Amazon avoidance tax

How much will you spend to deny Jeff a sale?

Smaug, founder of Amazon. With thanks to Socialist Worker for the pic

I've just bought a metronome, the fine, old-fashioned tick-tocking kind. I know myriad metronome apps are available free; in this case I want the mechanical variety.

So I duckducked it (avoiding the g-thing — 1-0 to me) and before I'd even thought about it was on the verge of tapping that alluring yellow Buy Now button. But wait — why would I buy a musical instrument (sort of) from a web hosting company? This is the awful choice we are faced with almost whenever we buy something now, a quandary unimaginable a generation ago. Amazon often seems to be the only site selling quite ordinary things, such as hardware and electrics, and it is always the cheapest. But somehow buying from Bezos doesn't feel like capitalism any more.

Somehow Bezos with his years of expansion, not profit, has gamed the capitalist system. How he persuaded his investors to hold out so long for their returns is one of the odd aspects of the Big Tech age – some household names such as Spotify and Uber have still made zilch for their backers – but the result has been to make Amazon more of a socialist monopoly than an enterprise. It feels as though the good capitalist consumer should buy from a competitor, while there still is one. But how much will you spend to keep some facsimile of competition in the market for almost everything?

It's no secret that Uber's strategy is to undercut all geographically based taxi firms, with the help of its backers' bottomless pockets, until it has destroyed every vestige of competition. Then we'll find out the true meaning of surge pricing. Similarly, Amazon is now opening real bookshops and food shops, having wiped out the ones we used to have. To keep a free market we have to understand that the gargantuan, stateless tech companies reach a point at which they are no longer capitalist concerns but more akin to Rostheft — er, Rosneft.

Amazon, with a GDP on a par with Jamaica's passed that point long ago. The Amazon-free Christmas has been popular for some years. It costs, but in the end it may be worth it. I bought the metronome for £31, including postage, from a local music shop founded in 1898. But for lockdown it would have been lovely to visit in person. From Amazon it would have been £22, with postage "free" as part of my Prime subscription.

So my Amazon avoidance tax was £9 today, plus a few days' extra wait for delivery. Worth every penny and every second.