Wordsley, Stourbridge, England: 15 degrees, cold, overcast, rainy and miserable.
My first experiences with Amazon are truly quite amazing.
Until this week, I had never used Amazon. The company entered Brazil relatively late; I used some other Brazilian online retailers but never Amazon. Friends in Brazil and Julie have raved about their efficiency, especially in delivery.
Last weekend was a weekend when things were breaking. My new Google watch charger and cable have a bad contact after only a month and a half of use, and my skipping rope and exercise bands broke on the same day.
On Sunday, I ordered two new charging cables for the price of one through Amazon, and they arrived on Monday. The delivery charge was £5. If you subscribed to Amazon Prime for free for one month, you would not need to pay for delivery.
Since I live with my mother and am unsure about my future and other things, I prefer to pay the £5 delivery fee, which is almost 50% of the cost of the cables, rather than watching TV and doing the wrong thing.
The next day, yesterday they arrived early afternoon with no drama, confusion, excuses, etc Everything was right, and they were what I had ordered, so it was a plus.
So I decided to take it a step further; this morning, I revisited the Amazon site and ordered a new skipping rope and a set of elastic bands for exercising with same-day delivery.
This time, I had to pay £1 more than the usual next-day delivery, making the total £6, with the option to subscribe to Amazon Prime to waive the delivery fee. Amazingly, at 5:00 p.m., both items were delivered—strangely, separately, at different times, in different packages.
My mother received the skipping rope, but I expected or had the impression that everything would be delivered together. When I opened the package and saw that the elastics were missing, I went online. I received an email with a photo showing that the delivery person had either placed or thrown the box with the elastics behind the dustbin on the other side of our locked gate.
I was amazed. How good is that?
Everything was in order, and my two deliveries were honoured. Besides being very impressive, this is also extremely powerful. It is clear that street retailers in England have been and continue to suffer because of Amazon and similar companies. The experience of visiting a shop or shopping centre has been replaced by the experience, process, and excitement of ordering online, receiving your order on time, and unboxing it.
It may be that, even after placing the order, the anticipation of waiting for it is part of the psychological rush that used to accompany buying something in a regular bricks-and-mortar shop.
Indeed, the small High Street shop owner faces nearly impossible conditions to compete with the might and force of Amazon and similar companies. If you want to run a High Street shop, you must ensure that you’re selling something that Amazon does not offer, because if you are, you’re fucked. Just offering something that Amazon does not have is almost impossible nowadays.
This is why, when I walked down the two main high streets of Brierley Hill and Stourbridge for the first time in over twenty years, I thought of these iconic places from my childhood. These streets, which once hosted a wide variety of top-quality shops and diverse offerings, now mostly feature closed or empty premises.
If a premise isn’t closed or empty, it is either a charity shop or what I call ‘a shit shop’—a vape or gaming shop. For me, these do little to enhance the area’s overall value and only serve to disappoint.
It is clear that Amazon has been a revelation and a revolution in modern societies, where you can literally buy anything from a multitude of options with ease and reliable delivery, which, in itself, is a powerful force. Like any giant, it has come at a cost to others — specifically, affecting our society and, more particularly, local shop owners and their culture.
It is a pity, and, in a certain sense, many could see it as an injustice in modern society. Still, injustice is capitalism, and those who offer the best in terms of product, quality, and increasingly important, delivery, succeed. Because of this, Jeff Bezos and Amazon have triumphed, but it has consequently impacted the entire fabric of the retail system.
The rest of my day was spent in classes, blogging, journaling, and of course, speaking to Julie.
In bed by midnight.
Thank you.
Thanks for reading this blog post. Please explore my other posts and share your thoughts in the comments section.
Richard
