Moving to a new home is an exhausting and exhilarating process. On the one hand, you may almost throw out your back having to haul heavy boxes up three flights of stairs because your new apartment was built in the 70s, feels like a dungeon, and has no elevator. On the other, you get to embark on the process of making a space feel comfortable to you. You control everything from how the spices are set up in the kitchen to placing your desk in the appropriate place to the decor on the walls. In that sense, setting up a new home is one of the most quintessential expressions of identity: how you live says a lot about who you are and what matters to you.

One of the less than fun things about moving, however, is realizing how much stuff your roommate in your previous home owned that you use every day. For example: bath rugs? Who thinks about who owned the bath rugs when you’re arbitrarily stuffing dishware into trash bags for storage? My “list of missing items” was not particularly long, but it was filled with things that I felt would make the place feel more like a Deepak home: the right bath rugs, a dish rack, a shoe rack, a microwave, cable management for the floor. So I did what every millennial does when they need an eclectic collection of things: I turned to Amazon.

Amazon is like magic. You give them your address and pay them $120 a year and then all of a sudden stuff starts showing up two days (24 hours, if you’re in a city!) after you click the order button. Its convenience is unparalleled, and serves as one of the wildest demonstrations of supply chain excellence that the world has ever seen. However, as we’ve learned over the course of the last decade, Amazon would not be the company we know today without them exploiting the capitalistic American society that I have come to abhor. I am not mum about the fact that I, along with many progressive minded folk, think billionaires (or more loosely, very very very very rich people) should not exist in American society. Yet Amazon is the brainchild (and money maker) of our favorite billionaire punching bag, Jeff Bezos. I was incensed when I learned that Amazon fired a whistleblower who voiced concern about the health and safety of warehouse workers when covid-19 erupted around the country. I was momentarily joyous when Amazon raised the minimum wage of warehouse workers to $15/hour, but some adept reporting showed us the company’s true colors: Amazon likely did this to make sure they had enough employees for the 2018 holiday haul, and also removed stock options and bonus pay for warehouse workers, leading some workers to correctly identify that they will actually make less money per year than before the minimum wage increase. All incredibly disappointing behavior.

If my home is a marker of my identity, then what does it mean if my new home is flush with products propped up by a corporation whose policies and behaviors I do not stand for? Maybe it means I’m a bit of a progressive hypocrite, preaching the religion of progressivism in one breath but undercutting it in action in the next. When a friend called me out on this, I immediately got defensive. “The world is gray”, I would argue, “Amazon does both good and bad things.” I said these words in the moment to justify my purchases, but also to quell my welling shame that my actions were not in accordance with my beliefs. Perhaps sensing this, they dropped the argument altogether. But their words stuck with me. I did my homework, I read the articles, and I have drawn the following conclusion: I was wrong about Amazon.

Where does that leave me now? No, I will not be burning all of the things I purchased from Amazon in the alley behind my apartment. After all, that would emit too much CO2, and besides, I kind of like my new microwave. I also do not plan to divest from Amazon altogether, because Amazon does, in some cases, actually provide benefits that are irreplaceable: where else will I watch “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” in a way that supports the artists that poured their hearts and souls into the work? What this means for me moving forward is being more conscious about what I purchase from Amazon and what I might get from local establishments. If I want a new video game? Maybe I can get it from the local video game store instead. Local grocery stores are cheaper and similarly nutritious to food bought at Whole Foods. If I am going to engage in our modern day capitalistic society (which I am, because let’s face it, I like buying things), being a more conscious member of my community seems like a good way to do so. That’s the identity I want for myself.