amazon Prime, and there's a good chance you're one of them. For many years, I was, too.

After mounting frustration with Amazon's unethical behavior, questionable business practices, unreliable product quality, and unfettered growth, I cut the Amazon Prime cord and haven't looked back since. 

I'm convinced you can quit Amazon Prime, too. I'm not imploring you to cut ties with Amazon entirely. I think that's pretty hard to do. Given Amazon's broad participation in most major markets, it's not especially practical or realistic. But their omnipresence is one significant reason we should diversify our consumption.

The United States government thinks Amazon is bad for customers and competition

A growing group of people and organizations is fed up with Amazon's domination of online shopping (which has significant negative impacts on brick-and-mortar businesses as well). Amazon brought fresh innovation to buying and selling goods, which is generally good for markets and consumers. However, the government agrees that Amazon has become too big and too powerful at the expense of customers, workers, and small businesses.

Via FTC Press Release

In September 2023, the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and 17 state attorney generals sued Amazon for various "anticompetitive and unfair strategies to illegally maintain its monopoly power." This is not a partisan perspective. The 17 states included in the lawsuit include a variety of states across the political spectrum, notably many that tend to be especially "purple" or politically mixed states.

With Trump in office and Bezos among the billionaires sitting in the front row at the inauguration, this FTC suit will likely vanish into thin air (if that’s an option, given the 17 other states involved). Trump and his administration have no interest in helping everyday Americans at the behest of billionaires (13 and counting of whom are likely to be in his cabinet!!)¹.

Amazon makes prices higher and hurts sellers

More specifically, the suit alleges that "The FTC and its state partners say Amazon’s actions allow it to stop rivals and sellers from lowering prices, degrade quality for shoppers, overcharge sellers, stifle innovation, and prevent rivals from fairly competing against Amazon."²

In other words, Amazon has gained so much control over online shopping (and consequently in-person shopping) that the company drives overall prices higher, worsens online shopping experiences, and harms small businesses by gouging them on fees. These fees ultimately get passed on to consumers through higher prices and prevent other companies from developing innovative ideas to improve the market for everyone. In short, Amazon is exploiting its power to harm just about everyone.

Amazon's report card shows plenty of bad behavior. However, the government is pursuing only the areas where it believes it has a strong case to root out market exploitation and make online shopping a better and more fair experience for everyone involved (i.e., you and everyone you know).

Our antitrust (i.e., anti-monopoly) laws in the United States are outdated. They were established long before Big Tech changed the way everything works. And since at least the 1970s, our antitrust laws have been pretty lax. They are not enforced much unless in cases of egregious anti-competitive practices.

Monopoly power can be used in a variety of ways. However, the FTC will likely see the most success in this case if it starts by targeting specific areas of power abuse, like consumer prices and high seller fees, that traditionally have been covered by antitrust jurisprudence.³

Wait?! Amazon makes prices higher?

You probably shop at Amazon because they have the “lowest” prices and because you pre-pay for "free"⁴ shipping via an Amazon Prime subscription. But guess what?! Amazon has the lowest prices because they effectively force sellers to put their lowest prices on Amazon, not necessarily because they're somehow getting you a great deal.

The FTC suit goes into greater detail about how they do this. Amazon makes it next to impossible to sell items on Amazon (by burying listings) if sellers have lower prices anywhere else (even on sale on their websites). Amazon uses bots trolling the Internet to enforce these measures. So sure, Amazon has the lowest prices, but only because they coerced sellers into marking up prices everywhere else and essentially forcing sellers to pay steep fees to have any chance of showing up in search results. Is that the type of market player you want to support?

Do you know why they can get away with this? Because sellers feel they “have no other choice.” Is that not the definition of monopoly power? 🤨

Guess who ultimately pays those crazy seller fees? You! The fees are incorporated into the product's price, so you spend more. The seller hopefully breaks even, and Amazon makes billions in profit from our purchases. This sounds like a good deal for Amazon (and not for you or your favorite small business).

Amazon Prime as a loss leader to increase seller fees + gain market share

Despite its marketing propaganda, Amazon is terrible for most small businesses. As detailed in this report from The Institute For Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), Amazon has become an expensive tollbooth for small business third-party sellers, the precise group that makes the market so successful.

Amazon uses Prime as a loss leader to capture an influential market share. Prime members, in particular, seek out Amazon as a primary point of purchase because they’ve prepaid for “free” shipping and perceive that it has a low-price market advantage.

via Statista

Amazon has garnered such power and omnipresence in the retail market that many sellers are forced to use it as their primary sales channel, even if it's not particularly profitable. With its monopolistic power, Amazon exploits sellers by charging outrageous fees and making unfair demands about how sellers do business, even outside of Amazon.

