CORONA-CATION DAY 17: Amazon has us right where they want us, with our credit cards out.

Amazon has America by the balls, at least those of us that still have some. 

They are continuing to ship us anything we need while were are under house seclusion.  If they strike, we will give them anything they ask for to keep up the flow of puzzles, games, food, movies --- basically everything moving freely!!  When I walk down the road with my dog, there are Amazon boxes littering the roadsides beneath the mailboxes.  The US Postal Service, FedEx, UPS all deliver Amazon purchased good, because they are smart enough to know a juggernaut when they see one. We need Amazon, more than we ever have, and they know it.

When I was growing up in Dardanelle Arkansas, population 3, 261, Sonny Warren owned Warren’s Grocery, a hole in the wall grocery store in downtown Dardanelle.  I would walk down to the grocery with my Aunt Mary to get an assortment of stuff, including bologna.  I was often barefooted, stubbing toes along the way on sidewalks that had been down so long that they had been undergrow by roots, elevating them to toe-stubbing level. Warren’s grocery was like the Amazon of Dardanelle.  Mr. Warren and his “staff”of two would deliver to your front door if needed. He had about three rows of groceries and goods, but I most remember the meat counter.  Sonny had these HUGE cannons of bologna and he would slice off a piece “thickas yur thumb” and wrap it up in white butcher paper.   There were no plastic bags, and my Aunt Mary carried her groceries home in a cloth sack or a simple brown grocery bag (these were recycled by my Aunt Robbie as book bags J).  I guess my point is, if Mr. Warren were still alive and still serving up slices of bologna in this time of Pandemic, he would be delivering, and he would still have his doors open because people needed him. He had a sense of responsibility.  He put everyone’s purchases “On Account” which people settled up at the end of the month, or didn’t depending on your situation. 

Things are different now.  Amazon is not Sonny Warren.  They do not deliver out of “a sense of responsibility”.  They deliver because people will pay them, and they in turn will employ desperate people to package and deliver critical things….like puzzles, games, food and movies. I don’t think that this is wrong, just different.  Let’s hope that we never run out of money, and Amazon never runs out of desperate employees.

 Mountain Pig....out