It’s not news, but somewhere along the way, the Thanksgiving-to-Christmas season has changed from reflective family time to a vast commercial engine, replete with Black Fridays and Cyber Mondays settling the financial fates of national retailers and sending the stock market aswoon.
Fair enough; in a country bent by Puritan will to the conflation of materialism and God’s grace, perhaps we’ve simply gotten what we’ve asked for. Cheerily or not, most of us shop more than we wish, feast beyond what we can process, and risk life and limb to travel in the face of daunting crowds and unreliable weather. The goal may be delight, but the tactics too frequently depend on excess.
Shopping and food gathering were once social and community activities. We took to the streets along with our neighbors, we visited local shops, we ordered pies if we couldn’t conjure them up ourselves, and we were entertained by the social nature of holiday preparations.
A bit of this holiday attitude has persisted on the Vineyard, likely owing to our physical isolation mixed with a certain self-conscious Island affectation. But we’ve put our money where our mouths were; as we clearly proclaimed almost 40 years ago during the Golden Arches Resistance of 1978, we haven’t chosen to live here in order to easily surrender to market forces.
Market forces, though, are hard-wired into our capitalist system, and they are relentless. Fueled by technology, markets have always molded American retailing and shopping, from railroad freight-enabled Sears catalogues to automobile-fueled suburban malls too often delivering a capitalist coup de grâce to the local commerce at the heart of our village life.
Dramatically, a new wave of market change driven by Internet technology and opportunistic entrepreneurship has once again intruded and changed the way retailing and trade work on the Vineyard and elsewhere. And it has brought unintended consequences we aren’t likely to welcome, and costs we may not be able to offset, along with it.
The most ubiquitous example of real life overtaking our fantasies of Martha’s-Vineyard-as-1940s-small-town-icon is Amazon. Amazon uses the abilities of the web, and its billions of dollars of revenue and investment capital, to aggregate massive numbers of shoppers at a global scale, and then uses its scale to drive down costs among vendors while investing in customer service (and in many states, immunity from paying sales tax) to add to its market share and power. The Amazon model, promising limitless selection, very low prices, and almost instant delivery, can work for books, of course, but also for appliances, for lawnmowers, for shoes, for jewelry, for fine art — in fact for just about anything fitting its supply-chain metrics.
The most dramatic and obvious victim of Amazon’s brand of disruption, though, is its original target, the book industry. As Amazon has gained more than half the market for all U.S. book sales, most writers and publishing houses have been thrown into turmoil as a result of becoming diminished if not impotent cogs in the Amazon supply chain; watchful readers have seen titles come and go based on Amazon’s business interests; and the financial viability of independent bookstores (including Bunch of Grapes and Edgartown Books) has been sorely challenged by Amazon’s retail power.
And it isn’t just book sales in play; virtually all consumer goods are one click and 24 hours away (less when the drones find us), and Amazon is on a mission to become the gatekeeper and primary beneficiary of every transaction — every last one. Clothing, housewares, appliances, jewelry, groceries, fine art — Amazon has taught us to click it first to research products (fully 44 percent of all online product research begins at amazon.com), select an Amazon Market–approved vendor, and use its one-click feature to close the transaction (Amazon has about 244 million active accounts, and credit cards, on file).
If Amazon is inevitable, it’s not because it offers the face of friends and neighbors while we do our holiday shopping, or because it’s good in any way for our community (or anyone else’s, except perhaps near its Seattle headquarters). It isn’t even necessarily the least costly merchant choice.
Amazon has gained its dominant position because it is relentless at finding businesses with little global market leverage and offering goods cheaper, faster and/or more easily, so it can add still more customers and increase its ultimate market power.
Amazon would like us to see it as simply a neutral marketplace facilitator, but its success at seductively packaging transactions and removing them from the community life we’ve always valued and tried to preserve, going back at least to the McDonald’s wars, enriches no one but Amazon investors, while bricks and mortar retail inevitably declines, our Island Main Streets revert even more quickly to seasonal sales of visitor ephemera, local entrepreneurs and staffs diminish, local craftspeople and artisans lose their market outlets — and we get to spend more time in front of PCs and mobile screens.
Here are some ideas for the remaining weeks of the 2015 holiday season: First, let’s try to organize holiday shopping lists around the unique and local goods that can’t be reduced to commodities on shopping websites; second, let’s do our research at amazon.com, and then let’s go to the trouble of heading downtown to see what we can find in local stores (remembering that travel costs, gas, and delivery all add to the social costs of doing business with Amazon). And merchants and craftsmen: Hold up your end, by offering the things we want, by pricing as aggressively as possible, and by investing in shopping and buying alternatives on your websites so that the nondigital leap is easy to take. Shopping (and selling) locally isn’t a scheme to help a few local merchants — it’s a concrete way to help keep the Island life we’ve all chosen healthy and viable.
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