You know, I think I’m done buying from Amazon in Sweden. The experience is always woeful given how bad the Swedish infrastructure for deliveries is. I’m tired, boss. Tired of having to get dressed around midnight to go down and open doors in another building for people who can’t work a simple apartment layout. Tired of getting phone calls to meet drivers in the freezing cold because they can’t work a car park. Tired of Airmee who, while good for a long time, now just return stuff if they don’t want to deliver it. Tired of having to go to a pickup centre because couriers – even when you paid extra for them to do so – just won’t deliver to your door. Tired of not getting packages because of sellers pretending to be Swedish and shipping from Abu Dhabi without paying import fees. Tired of it all.
The thing that makes it especially galling is there’s a package locker literally just outside my fucking door but THEY WILL NEVER LET ME USE IT AS A DELIVERY SPOT. And, on the few occasions I get to, I often get told ‘Yeah, it’s full, dumbass. Go pick it up from a depot you piece of shit. You fucking loser beta cuck.’
Amazon has always been my ethical blindspot, and it’s especially hard to give it up in Sweden given how the whole country is so homogenized in retail that it only serves the lowest common denominator shopper. There is no long tail of choice in Sweden. Amazon is the only place where you can really experience some consumer variety. If you need a specific cable? Amazon. If you need a particular set of screws? Amazon. Otherwise, shut the fuck up and conform to the consumer consensus. You’re not special. Jante, motherfucker, do you speak it [0]?
The triple-pillars of this little meltdown were
1) Three packages getting sent back without anyone doing anything as exotic as ringing the doorbell to say they were here,and
2) A company that told me books were ‘shipped’ months ago only to tell me, on being queried on this, that they had never been shipped at all and thus were to be cancelled, and
3) A second company who sold me a book that they did not have, and when I inquired about it (a book for our book club) they didn’t respond to my query and simply cancelled the order. So, companies are basically selling things *they don’t have* and treating my purchases as a kind of interest free loan until I complain.
Amazon has always been enshittified – it’s one of the pioneers of the concept. It has though now also become irredeemably sloppified. The listings are often AI-assisted dropshippers. Its once pretty good customer services have become resistant, customer-hostile chatbots. It’s just unpleasant to buy stuff from Amazon now. It feels… unwholesome. But also do I really need to buy that much any more? Of course I don’t, I prove that every few years when I do a no-buy for twelve months at a time.
Where does this decision hit me, though? Where is the cost of boycotting Amazon? How is the shit changing its flavour?
Partially, in the wallet. Even taking into account Amazon’s ‘Most Favoured Nation’ status in many countries, the Amazon tax just doesn’t apply in the same way in Sweden yet. In the USA, Amazon sets the floor of prices – when a vendor raises the price there to deal with, say, additional commission then they contractually have to raise it everywhere else. You can’t sell on Amazon while selling cheaper on any other platform. That’s not true in Sweden – Amazon Sweden is mostly just an outcropping of Amazon Germany. It just doesn’t have the sway to do anything much. So Amazon is almost always cheaper. That’s not a nothing issue in a world of escalating costs.
Mostly though the cost is in my consumer choice. I’ve been enjoying doing some tech refurbishing as part of Deshittify 2026 and that often means I need specific cables for specific systems, or a weird screwdriver, or a niche component. It’s so much harder to hunt them down elsewhere. eBay is a non-starter. They once stole ~£600 from me from a sale, and I won’t ever use them as a result. Fundamentally I don’t trust the second-hand online market. Local alternatives exist but aren’t well stocked. I guess more of the stuff I own will just end up being abandoned rather than repurposed. Score one for sustainability, Decoupling from Amazon means a small but measurable increase in global eWaste.
But again this hits unevenly. CDon and Webhallen are Swedish stores that have a reasonable online presence and sell some of the things I’d be buying. Books – well, I guess my days of buying physical books in abundance are over because they are not cheap or convenient in any Swedish retailer. Clothes – well, mostly I order from custom t-shirt shops anyway but I suspect given how I honestly don’t care about clothes there will be plenty of options. It’s really the miscellany that will sting – as I say, that long tail.
What is a non-starter though is buying at retail in general, because honestly – there’s nothing. It’s like that Simpsons clip where Roger Meyers is leading Bart and Lisa through the Itchy and Scratchy corridor, saying that they save money by reusing backgrounds. The joke being the background of that scene is the same door and cleaning lady repeated again and again. That’s Sweden. It’s a Clas Ohlson, an Ahlens, an H&M, a Hemkop, then a Clas Ohlson, an Ahlens, an H&M…
So I guess I’m on the de-Amazon train now as well as all the other deshittification threads. I won’t do it instantly – I need to audit what I do with Amazon – but from now on when I add to my basket I’ll be asking the question ‘Where could I get this otherwise?’. Some of the time the answer will be ‘nowhere’, but it might occasionally be ‘you can get this much shittier version you don’t want for much more money if you don’t mind waiting four weeks.’.
God, it doesn’t sound like a win when I put it like that. Let’s look at a quick audit of the last few months when I bought things:
– A precision electric screwdriver for electronics. Probably could have gotten something like it at Clas Ohlson or the like. Except every time I have ever gone to Clas Ohlson they have never had any of the obviously appropriate things I went in to buy.
– A SATA to USB cable, so I could flash a cheap SSD for use in an old laptop. I got it for 100kr. The best alternative I could find in Sweden was about 300kr and was out of stock.
