Amazon has been immensely valuable to families and vulnerable individuals over the past year. Many people feel or felt going into a store would endanger them. Many parents couldn’t run out to the store because they had to stay home with out-of-school children. So the benefits of this website that allows us to buy almost anything from our phone or laptop are not merely benefits of convenience for lazy people.
But the cultural costs of Amazon’s dominance are real and massive. The ease of buying things from home has been bad for brick-and-mortar stores. This has been bad for brick-and-mortar retailers and certainly led to many closures. Fewer stores to shop at means fewer downtown areas, fewer serendipitous encounters with neighbors, fewer people popping in unplanned to the coffee shop or bakery, and, all told, less community cohesion.
Less community cohesion means less social trust, which means all sorts of bad things, as I argued in Alienated America.
Since I wrote this book that dwells on the centrality of meeting places, I try to walk the walk. Today, I thought of some purchases I need to make — a toilet auger, some insulation, and an outdoor lightbulb. I thought, “Hmm, maybe I shouldn’t just give money to Jeff Bezos, and I should buy these things from a real store.”
But then I remembered that no store within walking distance of my house sells those things. The closest store that does is Home Depot. Home Depot is deliberately arrayed in an inhuman, massive way, and it serves a population of maybe 100,000 or 200,000 people, meaning the folks I am likely to run into there aren’t people I know or will see again. So the upside of buying the toilet auger in person is almost eliminated by the lack of walkability or human scale at the places where I could buy it in person.
That makes it much easier for me to decide — “Heck, why not save a trip and just order this stuff from the website owned by the world’s richest man?”
Maybe Amazon wouldn’t dominate so much if Home Depot and Montgomery County’s central planners hadn’t destroyed or neglected Main Streets in favor of massive stores with massive parking lots.
