Before Covid and lockdown and stay at home orders, I don’t think I’d really appreciated the value of retail therapy or accepted that it was anything other than an excuse to fritter away money. But then I discovered that searching for a new thousand-piece puzzle could while away most of an afternoon and the pinging notification that an Amazon parcel was out for delivery could happily deflect the monotony of sourdough proofing or interrupt the farce of homeschooling. Through those dark months Amazon’s delivery drivers truly were the fourth emergency service, bearing LEGO sets for distraction, mariachi costumes for Zoom pseudo-frivolity and strong liquor for oblivion.
Right then it was easy to put the concerns that many of us had been feeling about Amazon out of our minds. Stories of the poor working conditions in their warehouses, questions regarding their business practices and tax status and disquiet about Amazon’s role in the decline of the British high street had featured regularly in the media, most recently in November 2019’s Dispatches special entitled ‘The Secrets of Amazon’. But now all this was forgotten as we filled our baskets, eagerly anticipating the double dopamine hit of a brief moment of contact with a stranger along with the unboxing of some vital retail therapeutic.
Between March 2020 and April 2021 (when non-essential shops re-reopened) I placed 94 orders on Amazon, more than seven orders every month for thirteen months. Nearly 200 individual items were delivered in that time, and I spent £2275.89, almost doubling my 2019 spending. This pretty much mirrored national spending, with Amazon’s net sales leaping from $17.5 billion in 2019 to $32 billion two years later.
Of course Amazon was not unique in benefiting from the closure of physical shops - online sales as a percentage of total retail sales rose from 19.1% in February 2020 to a high of 37.8% in January 2021. But Amazon’s experience and infrastructure meant that they were best placed to fill the retail void and satisfy our demand for whatever it would take to get us through those claustrophobic, tedious, terrifying months. Amazon delivered where others were failing and the pandemic imbued our 194 deliveries with greater meaning than almost all of those that had arrived at our door in better times.
Over the next few months I'm going to publish posts about a few of the things that I bought during the pandemic, purchases that either had significance at the time or, five years on, prompt particular feelings or memories about our lockdown. The first of these vignettes, about my last pre-lockdown purchases, is already posted here.
