So I wanted a copy of the board game Carcassonne as it’s a game I’ve played with friends before and loved. For things like this I (like many others) would gravitate towards Amazon.
But after some research I found that my local board game cafe sells copies of the game cheaper than anywhere online. Yesterday I popped by, grabbed a copy and had a nice chat with the owner about the game and their favourite expansions. This was a significantly better experience than buying the game online from a soulless corporation, and my money has gone to an great local company rather than a billionaire. Why did we give up the joy of shopping locally and in-person for convenience?
Similarly I was looking out for a black denim jacket in my size. Instead of going to a big clothing retailer I checked out some charity shops, and I found exactly what I wanted for a fraction of the price with the money going towards charity.
Going forward I’m going to avoid Amazon and any big American companies wherever possible. Hopefully others will do the same :)
Oh yeah for sure - buying clothes online really isn’t fun. I dread to think how much energy and effort is wasted shipping these items back and forth when someone buys something online and then returns it. I think to some extent the modern internet has trained people to leave everything until the last minute and rely on fast shipping. Rather than plan to physically visit a store a few days in advance, things are done online the day beforehand using a vastly inferior system.
It’s worse than that — a lot of returned stuff ends up in landfill because it’s not worth the cost of re-stocking it.
You’re right, also i think it normalised the will to skip human interactions. Yeah i get sometime the retail workers can be a bit annoying but it’s normal and healthy to interact with other human beings and we shouldn’t convice ourselfed that we can lock us behind a screen to avoid it.