I canceled my Amazon Prime subscription this year. I’m not sure how much the class had to do with it, but it certainly did remind me to do what I’d been meaning to for a while. I first started to see through Amazon’s shiny and brightly painted facade when I read the 2014 Salon article detailing a few of the numerous abuses of employees in Amazon’s enormous warehouses. Some of them include constantly increasing the expected output of workers, making them wait in line for 10 minutes of their 30 minute lunch break for a security check to make sure they aren’t stealing anything, firing them if they cry on the job, and refusing to open loading doors on days where it got so hot inside the warehouse that workers were collapsing because they were afraid the workers would steal something (they had ambulances stationed outside all day on a few days, and gave the workers “cooling headbands” after over a month of this). But it’s almost difficult not to buy anything from Amazon, they have good prices and fast shipping, although it’s all supported by the backs of exploited workers. It’s similar to Walmart in that it’s a good place to shop if you don’t have very much money, but everything costs so little because the entire process makes workers do absurd amounts of work for very little money and no benefits. Learning about all of this and becoming more and more anti-capitalist made me want to cancel prime, but I didn’t for a while, partly because I thought I would lose the remaining part of the year I paid for, and partly because it was convenient. Which was selfish. But I also didn’t buy enough to justify spending that much on being able to buy more stuff and get it shipped to me quickly.

In the Amazon team’s presentation, the Amazon employee said that Amazon coming to the school was mostly just to breed a new generation of Amazon prime customers, and he was right. Amazon already has the student program, in which anyone with an edu email can get prime free for 6 months, after which they get a discount on the service. This was how I started with it, it seemed like a good idea, I could get free 2 day shipping on my textbooks and whatever else I ordered. Then when the free period was up I was like, well, it’s been convenient to get things so quickly, and it’s discounted now, I can justify that. Giving the whole campus free one day shipping automatically means that they’re getting so many more potential customers, and I’m certain that students will welcome it. Because people like fast shipping, it’s nice, and sometimes you just need things fairly quickly but not quickly enough to go to through the time and effort to get up and go to a store. But I don’t think students will really be aware of what’s going on behind the scenes to give them that free one day shipping, and a lot of them probably don’t really care. And if people can’t see how harmful something is but benefit from it, they generally won’t go to much effort to stop what they’re doing or fix it. Besides the exploited workers at Amazon’s warehouses, many of the goods they sell are made from raw materials gathered by slaves in the global south, and manufactured by much more exploited and underpaid workers in China or Mexico. All of modern society is built on the backs of slaves and abused workers, and for the most part, people don’t really care. We like having our shiny new computers every year or two with coltan mined by Congolese slaves inside them, constructed by Chinese workers in buildings with suicide nets. The problems are easy to ignore, so we do. Being able to look at a picture of something and buy it, then have it show up in a locker a day later without ever having to interact with another human just puts one more layer of abstraction between us and the consumer goods we rely on, and makes it even easier to forget that they don’t just pop out fully formed from the void.