This Startup Will Take Amazon By Storm

If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em has never been more real

Lindsay Rae Brown
5 min readSep 17, 2020

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Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

Amazon has been around for what seems like forever now. From its meagre beginnings in 1995, Amazon has grown into the goliath of retail servicing for consumers. Before that, late-night infomercials after too many glasses of wine and the realization that we most certainly did need a Snuggy blanket was the closest thing we had to couch-surfing impulse purchasing.

Amazon’s big pull was the convenience of having items shipped directly to your home, along with the idea that customers could make their purchases with only a few clicks of a mouse. Hells yeah, we screamed when this idea found its feet. How could we say no? Much like the convenience of ordering cheap food made for the masses through a drive-through window, this is what we, the consumer needed.

Finally, a platform to give us the ability to be even more lazy and antisocial than ever before! It sounds harsh, I know. However, this is the cold hard reality.

Convenience shopping has killed conscious consumerism.

No longer do we need to feel the fabric of a dress to know if it would be a good purchase. Instead, we merely read the reviews attached to the Amazon link. We’ve become so ingratiated with online shopping that it gives us acute anxiety to walk into a brick and mortar store that we’ve never visited before.

What if the store clerks are rude?

What if I don’t know how to order from their menu?

These fears are alleviated by the notion that we can skip the hassle of human contact and instead order online.

As much as I see the downfalls of this new way of life, I am a proponent of moving with the times. This is the world in which we live, so let’s pull up those bootstraps and deal with it.

The thing is, what most people don’t see — or, more likely, see but don’t care to acknowledge — is that with this mad dash for gluttonous purchasing, it’s ironically, killing our local economy. Because of course, people know its happening. Our small businesses are shuttering their doors at an alarming rate, especially in light of the coronavirus pandemic taking…

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Lindsay Rae Brown

Mother, writer, user of too many hashtags.