All my friends are quitting Amazon

Haven’t you heard? Everyone's trying to quit Amazon. 

Or, perhaps, this is just how it feels to me. Because I’m not talking about the company’s workers, 73% of which are thinking about leaving their jobs. I’m talking about a fairly diverse cross-section of American shoppers — those living all around the country, in major metros like Houston, Nashville and Austin; in more walkable urban cities like New York and Chicago; and in small cities and towns like Tempe, Arizona and Hereford, Texas. These shoppers have all kinds of occupations: brand manager, engineer, retail consultant, video editor, stay-at-home parent. And they all have three things in common:

1. They’re trying to use Amazon less.

2. We follow one another on Instagram. 

3. When I posted the question, “Have you recently tried to quit using Amazon, or tried to use it less?” to my Instagram story on a recent Tuesday afternoon, they had thoughts.

For these friends — in a lot of cases, "warm acquaintances" is a better fit — the list of commonalities might end there. All in all, I heard from 27 people when, pooled together, represent a crude cross-section of elder Gen Zers and young-ish millennials from two starkly different phases of my life: my upbringing in the upper-middle class, conservative suburbs of Houston, and my young adulthood so far spent in progressive creative communities in Chicago and now New York, writing and performing comedy. Most respondents were white, ranging from their late 20s to early 40s and living in or near a major metropolitan area. I’d met them across all walks of life: former high school classmates, friends from college, former colleagues, mutual friends, family friends, people I’ve met at shows, work conferences and bachelorette parties.

Of the folks I heard from, I’d call maybe two or three politically conservative. The majority of the informal “respondents” from my social and professional life skewed largely liberal — a lot of centrist Democrats, a lot of progressives — with virtually all of the New Yorkers falling somewhere on the leftist-progressive spectrum (sorry if that’s news to any of their parents). This cross-section, homogenous in a few key demographics but starkly dissimilar in others, seems to underscore a shifting consumer reality that’s present in both red and blue states: Americans are trying to use Amazon less.

Last year, a report found that nearly half of Gen Zers say they’re trying to cut back, along with 40% of millennials. And in speaking with shoppers who are trying to quit, the reasons for using it less were myriad, rooted in both existential societal concerns and their day-to-day financial lives: cutting back on thoughtless purchases, supporting small businesses, spending less on non-essential goods overall, concerns over workers' rights and the environment and Americans' addiction to consumption, to name a few.

"It has so little value once you buy it"

It's easier to abstain from Amazon when you’re living in New York City, where jumbo discount stores on every other block remain stocked with thousands of miscellaneous household goods — extension cords, Command Strips, wrapping paper, candles, entire ceiling fans — available for about the price you’d pay on Amazon, if not a few bucks more. I heard from nine New Yorkers who either haven’t used the site in years, or use it sparingly. Katie Jackson, a 29-year-old graphic designer living near Brooklyn’s Prospect Park with her boyfriend, said it’s “way easier” not to use Amazon in the city; they haven't used it in four years. Same for two other Brooklyn residents: Leah Abrams, a 29-year-old writer in Williamsburg, has gone five years without Amazon, and Michael Kulikowski, a 34-year-old architect in Brooklyn in Carroll Gardens, hasn’t used it in several months.

On the other side of the Mason-Dixon line, Sydney Garrett, a 37-year-old marketing manager living in Houston with her husband and one-year-old, made a New Year’s resolution to use the service less frequently — and has so far held fast, save for the one time she needed to replenish her carpet shampooer. (Amazon’s offering of virtually every hard-to-find appliance part or piece of hardware was a commonly cited reason that opponents of the service feel they occasionally need to use it.) Around a three-hour drive away in Austin, Anastatia Hansen, a 33-year-old consultant living with her husband, has had a “no new things” resolution for two years, and “rarely if ever” uses Amazon, she said. Melissa Harris, a 33-year-old retail regional manager living in Nashville, has never been an Amazon Prime member. 

And in Hereford, Texas — a city of just under 15,000 around 50 miles outside of Amarillo — Courtney Formby’s adjusting to life without Amazon while she and her husband raise two young children under the age of four. It wasn’t exactly her call — her husband opted to cancel their shared account. “I was sooo mad at first but it really hasn’t been terrible! Yet,” she said in a message.” (The “yet” was followed by two smile-cry emojis.)

Reasons for quitting were varied. For many of the New Yorkers, eschewing Amazon came from a general avoidance of conglomerates and overconsumption, as well as a protest against the rightward political turn of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. But those sentiments weren’t limited to New Yorkers. “Bezos doesn’t need my money,” Hansen, the consultant in Austin, said. 

