The Cost of Convenience; why I deleted my Amazon Wishlist (and you should too)
If you ask most people how they feel about corporate corruption and workplace abuse, they’ll tell you they’re against it. As a society, we tend to believe that everyone is entitled to the same opportunities and rights; food, shelter, water, comfort – these are intrinsic to our survival and mental wellbeing. We know all deserve access to them, but we don’t always act like it.
By this point, you are likely aware of the multiple human rights violations Amazon (the largest internet company in the world) is responsible for.
Amazon, founded by Jeff Bezos in 1995, was initially created as an online bookstore. This may sound innocent enough, but the framework of the company was designed to eradicate small businesses or ‘mom & pop stores’, and (once the competition was eliminated) hike up prices.
Today, Amazon controls 75 percent of online sales of physical books.¹
Amazon now holds a monopoly on retail around the globe. Overall, Amazon generates 30% of all (online and offline) retail growth in the USA.
A whopping 84% of American consumers have made an Amazon purchase in the past year.²
CEO Jeff Bezos is known to exploit his workers under back-breaking conditions, simultaneously taunting their hardships with his luxurious lifestyle.
Bezos is the richest man on earth with a colossal net worth of over 200 billion USD. For Jeff Bezos, spending $88,000 USD is as blasé as spending $1 would be for you and I.³
Not to mention the massive volume of packaging materials and shipping waste created by online shopping (Amazon) has taken a permanent toll on our environment.
While Bezos plans commercial trips to outer space, his employees are surrounded by bubble wrap, forced to skip bathroom breaks or urinate in plastic bottles to avoid being penalized or losing their jobs. If Amazon employees suffer from work-related injuries, they will be unable to pay their medical bills due to meagre wages. If Amazon workers were able to unionize, it would force the company to alter policies such as break times or pay. Because of this, Supervisors for the company are trained to spread anti-union propaganda, and employees caught attempting to form a union are fired.
I am sure that most of us can agree this is not the type of company we want to support. So why do we?
I like to think that the majority of people in this world have good intentions, and that includes my fellow performers in the adult entertainment industry. I can only speak for my own experience, but I’ve found the majority of sex workers I’ve met to be open minded, generous, and empathetic people; they certainly wouldn’t want to support corruption and abuse.
Despite this, when you ask adult performers how you can send them a gift, the vast majority of them will link you to their Amazon Wishlist. This is because these Wishlists provide performers with a convenient, uncomplicated, and anonymous way to receive gifts from their fans (though there have been numerous reports of drop-off confirmations from Amazon delivery which have lead to address-sharing and safety concerns among sex workers)
With the quick and easy registration of an anonymous PO box, anything you can imagine is available at your fingertips – and your fans from around the world can send it to you at the click of a button.
Additionally, Amazon Wishlists have provided another less commonly spoken about function for performers: a way to underreport their earnings. Many performers whom I know personally receive an average of $20-$30k USD annually through Amazon gift cards and wishlist gifts. These gifts are not traceable through their bank account, and therefore are not reported as earnings on their taxes. Since Amazon now sells just about everything under the sun, performers can be sent anything they desire from their more-than-willing clients and fans. As one example, WholeFoods (once upon a time a mom & pop organic grocery store in Austin, Texas) is now Amazon’s largest subsidiary, and gift cards for this international MEGA grocery store can be purchased through the Amazon website.
If a sex worker is sent enough gift cards for WholeFoods every month, they will never have to purchase their groceries out of pocket. Not only that, but they won’t have to claim those earnings… you can see where I’m going with this.
We know that Amazon is an evil corporation built with the framework of exploiting workers for capital gain. We also know that Amazon is the easiest, most convenient option to receive goodies – and lots of them. We become in conflict with ourselves, and are faced with the difficult decision to either sacrifice the constant flow of gifts – or admit that we care more about our financial and material gain than we do about the exploitation of our fellow people – and the environment around us. Rather than doing either, we make excuses for our actions and convince ourselves that our behaviour isn’t all that bad. At the very least, we ignore the problem. After all, what can one person do?
In 1957, psychologist Leon Festinger published ‘A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance’, centring around his theory on this phenomenon. Festinger proposed what people experience discomfort when they hold conflicting beliefs, or when their actions contradict their beliefs.⁴
Experiencing cognitive dissonance may cause a person to feel anxious, guilty, and ashamed. As a result they will constantly rationalize their actions or choices, avoid conversations on the topic, and ignore information and research that opposes their existing beliefs.
I believe that cognitive dissonance has prevented many of us (both in and out of the industry) from making the right decision for our communities, for our local economies, and for our planet. The convenience and perks of Amazon (and other sites like it) have been tantalizing enough to dominate this part of our industry while cognitive dissonance has allowed us to pretend it’s not a problem.
I have come to the conclusion that it’s unnecessary, unethical, and inhumane to continue supporting Amazon and everything that it stands for. Though I know there are many who are not in a financially secure enough space to turn down the monetary gains associated with these gifts, I urge all of those who are to think seriously about their priorities. What is more important to us – convenience, or humanity?
