You don’t have to boycott Amazon this year if you don’t want to

Amazon is terrible but you’re not terrible for shopping there

My approach to moral decision making has typically been what the philosopher Immanuel Kant called the categorical imperative — or, more intuitively: asking What if everyone did that?

It’s a great way to curb all the little things you do that don’t seem like a big deal: What’s the big deal if I ignore stop signs, litter, eat meat, drive a Hummer, isolate from my neighbors or avoid taxes? Maybe my actions don’t make a dent. But what if everyone did that?¹

Kant said, “Act as if the maxims of your action were to become through your will a universal law of nature.”

The same goes for positive actions. It never feels like your single action can have an impact. But what if everyone did that? What if everyone gave a single dollar to a charity, what if everyone picked up a single piece of trash at the park, what if everyone took a meal to a sick neighbor once a year?

This moral compass (along with a dash of moral OCD) is incompatible with capitalism, which creates an environment where a universally moral choice almost never exists. If it does, it’s inaccessible for most of us and unreasonable to expect of anyone.

But the anxiety about doing the right thing never goes away.

This morality sits heavy in my chest this month, as seemingly every writer, podcaster and influencer in my sphere vows to boycott Amazon.

There’s no doubt for any reasonable American that Amazon’s business practices are bad for society, and its founder’s recent capitulation to our incoming fascist president has pushed many over the edge. The categorical imperative certainly doesn’t condone shopping through Amazon with all that we know in 2025.

But I haven’t canceled my Prime membership. I know many of you won’t, either, and I’m writing today to tell you that’s OK — Kant be damned.

Lots of reasons to boycott Amazon right now

I’m absolutely not arguing that Amazon isn’t actively harmful or that actually it’s a pretty OK company to work for or even that we’re 100% free of culpability for how we shop.

Amazon specifically and the online-shopping culture its bred more broadly certainly are harmful across almost any arena you might care about. Corinne Fay and Virginia Sole-Smith had a great discussion about their reasons for doing a No-Amazon January in this subscriber episode of Burnt Toast and brought up these points:

• The waste generated in shipping materials and low-value, short-lived junk we buy and don’t hold onto.

• Workplace atrocities, including union busting and unfair pay in the U.S. and completely abhorrent worker/human rights violations overseas.

• Separating immigrant families.

• Tax avoidance.

• Founder Jeff Bezos’s support of Donald Trump.

• The site’s impact on authors and the book publishing industry.

There’s also the fact that online shopping through multi-national corporations for products made cheaply all over the world decimates small towns like mine by sucking dollars out of our communities. And our ability to get anything we want with almost no wait encourages our worst habits — overconsumption, wastefulness, instant gratification, to name a few.

There’s the reality that Amazon profits have made a billionaire of a man who thinks the best use of his funds is a creepy space race with the only other billionaire on the planet anyone hates more than him right now.

None of this is good for our planet, our society or our individual mental health.

So much needs to change about the way Amazon does business and the way we hold it and others like it accountable for their impact.

But I never believe the responsibility for this change should fall on individual consumers.

It’s not a consumption problem

I don’t believe any of us shops on Amazon because we’re careless, rabid consumers. We shop on Amazon because it’s the option we’ve been given.

We’ve been convinced low prices are important, agitated into false urgency, overwhelmed by life under capitalism, and abandoned in food and resource deserts, until clicking that yellow “buy now” button is the simplest and most reasonable way to just get through another day.

Host Katie Gatti Tassin and executive producer Henah Velez had a fantastic Amazon-versus-small-business debate on Money with Katie a couple of years ago that I highly recommend revisiting. While Henah absolutely has the moral high ground with an anti-Amazon stance, Katie’s position stood out to me:

“It shouldn't, in my opinion, be on the end consumer” said Katie. “Amazon in the first place should not be allowed to treat people [the way it does], and we shouldn't be tempted with that cheap option that exploits people in order to exist.”

I shop online because it gives me access to goods that aren’t available in my rural area without a 60-minute drive. I shop on Amazon because it’s the easiest way to search for those goods, because I pay for Prime so think I should use it, and because most of what I order shows up within a couple of days.

Sometimes I use Amazon when I’d rather use another retailer because I haven’t planned ahead, and I need a gift for a kid before the weekend.

Sometimes I shop on Amazon because I came of age in the digital era, and I don’t know where to even begin looking for the specific thing I need for my house or car or piece of furniture or device.

Sometimes I shop on Amazon because it’s hard to be in the world, with all of its noises and smells and dangerous drivers and people making small talk and carts bumping into you and shoppers standing in front of the thing you want and someone’s sticky fingers leaving smudges on the one you grab and why is the world so sticky??

Sometimes I shop on Amazon, because it’s going to make like $100 billion this year from Amazon Web Services I can’t reasonably boycott, so why should my life be harder if Jeff Bezos is going to be a billionaire either way?

Sometimes I shop on Amazon because I want to support a self-published author, and its 10 times easier to self-publish through Amazon than anywhere else.

You might not want to leave the house every time you need toilet paper or shampoo because you’d have to load young kids into the car and then stop them from acquiring Squishmallows and gummy bears like sticky bandits while you wait to check out at a Walgreen’s.

You might have ADHD or other executive functioning challenge that makes it hard to shop more than 48 hours in advance or that makes you vulnerable to the constant barrage of impulse-shopping displays in physical stores.

Whatever it is for you, there are about as many reasons it feels impossible to stop shopping on Amazon as there are reasons it feels like an absolute moral failure to keep doing it.

These are the conditions you’ve been handed. It’s not a moral failing to want peace and comfort under these conditions.

Keep the optimism, drop the burden

No one I know is suggesting that you’re wrong if you don’t give up Amazon in 2025. They’re not acting morally superior or ignoring the many forces that keep so many of us shopping there. They’re simply making a choice that feels right for them in this moment — and talking about it publicly, probably because it’s such a complex and difficult choice that merits some discourse.

But seeing people take an action that feels like it should be a moral “universal law of nature” can bring up a lot of anxiety for those of us not taking that action.

It makes me feel like I’m not a good enough person. Like I’m not strong enough. Like I’m not living perfectly in line with my values.

This is a reminder — for you and for myself — that perfection isn’t possible and should never be the goal.

If giving up Amazon this year feels right for you, go for it. We should all hold onto the optimism that where we put our dollars can make a difference. Nihilism isn’t a great place to live.

But no one has to assume personal responsibility for making a change that requires global, systemic action. If giving up Amazon doesn’t feel right for you, don’t. Let me be a voice in your feed that’s not taking up this piecemeal boycott, so you know you’re not the only one.

Your turn

What’s your relationship to Amazon shopping? Have you seen folks talking about boycotting? How have you been feeling about it?

We don’t judge other people’s consumption here, so please be nice in the comments — stick to your feelings and experiences, and let others have theirs!

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1. For the philosophy nerds (or maybe just The Good Place fanatics), you know this simplification strays a bit because it gets you thinking about consequences, which aren’t supposed to be a factor. But this is where we get to take a 300-year-old idea and make it our own in the 21st century!