Amazon Has Fresh Food Now, and You Will Buy It from Them

photo credit: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

It’s well known (among people who know these things) that Park Slope is lousy with “publishing people” (it’s also lousy with lice – did you know that’s where the word lousy comes from? – because of all those 321 kids hugging each other. But I digress.) 

My husband and I are, in effect, “publishing people,” and so are some of our friends. And we are all royally pissed at Amazon, a company that seems gleefully bent on destroying traditional publishing, and who is in a well-publicized battle with French publisher Hachette for reasons not funny enough to outline here (go the link!). The gist is, Amazon is being a total dick.

In solidarity with Hachette, and, you know, the future of literature, some of us are trying to avoid buying from the Engulf + Devour (hat-tip Mel Brooks) of online retailers as much as possible. Buy a book from those book killers, fuck no! There are plenty of other book purveyors to patronize: indies, if you’re lucky – shout out PS’s own Community Bookstore! -- and NYC institution The Strand; non-nefarious online options like abebooks.com; and even B&N is less onerous than Amazon. (Admittedly, sometimes you need a non-book thing like a large guinea pig cage the next day, or an extra blanket for your kid at sleepaway camp, and then what the hell? Powells.com can’t help ya.)

Meanwhile, it’s not just us bookish types, you know who else is encouraging readers not to buy books from Amazon? None other than TV star, Stephen P. Colbert.

So cut to a conference room somewhere in Seattle, I imagine a bunch of pricks sitting around a big table made out of a recycled door, drinking their northwest coffee, snickering, and plotting to FUCK WITH US.

Amazon is launching a big fck you haha! grocery delivery service RIGHT HERE IN PARK SLOPE. We’re the pilot, or whatever, on the East Coast – where all the publishing people live. The offering sounds pretty much like Fresh Direct, except they claim delivery “within hours,” and it sounds like you can also get shit like ear buds and Barbie dolls delivered with your frozen mac&cheese and Paul Newman spaghetti sauce. Current Amazon Prime members ($99/year; free, often overnight, delivery. Guilty.) can use the service free of additional fees for the next couple of months, but then need to upgrade to a $299/year membership. Which seems crazy steep. 

“Who’s gonna buy from them?!” I say to my husband, all sneering and condescending. And he says, “not everyone’s like us.” Oh.

“But but but,” I stutter, arms gesturing towards points west and south and whichever direction Red Hook is, “we have the Coop for that type of person and and and we have Whole Foods down there for those types of people, and Fairway and Union Market!”  I recognize convenience may well trump “buy local” or “boycott amazon,” but there is Fresh Direct if that’s your thing. So unless they did NO research they know that the neighborhood is hardly hurting for ways to buy groceries. They’re doing it to fuck with us!

Let’s fuck with them, guys! For example, if you already have Prime, let’s buy like, one plum at a time every day for the next few weeks… and then not upgrade at the end of the year!! That’ll show ‘em!

Never mind. I think I have to face it: they just wanna fuck with us, want us to see those stupid trucks rumbling down 5^th avenue, and they don’t give a rat’s ass whether they make a penny doing it.

VIA DNAINFO