How are you celebrating Prime Days?

Me? I unhooked. It wasn't as easy as it should have been.

Settle in. This may be a longish mea culpa.

Come July 17, I will no longer be an Amazon Prime member. That’s when my membership expires and I will not renew and I let the company know that, and I let them know why.

No, I don’t expect a cookie for this. I was early to online shopping party, and I’ve been way too late to leave.

In fact, I’ve been an Amazon customer since the website was an online book vender, back and nothing more back when we were calling online shopping “e-commerce,” and then “ecommerce” because the dash took too long to type, I guess.

I can sit in any room of my house and tell you precisely which thing came from Amazon. When I bought my house in 2018, three of the rooms were essentially empty (I forgot to look up the meaning of “downsizing,” which was what this house was supposed to be). So that bed, and the rug beneath it, that poster frame, and those towels? Were all brought to me by a blue panel truck within a day or two of my ordering them.

I was always a dedicated customer, but things got weird during the pandemic. You could go to a store and shop, but simply hitting a few keys was easier and the delivery gave me something to look forward to. For a while , I knew the first name of the driver (Dennis) and would greet him and even offer to help as he toted boxes to my stoop.

My husband once joked that if the Amazon truck passed our house, the driver was lost because they never just drove by. They always stopped. Monthly deliveries through the company’s Subscribe & Save program made sure I never ran out of toilet paper, or that liquid hand soap I like, or that toothpaste that supposedly whitens my sensitive teeth. I only know I didn’t have to get in the car or interact with any one (save Dennis) to get My Stuff. I lulled myself into thinking that whatever was going on with the virus, at least I’ll always have My Stuff. Years ago, my sister said that though she and her husband had a lot of debt, they also had a lot of stuff, so…

Whee! American consumerism at its finest.

I flattened the boxes and dutifully put them in the recycle bin, though one year I used them to put in a part of the yard where I was building a sitting area and needed to kill the growth there.

Then one day I ordered a lemon zester (see above) because some recipes I was trying called for zested lemons, and the thing came in a box that would have easily fit a couch cushion. I mean, the zester came with a little brush for cleaning, but still. That was a lot of box. I could not keep pretending that this was OK, that Amazon was good for the environment. It isn’t. It really, really isn’t.

Then, too — it must be said — I am not a fan of rich guys going into space, unless it’s a one-way trip because we have more than enough rich guys already, thanks. That I was helping the company founder take fabulous space trips (and throw obscenely expensive weddings) started to feel gross.

I started losing serious interest when I began reading about the company’s union-busting. Yes, I am a knee-jerk liberal feminist, but I can be a clear-eyed capitalist, too. When companies refuse to pay a living wage to their employees, the rest of us pick up the tab. That equation doesn’t make sense.

Then I saw a documentary about the working conditions in some Amazon facilities during the worst of the pandemic, and it became harder and harder to justify my allegiance to convenience.

After Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post, and the paper declined to endorse Kamala Harris for president in the ‘24 election, and the next year, Bezos said the storied newspaper’s editorial pages would defend free markets and “personal liberties,” that made my unhooking from both Amazon and the Post that much easier.

So now I am finding smaller manufacturers and new brands, or simply doing without. I know. As much as I spent on the Amazon website, Bezos will continue to spend money like water (that Venice wedding was an eye-opener, yes?). My little protest is almost cute but at least I feel better about myself. The world keeps turning but Bezos, who remains the company’s largest individual shareholder, will need to get along without me. Good luck to him. Not really. I hope he chokes on it.