Pam Peirce

Amazon's business plan is to offer whatever consumer goods people want online, from one web site, and offer to deliver it fast. As a company, they are the ultimate in factory employment, using time and motion study to get as much as possible from their warehouse workers and delivery workers. They are hoping to maximize profit by using drones to deliver some goods.
 
I do not buy from Amazon, but I had an "associate" relationship with Amazon for a fewl months several years ago thinking, "if you can't beat 'em, maybe join 'em." I got a very small amount of income through people buying my book and a couple of other things from Amazon through my site. Then California threatened to charge sales tax to Amazon buyers in the state. That very afternoon, Amazon wrote me saying they were ending my associate status. I immediately wrote back that I was also ending it. Amazon threatened to pull all of its warehouses out of California. I don't know how it ended, but I still do not shop using Amazon, and I now have a bookshop.org link on my web site, through which visitors to my web site can buy books—mine and others and support independent bookstores. I am a bookshop.org associate, so I get a very small payment when someone buys books through the link. The buyer gets a bit of a discount.
 
I am pleased not to be associated with Amazon, though I do use their website as a reference, to learn the names of publishers, publication dates, and ISBN numbers of books. They tell you this important information, though you have to scroll down quite a bit to find these details near the bottom of a book's listing.
 
Apparently, many do buy stuff from Amazon.Are there two classes in America now? Those who work for places like Amazon and feel the "whip" of time demands they can barely meet and those who enjoy the convenience of buying from such businesses? Is it like the pandemic lock-down that divided the nation into those who could work from home and order whatever they wanted through online apps and those who had to keep going to work to provide the home deliveries? Is that the division that brought us Trump?I recently read a Facebook post wondering if Walgreen's would sell less with things locked up. Someone commented that they simply stood by the locked up item and ordered it from Amazon.

You probably haven't thought about what you want nearly as hard as advertisers have thought about it. They have studied the statistics to decide if you are in the demographic that might be interested in what they sell, classified the type of consumer you represent, figured out where you might look to see advertising, and chosen the type of ad that would especially appeal to you. In the video cartoon Futurama, written by Mat t Groening, ads appear in dreams. The character who has woken up after being frozen for a thousand years objects. Other characters ask him "Didn't ads follow you around in your days? This is just an extension of the same principle." And yes, we are followed around by ads.
I once met a man whose business was to sell wholesale goods for a company that made stuff for babies. "Then," I said to him, "Your fortune is dependent on the birthrate."  "Yes, it is," he replied. His company probably didn't have enough clout to encourage people to have babies, but it would sure be in his interest to do so. Just as it was in the interest of cigarette companies to deny a link between cigarettes and lung cancer, or in the interest of oil and gas companies to scoff at wind farms or water-saving toilets (ours is a one-flush wonder, by the way) or in the interest of weapons manufacturers that there be wars.
Ads are more strident when the goods for sale are less needs than wants. We will get what we need if we can afford it, but to get what we don't need—special features, something that meets an emotional desire, something that lets us imagine ourselves rich or on the leading edge of innovation—that takes encouragement. It takes skillful ads, maybe a low price. Still, it has to meet a want—or seem to.

This is to be a blog about human desire. I will have much to say about our basic preferences as humans. (Secondarily, I will sometimes write about what some people want and others do not.) The topic of human preferences quickly involves the role of money in our lives and also involves the earth's environment, as it seems that individual choices have created a world economy that is damaging to that environment. The name is a reference to Freud's famous question: What do women want? (Answer: We are people.)

This is an introductory post, sort of a placeholder. By the end of January I will have added more posts to this  blog--check back then.