Hansen started her "buy nothing" resolution in response to the fact that "there are so many things on the planet." She’s lived in Houston, Notre Dame, Indiana; Oakland, California; and spent three months in Paris. In her experience, most of the stuff purchased on Amazon is “going to inevitably end up in a landfill.”

“Anyone who has ever moved has encountered this,” she said. “No one wants your cheap junk, and it has so little value once you buy it.” 

She’s trying to convince her husband to cancel his Amazon Prime membership, but he’s watching the new season of "Reacher," a Prime series. “We’ll hopefully cancel once he finishes the season,” Hansen said.

For Harris, the retail specialist in Nashville, her rationale was two-fold. She’s never had an Amazon Prime membership, nor does she have any delivery apps on her phone. “I know that I'm an overspender, so I try to put intentional barriers in my way to prevent impulse purchases,” she said.

Plus, for more than a decade, she’s worked in the brick-and-mortar retail industry, at companies like Lululemon and her current job at Fleet Feet. “I have a really deep, intimate understanding of how sales inside of a retail store can directly impact the people working at the store level,” she said. “If and when it's possible, it matters a lot to me to actually go into a store and buy something.”

A shift in how consumers see Amazon

Talk of quitting Amazon is nothing new. But for most Americans who have swallowed the Prime pill, that's where it typically ends. Nearly 98% of Amazon Prime members who have used it for at least two years keep renewing, The New York Times reported in 2022, making the service “one of the most resilient consumer products in the United States.” 

That sort of disconnect doesn’t happen accidentally. In a time where more Americans are feeling more financially strapped and time-constrained than ever — and more disinclined to leave their homes, thanks to some pandemic-induced homebodiedness — Amazon is uniquely engineered to meet the moment. As The Times wrote in 2022: ”The real magic of Amazon, and particularly Prime, is that they remove the thinking from shopping.” 

Also, millions of U.S. consumers still find themselves reliant on Amazon because of the country’s systemic shortcomings, whether because they’re among the 17% of Americans who live more than 10 miles from a grocery store, or because they’re a working caregiver without the free time needed to run daily errands, or for other reasons.

But most consumers outside of those classes who feel any number of negative emotions around using Amazon — ethical queasiness, financial dread, a general nagging feeling that they simply can’t cut the cord — have adopted a sort of stuttery cognitive dissonance that Vice aptly summed up with the 2021 headline: “How to Stop Shopping at Amazon When You Know It’s Bad but Do It Anyway.” In this way, Amazon has succeeded as a sort of consumerist tobacco, an engineered addiction — easily accessible, affordable in small bursts but costly over time, a known “bad” entity with existential repercussions. And just as tobacco riddles the lungs, Amazon, one could argue in their preachiest moment, rots the soul. 

But now, something’s shifted. Maybe it’s our growing disinterest with consumption; two-thirds of American shoppers say they intend to spend less this year. People are generally trying to save money, too, amid all the impending recession talk and existing pricing woes. It could also be the new political identity that Amazon can’t help but carry, what with Bezos sitting feet away from President Donald Trump during his inauguration. (For some shoppers, it was a mix of all three: “The antidote to all of this is to just not accumulate in the first place,” Hansen said. “As consumers, we all ‘vote’ with our money.”)

These friends of mine, of course, aren’t the only ones quitting. On Reddit, there’s no shortage of users seeking the wisdom of the masses on how to effectively quit. “I don't want to keep giving [Bezos] my money,” one user wrote. Another with three young kids sought tips on how to cut back. “I think alot if it is habit/impulse,” she wrote. The subreddit r/Anticonsumption has become a popular breeding ground for discussions on quitting the site. Amazon is “the poster child for over consumption and hyper capitalism,” one user wrote, telling others that “Amazon is nothing without us.” 

“This is going to be really hard for me, but I have secretly hated the way Amazon treats their workers,” another user wrote, seeking advice on how to wean himself off. 

My ongoing attempt to quit

Like many, I didn't stop using Amazon when I first learned about its offenses. My husband and I didn’t use it much in Chicago, but when we moved to New York we found ourselves more reliant on it more than ever. Money felt tighter than ever — for a 500-square-foot apartment, we were paying $2,950 a month — and the nearby bodegas’ prices made takeout ribeye feel like a tasteful splurge (try justifying grabbing a can of Amy’s soup for $9.99, or a two-pack of paper towels for $16). 

But this year, we attempted to go cold turkey on Amazon’s retail offerings — though we still have a Prime account (like Hansen’s husband, my own digs "Reacher"). 2025 presented a new year, the oligarchs are being brazen about it and autocracy is nigh; after Bezos’ beady-eyed presence at the inauguration, the cognitive dissonance was no longer viable. Also, we’d just moved to a new apartment, which felt like a nice time for a clean slate. 