Seller fees include various service fees, such as listing or referral fees, advertising fees, and fees for warehouse and shipping services (Fulfillment By Amazon). While Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos claims that seller fees are increasing because sellers choose to use more of these services, the ILSR report suggests that sellers have little choice.

Amazon prioritizes products in search results whose sellers use more of its services (a “pay-to-play” model). Sellers who opt not to use all of these services have trouble finding relevance in search results, even if they have the best product to match the customer's search intention.

Prime subscriptions create a flywheel of market consolidation (precisely as designed). Prime members flock to Amazon instead of other e-commerce outlets because they receive “free shipping” and perceive lower pricing. Sellers feel obligated to make Amazon their primary sales channel and comply with Amazon’s exploitative rules to access the growing cohort of shoppers who default to Amazon for most of their online shopping. As more shoppers seek out more sellers on Amazon, Amazon’s stronghold on e-commerce strengthens. 

Amazon is actually pretty shitty

Meanwhile, Amazon chooses enshittification, a term coined by Cory Doctorow and selected as Macquarie Dictionary’s 2024 word of the year.

Macquarie defines enshittification as “The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.”

Doctorow describes the process in three steps. “First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.”⁵

For Amazon, this degraded platform includes, among other things:

• excessive fees for sellers

• messy product recommendations that prioritize sponsored content over more useful listings that match search inquiries

• congested search results that include multiple listings for the same product from sellers trying to game the system with multiple selling identities

• unreliable product quality

• limited seller oversight

In short, we’ve seen the enshittification of the Amazon platform for buyers and sellers now that people feel locked into it and unable to go elsewhere.

This video from More Perfect Union nicely summarizes how Amazon's monopolistic power harms consumers and sellers. It includes a discussion with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which focuses on building strong and resilient local communities.

Quitting Amazon Prime doesn't mean quitting Amazon

I started separating our family’s consumption from Amazon a few years ago. I didn't quit cold turkey. Over time, I sought replacement retailers for things we typically purchased from Amazon. I let our Amazon Prime subscription lapse. After the pandemic hit in the spring of 2020, I decided to divest our spending from Amazon more actively.

Because Amazon has conquered so many markets and put so many small and medium-sized companies out of business, there are certain products you may still need to buy from Amazon. I've heard from a few readers about non-brand-specific products they need for medical or other important reasons that they can't find elsewhere. I get it.

It’s worth noting that if Amazon is the only way to access a necessary product, it perfectly indicates why Amazon is too omnipotent and poses an antitrust problem. That’s the definition of consumption without competition.

Buy only the things you must buy from Amazon for now. You can still shop on Amazon without Prime and not pay shipping if you meet the free shipping threshold. If you limit your Amazon purchases to only what you need and can't find elsewhere, shipping costs will almost always be less than the Prime subscription fee.

Amazon Web Services comprise a majority of Amazon's business

As I stated in a previous post, most of Amazon's net income doesn't come from its product sales. Instead, they generate 67%⁶ of their profit from Amazon Web Services (AWS); Amazon hosts a large portion of the content on the internet. We won't be escaping AWS anytime soon.

Amazon uses profits from its web services to subsidize its attempts to monopolize everyday consumption and, in turn, profit from rapidly rising seller fees. (Never mind the very valuable personal data to which they have access. 🙄)

Further, they have been known to utilize usage data from their web hosting to identify candidates for hostile acquisitions of successful startups. This is a prime (no pun intended) example of how their broad participation in various industries gives them monopolistic-equivalent power that doesn't fit the traditional definition of a monopoly within the current construct of our outdated United States anti-trust laws.

In short, we won't likely divest from AWS, but we can reduce reliance on retail consumption through Amazon by ditching Amazon Prime subscriptions.

What about Amazon Prime content?

Amazon offers convenient benefits to its Prime subscription, like Prime Video and Amazon Music. While some content is exclusive, there is more high-quality content on the Internet than one could ever consume in a lifetime. You can find plenty of fantastic content elsewhere.

You can often find the same content through other distribution channels. For example, my boys used to watch a show that streams exclusively on Amazon Prime. However, the show also airs periodically on PBS. We used our YouTubeTV subscription to record each episode of this particular show. After a few months, we had a library of episodes for them to watch on demand.

Amazon has exclusive content that you can't watch on any other channel. However, I suspect one could replace this viewing time with something they love equally. And is that favorite show so much better than anything else available that it's worth the annual Amazon Prime subscription fee of $139 each year?

Where to buy things if not from Amazon? Local!

Amazon is relatively new. Not long ago, many of us shopped elsewhere. We’ve grown accustomed to simply heading to Amazon for whatever curbs our shopping impulses. However, it doesn't have to be that way.

