Amazon is crushing the high street — Michael & Josh #dailycartoon
In the UK we heard that two big retailers in the UK have gone pop. They are the US retailer Toys R Us and also the electronics store Maplin.
It’s sad to see a further couple of big retailers go from the UK high street and I’m sure they won’t be the last either. Owing to our appetite for everything Amazon and most things online, the high street and out of town shopping malls will continue their demise. The #Amazon robots are winning the race! More coffee shops please?
This cartoon shows Amazon, the rocking horse, with a robot jockey, crushing the logos of Toys R Us and Maplin. The rocking horse is plugged into the wall, trying to show the fact that Amazon do toys (rocking horse) and electronics (plug and robot) really really well. And of course Amazon employs a lot of robots too!
Reduce is my word for 2018. Whether it’s reducing my time on social, reducing my spending habits or reducing the stuff that I own.
In September 2017, my dear friend Petros Kkolas suggested I watch a documentary on Netflix, titled ‘Minimalism’.
I was hooked, converted, a believer and probably recognised that I’ve always been a minimalist all my life and now I knew for sure.
Doesn’t mean that I behaved like one throughout my life, oh no! I was a shopaholic for most of my life, especially via the internet and of course the seductress Amazon. It’s interesting actually, I asked them if I could see my total spend from when I first started buying from Amazon and guess what? They can’t supply that figure, they said you have to go through each year on your profile and add it up manually.
Not many folks will do that right?!
Well I did and you can see the chart below. Total spend for my lifetime with Amazon is £5555.27. Now you would have thought that my spend in 2017 would be less compared to previous years because I had found Minimalism (September 2017) and yet it is higher compared to the previous 9 years. Oops!
Michael de Groot’s Amazon Spend
Well that was mainly due to some technology spend and it included a scanner, which will assist me in reducing my paperwork by scanning most of it and saving it to the cloud.
If I discount the scanner and some microphone kit for making videos on my smartphone, the spend for 2017 would have amounted to just £74.00, 2nd lowest in the past 9 years.
Governments, corporations, nations and investors are obsessed with growth. I know, I know it’s how wealth is created, how jobs exist and the fear that accompanies growth is not to be underestimated.
Every single day, news broadcasters are searching for stories to let us know how well or how bad we are doing with growth in our economy in the country of our residence.
And there’s absolutely nothing you and I can do about growth.
The decision is out of our hands. It totally depends how well the people that sell stuff are doing at creating more great stuff that we think we need, but really we do not.
Scott Galloway professor at NYU describes this brilliantly. He say that the four horsemen, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google all appeal to different parts of our bodies. Google appeals to our brain, Facebook to our hearts, Amazon to our stomachs/guts and Apple to our reproductive system.
In the case of growth all these companies are totally obsessed by it and their investors definitely are.
Let’s just take one of those, Amazon. Amazon is growing at an alarming rate and grabbing marketshare, share value and all the products in the world that can be sold via the web. They even own all the logistics now to bring you those products to your front door faster then anyone else.
We likely have 10–100 times more stuff than we actually need in our homes, but we keep buying more stuff and because it can be delivered faster, we are happy to buy more of it. Our stomachs/guts to buy more stuff is growing exponentially each year and Amazon knows this.
Growth might be an obsession in the world economies, but for sure the stuff that you own doesn’t need to grow any larger at all. More than likely you can feed yourself and your family for at least 90 days on all the food that sits in your store cupboards and not feel hungry.
The only growth we need is the growth in our thinking, the growth in our emotional intelligence and the growth in helping out the more unfortunate people in our society who have been dealt a tough hand.