For many years I’ve chosen convenience, and today I choose humanity.
goaskalex
GoAskAlex is an award-winning 18+ performer, feminist, and advocate for the representation of disabled bodies in pornography. She has spent the past six years as a webcam model and adult content creator. After becoming an ostomate in 2019, she focused her career on advocating for underrepresented bodies in adult media. She has since then been featured in XBIZ magazine (including a cover photo as their first ever model with an ostomy) and was featured in Hustler E-Magazine for her “Disabled Sex Workers” Calendar. Most recently, she won the 2020 XBIZ Awards for ‘Best Inked Model”.
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Regis Halfhide
I applaud and respect your choices as should all human beings on our planet. This is incredibly well written in my opinion and very intelligent. I really feel that people forget we are all humans before we are, whatever ethnicity we have created. Your human first, then your English, or African, or South American and so on. Humans first. We can’t live…as in breath air and joke around with our friends and family or, do anything in life, if we don’t have a planet to do it on. I wish people would really let that soak in. Thank you for your choices and for speaking up about this to help provoke a change amongst your peers. This needs global recognition, everyone should give this a read and wise up. It’s a shame that most likely won’t happen. Once again, humans can’t hate other humans, for the color of their “eyes” (wink wink) without a planet to do all that nastiness on. Whether or not we should be doing that is a whole different article or articles. Where are our brains? I don’t know if anyone else has or will but I’m sure it happens privately amongst your friends and fam maybe, maybe not, but here…thank you for your efforts and your help. Our world needs more humans like you.
I am not familiar with your work so, not that this is bad or anything, I try not to judge a book by it’s cover. That’s a code by which I choose to live my life by but, I say all that to say this, I’m not a crazy fan showing support for you. I was unaware of askalex. Until I read this article I had no idea who you are and or what you do professionally. For the record, it doesn’t matter to me, but that’s just me and how I choose to be. I’m sure you get judged unfairly quite a bit as do many in your profession. How unintelligent of us. Your article is excellent and I can’t express that enough. In my opinion, bare with me for a sec, your a very beautiful woman physically, but more importantly, your a beautiful and intelligent human being sharing your thoughts like you did, I’m blown away. You should take pride in your work with this article (with all your hard work really, on you as a person or anything but I digress) because the work you put in everyday is a reflection of that. Whatever you do is working and deserves respect so I’m just trying to give that respect to you by sharing my opinion and giving you some deserved compliments, in my opinion of course. I don’t know you, so it would be easy to disregard my compliments and thoughts, but those comments reflect what you allow someone to see because of what you have shared with the reader about the type of human your choosing to be. So no, I don’t really know you at all and yet you have made quite the impression and those kinds of thoughts should be shared by anyone who reads this, but that’s just my opinion once again, unfortunately.
I read this article on my newsfeed on my phone and was so impressed I wanted to write to you some support. It is insanely awesome. Have I said that yet? I truly have the utmost respect for it. I don’t have the platform or the ability to reach large swaths of people like you do but I’ve thought about starting a go fund me for a few years now or something, because I’ve wanted to issue a challenge to humanity. I’ve wanted to contribute to positive change beyond the choices I make. To challenge humans to donate a dollar to help the planet in some way was my idea. Just donating one dollar could be a contribution to positive change I thought lol. Just one dollar from every human that can. I mean, that could be some serious coin if every adult in, The U.S. for example did it. Your talking millions of people. That would equal millions of dollars at the very least. Wishful thinking maybe but that would be better than nothing I think. That would help change something positively. You would need to have a plan as to how those funds would be used but, that’s just something I’ve thought about from time to time while trying to survive and make better choices for myself and those I care about around me. Someone in your position can issue a challenge via social media and get people recording themselves on Instagram or tik tok doing the “donate a dollar for the planet challenge” or something like that. No different than the ice bucket challenge or, “whatever name it is goes here” challenge. Anyway, the point is we need more humans to give a shit because all the things humans like to do, no matter how it’s judged and thought about by others, nothing can be done without a planet to do it on. This is another, let that sink in moment. So since we can, we should do better for the planet. In as many ways as we can. So thank you for choosing humanity. Every human should give thanks to other humans making choices like this because, however small, it still helps positively change things. I hope you continue to live well and continue to take care of yourself and those you care for in the healthy ways you have. I think you are making strong positive choices, and that in my mind makes you an incredible, awesome human being. I don’t think that’s wrong even though, I know very little of who you really are. Humanity is indebted to you and others like you (there aren’t enough of us like you in this way) for your contributions even when they go unrecognized. I hope this reaches your eyes lol. Again, thank you for your choices and efforts. Keep it up, because the planet knows humanity needs it even if we don’t know that ourselves. What a shame that is. On a more positive note, what an incredible article. Thanks for the blessing, I truly appreciate it.
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