Allow me to set the stage:

It's the end of February. I'm visiting Mari in Florida. Trump has been in office for over a month and every day is a chaotic hellscape of information. Billionaire tech bros are trying to form an oligarchy. And I have insomnia. So what do I do? I start spiraling about Amazon specifically.

I have not engaged with anything Musk owns in years. Never been a fan of that melting wax statue of a man, and as soon as he bought Twitter and started running it into the ground, I was no longer on the platform. I deleted all of my former tweets and my account at the beginning of the year when they announced they'd be using tweets to train AI.

I begrudgingly still interact with some Meta platforms, specifically IG, because it is the only app of it's kind at the moment. I am patiently waiting for BlueSky to create an alternative, which they've announced they are working on.

But Amazon.... Amazon felt like a hard one. But it was 3am, I couldn't sleep, and I was mad.

So I looked at my account and realized that most of my Amazon purchases were for convenience. Most of my Amazon purchases were pharmacy-type items, like skincare and vitamins. And many of my purchases were due to poor planning where I needed something overnight because I ran out.

None of these things were things I NEEDED from Amazon specifically. And I needed to force myself out of my convenience bubble. So I cancelled my Prime membership. The customer service rep originally said they couldn't refund me for the months I hadn't used, but I knew from checking forums that they could, so speaking to a manager got it cancelled and my remaining months refunded :)

Since then, I have just planned for things the same way I did before I had Amazon and got used to the convenience - and it hasn't even been that hard! Most items you can still get online directly from the companies that sell them for shipping that isn't even much longer. It also prevents impulse purchases, like thinking I need something RIGHT NOW when I really don't.

I haven't gotten books from Amazon for some time, so that didn't change at all and I support my local indies. Wellness items like vitamins I can get from the local pharmacy and even have them delivered. Skincare items I can get for much cheaper from Korean websites (I mostly use Korean skincare), I just have to plan to order in advance because of the shipping times. Other items I try to find locally and just have to make the effort, but that also cuts down on me getting things that I mayyyyybe don't need.

It is hard to divest from Amazon completely. I recently read How to Resist Amazon and Why, and that book goes into all the different ways that Amazon is EVERYWHERE. But every little bit still counts. There may be a few things I'll still need to get from Amazon - for example, a lot of coloring book companies I enjoy print through Amazon as it's more cost effective than trying to print in bulk themselves. But for things I can get anywhere else, I will be.

Have you also stepped back from Amazon? Let me know how it's going!