Imagining a Christmas Without Amazon

Why this is my year to break free from Amazon Prime

Jacqueline Dooley
Marker
Published in
7 min readNov 9, 2021

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Two years ago, I’d seriously contemplated quitting Amazon Prime. It was January 2020 and I was decompressing from yet another holiday season delivered, quite literally, by the e-commerce behemoth.

Amazon had filled my stockings, created abundance beneath my tree, and saved my bacon when I couldn’t think of anything to buy my in-laws. Everything had arrived on time, packed in suitably oblique boxes stamped with the familiar smiling logo.

But once the gifts were unwrapped and put away, I’d felt deflated. The gift-buying experience had become so blandly anonymous that a week after Christmas, I could barely remember what I’d bought.

I’d expended so little effort in getting the gifts, they’d become meaningless. Adding to this feeling of pointless excess was the fact that I was still getting emails from Amazon and other retailers to buy more! Buy now! Buy the thing you want in the after-Christmas sale because it’s just so damn easy!

I had an out-of-body retail experience. I saw my consumption for what it was — primed by Prime. I’d become a mindless shopping machine. I decided that things needed to change. I was going to (gulp) cancel my Amazon Prime account.

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Published in Marker

Marker was a publication from Medium about the intersection of business, economics, and culture. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Jacqueline Dooley
Jacqueline Dooley

Written by Jacqueline Dooley

Essayist, content writer, bereaved parent. Bylines: Human Parts, GEN, Marker, OneZero, Washington Post, Al Jazeera, Pulse, HuffPost, Longreads, Modern Loss

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