Practical steps, personal convictions, and building a beautiful life and home economy without Amazon.
Hello. I hope you’re having a lovely day. Today I’m sharing how we live and function without Amazon.
I have not purchased from Amazon since January 2021, and I could probably go further back, because we only ordered from Amazon two times in 2020. In 2019 we cut up our Prime card, canceled our Prime membership, and really began our conviction of not buying from Amazon. I’ll give a very brief explanation for why we don’t buy from Amazon. This isn’t to tell you what you should or shouldn’t do; I’m simply sharing our perspective and the conclusions we’ve reached based on our own values. Everyone’s values are different, so whatever you decide will be unique to you.
I do want to encourage you, because I believe that if many people cut up their Amazon Prime card and simply stopped treating Prime as an option, many households would save a lot of money. By mentally removing Amazon from our lives, we’ve saved a significant amount of money and avoid accumulating junk.
Let’s go back to 2018. That’s when I quit my job to become a full-time homemaker. I discovered the concept of the home as an economy. Through learning about stewarding our home economy, we began studying the local economy through Wendell Berry’s book (World Ending Fire). We realized how closely the home economy is tied to the local economy. For the first time, we connected Jesus’ command to love our neighbor with supporting local businesses.
At that time, we lived in Stanford, Kentucky. We decided to try a November challenge of shopping only locally, sourcing everything within a 30-minute radius. We didn’t even go to locally-owned shops that sold global products; everything had to be from our area. We did this just to see if we could. We had read about a blogger who sourced everything within a 30-minute radius, so we thought, “Why not try?”
That November marked our beginnings. We have a 2019 YouTube video about stepping away from Amazon and big-box stores (watch here). At that point, we hadn’t completely written off Amazon.
We made a few purchases from amazon in 2020, then the last thing I ordered was books in January 2021, and then we stopped completely.
Why did we go cold-turkey? There are many reasons, but these are ours:
- During 2020, small businesses were devastated while Amazon boomed. We didn’t want to support a system that harmed local mom-and-pop stores.
- Amazon rips off small businesses that sell on their site. I subscribe to Earlywood’s emails, a woodworking business that makes wooden spatulas and spoons. They sent an email explaining they’d prefer customers buy directly from them because Amazon takes about 30% off the top. They explained how Amazon uses software to find popular products, then undercuts small businesses by creating cheaper imitations, often made overseas.
- We saw how convenience becomes compulsion and decided to remove the platform from our life entirely- also to see, can we do this?
Our buying hierarchy is:
- Make or build it ourselves (the home economy).
- Source locally from neighbors.
- Purchase from values-aligned companies online.
- Last option, find a lesser evil to buy it from
Shopping Local Resources:
https://upickfarmlocator.com/
https://www.realmilk.com/
https://www.localharvest.org/
https://garagesalefinder.com/
https://www.yardsalesearch.com/
I encourage you to try an Amazon-free challenge even if it’s for a month. It can reveal surprising savings and open doors to local relationships and better-quality goods!
You can watch the youtube video this blog came from here: https://youtu.be/JiEAh3dNLzQ
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