I was in NYC this past weekend for a girls’ trip with two close friends from high school. Also, a haircut 😀! While we all have careers and children and responsibilities and other hallmarks of adulting, our get-togethers inevitably devolve at some point into reminiscences, if not outright re-enactments, of stupid high jinks from when we were young, the three of us alternating between shrieks of laughter and feigned indignation. I highly recommend it.
Since I do what I do—make loud, bossy pronouncements about personal finance to my nearest and dearest—the talk eventually turned to more weighty and serious topics like, How do I stop buying stuff I don’t need through Amazon Prime? I’m so glad you asked! Let me first tell you what the answer is not. The answer is not more will power.
My four-year-old and I spend a lot of our days together absorbing life lessons from the likes of Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad, among other beloved friends. One of my favorite Frog and Toad tales—Cookies—finds Frog and Toad desperately wanting to stop eating cookies but not being able to stop eating cookies. At one point, Frog plaintively sighs, we need will power. Yup. Frog = ALL OF US.
Nothing works … until Frog goes outside and dumps all the cookies into the yard. The birds circling overhead swoop in and carry them away. You know what might counteract an Amazon Prime affliction / addiction? Dumping Amazon Prime. And then chucking Alexa out the window.
I talk a lot about math here at LBYM. How about a new subject … physics! Specifically, friction. Simply put, friction is a force that holds back a sliding object. Back in the day, I traveled to NYC quite frequently for work, sans kids and on expense account (a.k.a. the only way to travel to NYC). Since my budget for this recent trip was quite different, I had to make sure I made it a little difficult to fall into my previous life’s travel habits. No more $3.50 airport bananas.
It’s not enough to just tell myself I’m going to forego a cab and take public transportation from the airport to the hotel (will power!). I need to make it harder to take a cab and easier to take public transportation—this is leveraging the idea of friction. Why wish for will power when I can depend on laziness? So what do I do? Delete all the ride-sharing apps from my phone … and then maybe let the phone die. Take a flight at a reasonable time so I’m not exhausted when I land. Create a trip budget that spells out exactly how much—$5.50—I can spend on round-trip airport ground transportation.
Of course, before you can effectively increase or decrease the amount of friction in your day-to-day life, you need to know thyself. It’s quite possible you are someone who will patiently re-charge your phone, re-install the app, and call an uber before you’d even consider dragging your bags and joining the teeming masses of humanity on the subway. You need to figure out … what’s really going to sting?
From a friction standpoint, Amazon Prime is basically … ball bearings. That pneumatic transport tube at the bank’s drive-thru window. Slip ’N Slide. Jeff Bezos and his many minions deliver packages to your car, remind you when you need paper towels, entertain you on demand, provide … health care? I’d be more surprised if you weren’t buying unnecessary stuff through Amazon Prime. If you want to change your behavior here, you need to gum that slippery system up.
So cancel it. You know how much you hate paying for shipping.
Interesting post. I love Amazon Prime, and have never just bought something because it came up in my feed. Instead, it has kept me away from impulse buys at Target and the like. More importantly, it saves me a HUGE amount of time. No running to the store, searching for what I want on the shelf, or waiting in a check-out line. Prime allows me to quickly zero in on what I need (key word need), click and ship. Both in the home and at my legal practice, the time savings is life changing.
For those who cannot control their Prime Clicks, I would agree. Cut the cord.
Yes, exactly—know thyself! Thanks for reading, Melinda!