Finding better and more ethical retail alternatives requires varied efforts depending on the item you seek to purchase. Most everyday food, health and beauty, and personal care items fill the shelves at big box stores or corner drug stores in our local communities. While that used to require a trip into the store to collect said purchases, most of those stores now offer curbside pickup and/or delivery to streamline the shopping process. More specific product searches may require some research to find an alternative online retailer or local small business that stocks the product.

Local investment supports resiliency and community connection

While I can't create a comprehensive list of all the small businesses in your area with different types of products, it’s worth investing in them to build community resilience. Dollars spent locally stay in our communities, and local businesses create invaluable flexibility and agility to respond to customer needs, crises, and changing market conditions.

Our world, and especially our national stability, is fragile right now. Our executive administration is committed to chaos and collapse. Its leaders want to see the federal government crumble (for real), and they’ve expressed this in documents like Project 2025.

They’re happy to take big risks, move fast, and break things, regardless of the potential fallout. While this may work for big businesses, it is not effective governance!

Climate disasters are the new norm.

Local community builders, investors, artisans, producers, and connectors (and more!) will be paramount in weaving a safety net when everything else is breaking. Amazon is not coming to save you. Your local hardware store owner, restaurant chef, farmer, financial advisor, or indie gift shop owner might, though.

Quit Amazon Prime and save money

While altruistic reasons won't compel everyone to ditch Amazon Prime, I bet many people would save a lot of money if they stopped subscribing to the consumption drug. Amazon Prime makes shopping too easy (yes - consumption can be too easy). Prime intentionally removes barriers to hitting the Buy Now button that might otherwise encourage us to think twice about whether or not we need something new.

Without the simplicity of simply stoking the Amazon profit flames, we can pause and think about how else we might fulfill needs. We may already own something perfectly suitable. One might request the item in a local Buy Nothing group or borrow it from a friend. If needed, purchase something new from a local store, an online alternative, or even a competitive big box store.

Amazon's takeover of the world is not inevitable. Most people choose to support Amazon and Amazon Prime and buy into the business practices. Amazon is suffocating small businesses, destroying local economies, and encouraging overconsumption in droves.

Amazon's dominance reflects a consumption problem

I recognize that Amazon meets actual needs under a small set of circumstances. But by and large, there are loads of alternatives for the things we buy from Amazon, and we don't even need most of what we're buying!

We don't need Amazon to exist in its omnipotent form. It simply feeds our consumption addictions. We have to stop buying so much stuff and stop buying it all from Amazon.

Nothing is a great deal if we don't need it in the first place. No amount of investment from Amazon in electric delivery vans or wind farms will swell the storm of climate change if we keep consuming so much crap. And we don't need everything delivered in two hours or even two days.⁷

Our collective obsession with Amazon is primarily a mindset problem, and we have a choice to change. I challenge you to consider quitting Amazon Prime. If you’re honest with yourself, I bet you’ll be better off without it.

Let’s chat: Do you have Amazon Prime? Do you think you could ditch it? How much excess consumption is facilitated by the ease of purchase and perceived “free” shipping? As we watch Bezos kowtow to an increasingly authoritarian government, does it further your desire to separate your consumption from an enabler of anti-democratic forces?

1. Maybe they should make a Duggar-style reality show about this motley crew. “13 and counting.” Trump’s life is one big over-produced reality show, and Americans love watching the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Maybe we could distract Trump from the damage he's about to do over the next four years with the production of this show, which is much more up his alley than actual governing.

2. The Trump administration has been removing information from government websites that it dislikes. In case the FTC removes the information about the Amazon suit, I copied and pasted the language and put it on my site for longevity. If the FTC link no longer works, you can see it here. 

3. Given Bezos’ willingness to capitulate to Trump, I anticipate the FTC will drop this case. The Trump administration is far more focused on consolidating executive branch power and enriching its loyalists than on protecting everyday Americans.

4. You can get free shipping from Amazon without a Prime subscription when you meet a small purchasing threshold. If you need something that costs less than the threshold, wait until you need enough items to meet it, or add something extra you know you’ll use in due time. Dish soap, hand soap, and batteries are may go-to purchases of things I’d buy anyway that can get me to the free shipping threshold when I periodically need something I can only find on Amazon.

5. Hear more from Cory Doctorow about the enshittification of clean energy tech on this podcast episode of Volts, of which I’m a big fan.

6. Per Feb 2, 2024, annual 10-K filing.

7. If you need a gift for a birthday party, buy a gift card online, print it out, and put it in a handmade card. Your guest of honor will love it. Seriously, they will.