So far, it’s been about three months of no Amazon. I can now see in hindsight that a major life transition would be a tough thing to experience when paired with a major shift in consumption, especially when that life change involves suddenly needing measuring tape and an Allen wrench and wondering where all your coat hangers went. It has been, in short, extremely difficult not to place a bulk order for the dozens of little doo-dads and knick knacks we find ourselves needing in the new place, which is more than twice as large as our former place. To date, we’ve placed one order on Amazon: an irregularly oriented clothing-rod system that fits my old, warbled closet. 

And perhaps because we’ve largely tried to buy mostly used and secondhand, the sacrifice felt most acutely has been in the loss of our most precious resource: time.

The task of obtaining a headboard we'd bought on Facebook Marketplace, for example, involved the following: 

• Downloading the UHaul mobile app.
• Uploading my driver’s license.
• Waiting for a UHaul representative to call and authorize my account.
• Taking the train to the UHaul store.
• Picking up the van and completing a lengthy key retrieval and checkout process involving taking photos of the van from every possible angle.
• Driving to the Facebook Marketplace user’s apartment.
• Waiting for the 12 minutes it took them to see the message and let us into the building.
• Disassembling the headboard. 
• Heaving the headboard downstairs. 
• Loading the headboard into the van.
• Driving the van back to our apartment. 
• Illegally parking the van outside and unloading the headboard into our apartment. 
• Quickly letting our two dogs outside to pee.
• Getting back in the illegally parked van and driving back to the UHaul. 
• Completing a lengthy check-out process, involving taking more photos of the vehicle and documenting its gas tank levels.
• Taking the train home.

Alternatively, if we’d used Amazon, those steps would’ve involved: 

• Pulling up Amazon.
• Searching for a headboard.
• Purchasing the headboard and awaiting its delivery tomorrow from the sofa, margarita in-hand.

Amazon’s secret weapon is its convenience. And unfortunately, the serene pessimist constantly at war with the manic optimist in me is winning out on this one: I don’t think we’re close to the world of a four-day workweek, or to experiencing any meaningful shift in the way that late-stage capitalism gobbles up so much of our time. So, perhaps, in this moment, an antidote against Amazon’s grip can be shifting the way we view time. 

That time spent getting the headboard, for example, was frankly spent in a sort of grim fugue state, wordlessly drifting from place to place in exhausted resignation. But after we dropped off the van, John and I treated ourselves to some truly disgusting chicken sliders from a greasy fast- food spot. We went home, plopped on the couch and, zonked but inexplicably wired, watched the entirety of "Men in Black," which I’d never seen. We were so tired, but in a different kind of trance than the one Amazon keeps us in — one I remember far more distinctly than the one that leads to purchasing new workout pants.   

Any collective impact on Amazon’s bottom line is so far too small to show up meaningfully on any of the company's earnings reports — in fact, net sales were up 10% last quarter. But this slow-bubbling shift appears to be showing up in other ways. In a TikTok posted earlier this month, an Amazon delivery driver posted about how dramatically her daily delivery routes have shortened in recent weeks. Normally, she’s scheduled for between 160 and 180 deliveries per day, she said, but that figure has dropped “consistently” to as low as 99 stops per day. 

“If you work at Amazon, you know this is not normal,” she said. “I’m not telling y’all what to do — but I’m going to have a short day today.”

"Abstaining is the only ethical choice"

Jeffrey Self, a 32-year-old assistant chemical engineering professor in Tempe, Arizona, might be in the minority of folks around my age who have tried to stop using Amazon. Self told me he successfully quit using Amazon a decade ago "and is never looking back," save for the occasional work purchase he's forced to make.

His motivation, he said, was “to buy less junk and save money.” 

“It was actually pretty difficult to quit; what it boils down to is convenience,” Self said. Quitting forced Self to “refamiliarize” himself with his local business landscape — “re-learning where to buy pet food and cat toys and cord adaptors and everything else,” he said.

“Amazon makes everything too convenient. It lures you in,” he added. 

Self isn’t delusional about what the impact on Amazon’s bottom line might be. “At this point, it's hard to imagine Amazon is going anywhere,” he said. At the same time, he knows his money isn’t supporting a company that, in his appraisal, is “bad for business, bad for the environment and devastating for workers' rights.”

“The hidden truth is that it costs extra to quit Amazon,” Self said. “Convenience saves time and money, and people who are short on either are going to find it difficult to quit Amazon.”  

“But for anyone able to, abstaining is the only ethical choice,” he added. “Perhaps it's idealistic, but I think anyone that reflects on it would eventually reach the same conclusions. And from there, it is just about having the moral conviction to act.”