Nona Willis Aronowitz

    Sharing an Amazon Prime account with loved ones is surprisingly intimate. You're privy to one another's impulse buys, fondness for corny '90s comedies and preferred brands of vaginal suppositories. Like many families, mine shares a login for the ubiquitous delivery behemoth. Every time my dad or my sister orders an item, I see a cheerful red badge pop up on my app: "Your Amazon.com shipment is on its way!" Lately, those red badges have started coming several times a week. In 2018 alone, my family has spent nearly $7,000 on Amazon. It's not that we have extra time and money to shop; we have precisely the opposite. A few years ago, my 85-year-old father had a stroke that forever altered his daily life. Even though he has a generous, old-economy pension, he now barely breaks even each month, thanks to six figures of annual medical expenses, including 24-hour care at home. Often, when my dad needs something, he needs it now. He can't shop on his own, and his caretaker can't spend her life going to specialty pharmacies and medical supply stores. So Amazon Prime has been his lifeline. My dad, a former professor with an impressive library, used to buy only books on the site. Now nearly everything he needs comes from Amazon: physical therapy balls, elevated toilet seats, a better wheelchair than Medicare can cover, cheap tubs of protein powder, even staples like kitty litter and T-shirts.

     In a simpler world, Amazon Prime might be an uncomplicated bright spot amid America's vastly inadequate health care and elder care system. But in the past few years, the constant stream of negative reports about the company — poor working conditions in its warehouses, its ruthless white-collar work culture, what my dad called the "corporate bribery" resulting in two new headquarters — makes it feel like a deal with the devil. Before my dad joined academia, he was a factory worker and a union organizer for nearly two decades; he sang "Solidarity Forever" to me as a lullaby. Each one-click purchase feels like a teensy betrayal of my dad's past, a cruel reminder that he's now reliant on a monopolistic corporation with an atrocious labor record. (That record isn't resolved by its recent $15-an-hour minimum wage announcement). 

    My sister Kim faces this irony, too. Last year, just before her 60th birthday, she found out she had breast cancer. The chemo wreaked havoc on her immune system, and she took a seven-month leave from work. Afraid of making her health worse during a historic flu season, she barely left the house and started ordering the most prosaic prod- ucts on Amazon Prime in bulk: tissues, a fleece jacket, a lemon squeezer, dinner forks, deodorant. As her cancer treatment ramped up, the red badges signaled other items: wig caps, pill organizer, the Book of Common Prayer, a St. Peregrine patron saint of cancer medal. When her chemo resulted in a raging case of hemorrhoids, she was grateful not to have to ask our brother, who was caring for her, to fetch her sitz bath salts and witch hazel pads. After her reduced disability pay began to catch up with her, she used Amazon for the discounts. She once ordered 27 rolls of toilet paper for just $16.97. My sister spends her days as a social worker in hospice, giving her a front-row seat to the travesty of end-of-life care in the United States. A bleeding heart liberal, she'd been known for fierce Facebook posts on things like President Trump and gay marriage. When she was going through treatment, her heart was bled dry. "When I was in survival mode, I couldn't think of anything else but feeling better," Kim told me. "I really wasn't thinking globally." I wondered how many other people were also in this kind of survival mode: perhaps the one in seven American adults with a disability affecting their mobility, or the 60 percent who have a chronic condition, or the three-quarters of workers who live paycheck to paycheck, or the more than 90,000 who work in Amazon's "fulfillment centers" in the United States because they have no better options. If I wanted to quit the service forever because it offends my values, I could probably do that without upending my life. 

    But even for someone like me, who isn't sick or disabled or poor or living in a rural area, Amazon Prime helps alleviate the pressures of a sped-up economy. I don't use it just because I'm lazy and love to stream "Transparent." I use it (and other timesaving apps like Seamless and Uber) because I'm overworked and one-click ordering spares me time. I also live in a city where the cost of living is skyrocketing, so I might as well save money where I can. You have to be an able-bodied person with remarkable affluence and free time to not buy any of your food from drive-through windows, to forgo Walgreens for an independent pharmacy, to avoid all-encompassing superstores that slash prices. Nearly two-thirds of Americans have bought something on Amazon, and 95 percent have shopped at Walmart.

     "We should nationalize Amazon," my dad says whenever I bemoan all this. His suggestion is a perennial leftist refrain; Sarah Jaffe paraphrased Kanye West nicely in The Outline, when she wrote, "No one company should have all that power." But you don't have to be a socialist to feel for the workers hurt by big companies. A recent Gallup poll showed that 62 percent of Americans approve of unions, and Pew found that 58 percent say there should be limits on the number of jobs that can be replaced with machines (a practice common in Amazon's warehouses and, increasingly, for its desk jobs). Some of those people overlap with the patrons of huge corporations. Yet, as Kim observed, it's hard to care about the big picture when you're simply putting one foot in front of the other. Because of seemingly remote forces — an inaccessible elder care system, insufficient health coverage, stagnant wages, long work hours — those of us who see corporate monopolies as detrimental to this country nevertheless rely on them for anything from dish soap to our paychecks. The Libertarian presidential candidate Harry Browne famously warned that the government will break your legs, then hand you crutches. Mr. Browne, an ardent fan of the free market, could have been describing the economy of cheap convenience. Amazon is the clearest example of a corporation exploiting the precariousness created by capitalism — precisely by soothing some of its pain. 

From New York Times