Why I love Amazon.com
Besides the fact that I can order anything from diapers to winter tires at 2am in the morning, I love the hassle free, line-up free and no-charge delivery to my front door by the next day. If I time it right, I could actually turn my AM purchases into PM delivery of the same day! It’s the modern day conveniences of our transaction-based, gig economy. And as Amazon diversifies into new product lines, it’s only a matter of time before I can drop ship a finely curated grocery list by drone within 2 hours. But I don’t take this for granted because I also grew up in an economy that didn’t have these conveniences. When I was little, my mom would take me to the closest groceries store where we’d shop for the week. We didn’t drive; we walked and pulled a grocery cart behind us. A big shopping trip topped $20 in those days and if an on-sale item ran out, we’d ask the store manager for a rain check. Checkouts were staffed by cashiers who pressed real buttons on cash registers, redeemed paper coupons and handled actual money. They’d even calculate the change you get back in their heads! So the conveniences of RFID tags and scan-as-you-shop to skip even the self-checkouts lines are not lost on me.
But that doesn’t mean today’s 21st century conveniences automatically become the baseline for my daughter. In fact, as much as I expose her to modern conveniences (because I appreciate it), I expose her to simple, frugal living by shopping in our own neighborhood, buying only what we need to ensure freshness, avoiding waste and fixing what is broken rather than tossing it in the trash in favor of a newer one. From these perspectives, I love Amazon for three more reasons that it teaches my daughter:
This electronic marketplace allows me to virtually teach my daughter some old lessons.
Choose good suppliers. On her birthday, I said to my daughter that she can go online with me to buy some of her favourite toys: Littlest Pet Shops. She already has many characters at mine and her mom’s house, but because of the toy’s varieties, many young girls collect them. Some can be as rare as the hockey cards I once traded as a kid. For the first 30 minutes, she was lost in a sea of choices and fantasized about buying everything. I pulled her back to Earth and said she should look not at the products but the sellers, instead. Over time, it’s the seller that is more important than the product, especially if things go wrong. Reading reviews and ratings are essential to finding the right supplier since many will sell the same product. Helping her discriminate between average from good to great sellers is a skill that will be useful in the online world and especially in the real one.
Risk and maximizing return. I gave her a budget and she can purchase up to that amount. Being a young shrewd buyer, she maximized on buying the most LPS for that amount. Some deals were actually too good to be true. And after doing a bit of online comparison, it was not too difficult to discover that some sellers offered fakes. These lesser quality or even counterfeit products wreak havoc on legitimate sellers and dupe buyers into risky transactions. While Amazon does an excellent job at weeding out unscrupulous sellers, it’s not guaranteed. On the flip side, spending more doesn’t ensure buying legitimate products, either. Again, valuable lessons for both online and offline marketplaces.
Patience. When it came time to check out, we used the credit card I had on file to complete the transaction. We discovered that some of the sellers were overseas and next day shipping simply wasn’t an option. We could either use regular postal service for a nominal cost or expedited at a disproportionate cost. Given the value of the LPS, it simply wasn’t worth spending more than the value of the purchase. So we settled for free shipping which meant it will take time for the package to arrive. She protested at first, but after the transaction was complete, she soon forgot all about it. In our just-in-time, on-demand economy, patience is a rare commodity. It’s also a valuable one.
Thanks Amazon.com. Your electronic marketplace allows me to virtually teach my daughter some old lessons. While there’s no denying the advantages of instant gratification, there is much merit in taking a longer, deliberate and measured approach to online shopping.
