FEBRUARY 10, THURSDAY

AMAZON (A BIG BIG CORPORATION AND ME)

The problem I faced yesterday was how most ethically and morally to warm my bed in the the bedroom when I leave the heat off during the day in order to save energy. This comes after I finally realized a few days ago that it is not the house I want to keep warm, it is me, and often heating the house is the least efficient way to keep me warm. My solution for the corner of the living room where I sit most of the day is to have one small ceramic heater at my ankles and one small ceramic heater on the table top to warm my hands.

In doing this I feel I am being a very ethical person, I am not only lowering my electric bill I am also doing my part to prevent global warming by only heating what needs to be warmed, me, rather than the house, and am decreasing my electric power consumption and therefore the use of fossil fuels to make the electricity. I guess if I wanted to completely do the right thing I would install solar panels or put a small wind turbine on the roof. But since all I want to do is to heat my ankles and fingers and warm my bed at night, I‘m not willing, yet, to spend thousands of dollars for an alternative energy source. Hot water bottles, rather than solar, are my solution, but they raise their own ethical issues.

You’d think that buying a couple of hot water bottles, a throwback to my grandmother tucking us into bed at night, wouldn’t be a moral problem. But today when I ordered two hot water bottles from Amazon I began to fret. They will get here tomorrow.

Since turning off the heat in the house and warming myself with small electric ceramic heaters I have been very comfortable. When I went back to Aldi to get a couple more heaters so that I could place them in the places were I sit in the living room so that I wouldn‘t have to carry them around, Aldi on River Road was out, Aldi on Patton Avenue in West Asheville was out, but Aldi in South Asheville had 30 or more of them. I had already looked on line and Amazon had twenty different kinds of small heaters, the best selection in town, but I think the Aldi heaters are cheaper and better. It took me three hours of driving to get my heaters. And I would have turned to Amazon next if Aldi hadn‘t had them. On Amazon it would have taken five minutes. But even the thought of ordering from Amazon raises ethical issues for many people which I will have to deal with.

The reason I am getting hot water bottles is because when I go to bed at night if the bedroom is unheated the foam mattress gets ice cold. So I have been heating the room a little before I go to bed to warm the mattress. But I don‘t want the room to be warm I want the bed to be warm. So electric baseboard heat is heating the wrong thing. Hot water bottles will make the bed warm and the room cold and I will be able to sleep well.

But I didn‘t know where in Asheville to buy a hot water bottle. I could have driven for hours looking in store after store. But when I looked on line Amazon had twenty kinds of hot water bottles and promised them tomorrow. So I ordered two.

But in the process I am setting myself up for a moral problem that I don‘t think I can resolve. Maybe all I can do is to figure out what the issue is. The problem to be solved is whether Amazon is bad or good and shopping there is moral or immoral.

On the positive side Amazon has found a way to sell goods more efficiently than anyone else most of the time, although the heaters were cheaper and better at Aldi. Amazon offers a wide variety of almost everything. On my own I would go from store to store and be lucky to find any hot water bottles at all and when I finally found one I would have no choice. So the choice is between driving around or sitting at home and in five minutes ordering a hot water bottle. And because I have Amazon Prime I get free shipping and an additional 5% off with an Amazon credit card. Of course Prime is $119 now and will be $139 in a couple of weeks so I have to make use of the other services to make it be worth while, which I do, sometimes watching an Prime movie, storing my photos as a backup on Prime storage, and most of all, getting free books on Amazon Kindle. That is the positive side of Amazon: wide selection, ease of shopping, free and quick delivery, usually the low price. Anyone can see how attractive Amazon is.

The negative side is sometimes anecdotal. First of all, a lot of people hate Amazon because it is so huge and they hate huge corporations. They also don’t like the idea of Jeff Bezos being as rich as he is and frittering away his money on space rides when he could be helping the poor. It is also said that the warehouse workers are not well paid and have very strict work rules. But that is true of many manual labor jobs. I wouldn‘t want to work at Amazon, or pick apples or cotton, or dig ditches, or work on a trash truck. Some kinds of work are mind numbing and unpleasant but am I going to boycott all those companies who offer mind numbing low paid work? I guess if I was a saint I would. But I‘m not so I don‘t think mind numbing work is a strong negative.

The big knock against Amazon is that Amazon wipes out mom and pop stores and even many of the big box and little box stores. And that certainly is true. But why can Amazon do this?

Because the real problem from my perspective is that Amazon turns all of retailing upside down. Amazon is leading the way in a huge cultural change. I like Malaprops bookstore downtown, an Asheville landmark. I was told not to buy books from the huge Barnes and Noble at the edge of the Mall because it would destroy the local bookstores and it has. Only Malaprops is left. But now Barnes and Noble is being eaten up by Amazon. I am not the first person to browse for books in Barnes and Noble because they have a far wider choice than Malaprops but then go home and order the book from Amazon. A huge cultural shift is taking place.

Large cultural shifts happen with new technology and the all through history this has caused great dislocation. The steam engine, electricity, the printing press, the cotton gin, textile mills, the automobile, telephones and on and on have dislocated the way we used to do things. The technology allowing Amazon to upend retailing is computers and the Internet and rapid transportation and tariff free world trade which allows a completely new way of retailing.

The old way, the mom and pop store with someone standing around helping customers all day is not very efficient. It is not Amazon‘s fault, it is the new technology that is dislocating things. In addition a lot of what Amazon sells is virtual. I have switched from print books to ebooks, watch streaming movies, store digital photographs. The things mom and pop sold are disappearing. The world is turning upside down and there is nothing we can do about it.

Now the two hot water bottles are a step back to an old technology but even they will be made in China putting someone out of work.

This is what I mean by not being able to resolve the problem. Maybe I am feeling there is a moral problem because I have trouble handling change, but I should probably just get over it and go with the new technology instead of putting my finger in the dike and thinking that it will have any effect on Amazon or anything else. It is too late, the dam has burst, the world as we knew it is being swept away. I‘m not going to feel guilty when my two hot water bottles are delivered tomorrow.