– 4 books, average price of about 120kr each. The average price in Sweden is often twice that. I bought the book ‘Reader, Come Home’ in the English Bookshop when I was in Stockholm. It was 350kr. It is currently 190kr on Amazon.
– A charger for the old laptop I replaced the drive in. It didn’t get delivered in the end. 170kr but I have no idea where I’d even start looking for one locally.
– A super cheap SSD (120GB) for 305kr. The same one on Cdon is 600kr.
– A replacement remote control for an NEC projector. No idea how I’d even begin looking for it but it’d certainly cost me more than 60kr
– Four 128GB USB drives. Total of 745kr and I had need for specific form-factor. I don’t know if you can even get the specific ones I wanted but I do know that buying one generic 128GB drive from Cdon can cost 500kr.
This isn’t even counting innumerable adapters and cables of specialist utility. Can you even buy a Magsafe 2 to USB-C adapter in Sweden? I don’t know and don’t care to find out. This is what I mean by Amazon being something of a financial and logistical necessity if you don’t fit into the median profile of the median consumer.
But still – if deshittification is the goal then there will be a cost to it. Deshittification, as per the General Model of Shit, involves transmutation not destruction. Financial shit and logistical shit increase, but hopefully the *kind* of shit is more bearable.
But let’s put some guiderails around this for my future escape from the Amazon consumer mines.
1) Still gonna buy 99p books on the Kindle store. I know Kindle is a shittified platform – I don’t own the books, the physical kindle is a miserable reading experience, and the DRM involved means that it’s increasingly difficult to even move the books I ‘own’ outside the ecosystem. But also – it’s 99p, right? I own something like 900 kindle books, which – yeah, okay, even if they were all 99p is still a sizeable asset. But 99p for any individual book is nothing. And there’s always a chance that the DRM breaking will get better and easier.
2) I’m still going to be on Amazon Vine.
Aside from that – I intend to buy nothing unless it is a literal necessity that has no other feasible means of procurement.
That brings me back to books though.
I read a lot. The last few years I have averaged 115 books a year. And I much, much, much prefer reading physical books. As I say, I think reading on the Kindle is a miserable experience. And I just love books as physical artefacts. I don’t know if I should be ashamed of this but occasionally I take an old favourite book off the shelves and sniff its pages.
But also – I have a lot of physical books on my shelves and while I really enjoy curating them it’s not like I *need* more. I do *want* more, but that’s a different thing. Amazon currently lets me satisfy all my preferences around books – a great range, reasonable prices, delivered quickly, and they can’t ever take those books away from me. There is no way that I have found to replicate that experience in Sweden otherwise and like the ruthless demands of AI for human-drinkable clean water… I need a lot to meet my unreasonable demands.
So, the solution here is going to be:
1) Use the library, you dumbass. You piece of shit. You fucking loser beta cuck, etc. I mean, come on. Libraries are one of the few genuinely good and pure things left in the world, why am I not using them more anyway? Sure, it’s a chore in comparison to just having some courier service deliver books in bulk to my door, but they’re not doing that anyway. I’ve been thinking recently about the death of ‘third places’ and perhaps I should be spending time in libraries anyway just as a way to ensure I *do* have a healthy third place in my life [1]. I don’t currently.
2) If it’s not available in the library, then I can consider buying it. I will also buy books that are Proper Bangers so that they can stay in my collection. I like lending books to people. It satisfies some of the idealism of younger me [2].
3) Go limp on reading ebooks – there are a lot of great books on my kindle and the 99p daily deals put plenty my way too. I will look into options for less shittified devices (The Boox series intrigues me). And if I own a book on Kindle then I will feel myself to be morally inoculated should I reacquire it from other sources [5].
4) When I visit the UK, take advantage of the cheaper books and wider varieties.
As a side note – I jailbroke my Kindle and explored my options there. I don’t see them being much better – fundamentally a jailbroken Kindle is still a Kindle. If someone can explain to me what it actually *gets me* I might jailbreak it again. I did a factory reset after being disappointed.
Anyway. Fuck Amazon.
[0] A kind of behavioural pattern in Sweden that results in a low-grade disapproval of standing out. Essentially a cultural compulsion against being a special little snowflake.
[1] https://www.governing.com/urban/are-libraries-the-new-third-places-were-looking-for
[2] I imagined myself as a dark suited professor (lol) in an oak paneled, book lined office (lol), spending his days intellectually sparring with like-minded colleagues (lol). I’d leap up from my seat, pull a book from those shelves laden down with rich, leather books (lol) and triumphantly wield it to underpin an especially resonant point (lol). The reality of academia is, of course, nothing like this – it’s more like being a passive-aggressive middle manager on a ship that is merrily and intentionally steering itself onto the rocks – but still. One of my favourite things to do is match one of my students to the right book, and then hand it over with a flourish. One of my students told me recently that she basically has a whole shelf in her flat of books I have loaned her over the past year [3] [4].
[3] Sometimes I think I would have been a lot happier as a librarian rather than an academic. A lot more worried about money, for sure, but maybe happier with what I do with my time.
[4] One day people will realise that I am actually using their homes as safe storage for books that I don’t have room for myself.
[5] As usual, in this area the relationships between what is legal, what is ethical, and what is moral are more like a set of vaguely linking Venn diagrams than anything approaching a coherent philosophy of ownership.