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By: Joe Hight Columnist July 25, 2022 0

I recently bought two items from Amazon – indirectly because of the incessant flies and mosquitoes that plague Oklahoma summers.

As those who read this column know, I am not an Amazon fan. I’ve written about how you should shop local first. How Amazon takes away local jobs and revenue. How Amazon has shuttered many small businesses. How I own a local business threatened by Amazon.

If you know me personally, you know I become vocal when “Amazon” is mentioned. “Evil” has been uttered when I see the behemoth’s logo.

I also agree with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which has an Independent Business Initiative that “champions locally owned businesses, leads efforts to fight the unchecked power of corporate giants like Walmart and Amazon, and seeks to reverse the government policies that work against these small, independent businesses.”

According to the institute’s 2021 report “How Amazon Crushes Independent Businesses, and Why Breaking It Up Would Revive American Entrepreneurship,” Amazon’s growth led to 65,000 fewer small retailers from 2007 to 2017. The report also questions Amazon’s claims that it helps small business.

“Small business owners themselves tell a different story,” the report said. “In a 2019 survey, three-quarters of independent retailers ranked Amazon’s dominance as a major threat to their survival, and only 11 percent of those selling on its site described their experience as successful.

“It’s not only retailers; small consumer product manufacturers, book publishers, and other creators are also imperiled. All these small businesses are trapped in Amazon’s monopoly gambit; the tech giant controls access to the online market, which leaves them little choice but to sell on its platform. Yet doing so allows Amazon, also their competitor, to exploit and undermine them.”

I avoid Amazon and shop either locally or directly with the business if I need to order a product not available in this market. But that ideal changed recently.

Nan and I had searched for ways to prevent flies, mosquitoes and other bugs from coming into our house whenever we open our back door to let our dogs out or walk in from the garage.

The solution: a magnetic screen door. Friends of ours had success with theirs, so I asked where they bought it.

“Amazon,” they said, sending a link.

“Nope, not going to do it,” I thought. Instead, we searched locally and bought two from my neighborhood hardware store. I installed both, but our dogs soon scratched holes into them because the mesh was too flimsy. Flies poured in again. Strings also protruded from the garage screen door, leaving the feeling you were going through a spider web

The solution: a fiberglass mesh magnetic screen door. We couldn’t find any locally, and my youngest daughter, Elyse, has defied the family pledge to never have an Amazon Prime account.

I begrudgingly told Nan to ask Elyse to buy two on Prime Days. When they arrived, I retrieved them quickly before neighbors noticed the local bookstore owners with an Amazon box on their front porch.

I caved, and the flood of flies has stopped.

That hasn’t changed my stance on Amazon or the dangers it presents to local businesses and potentially to consumers.

As the Institute for Local Self-Reliance states, “If policymakers do not act to check Amazon’s outsized power, they’re effectively allowing Amazon to be a private regulator of the online market, deciding which businesses may reach customers and the price they must pay to do so.”

So, always shop local and turn to Amazon only if swarms of flies descend upon you.

Joe Hight is director and member of the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame, an editor who led a Pulitzer Prize-winning project, the journalism ethics chair at the University of Central Oklahoma, president/owner of Best of Books, author of “Unnecessary Sorrow” and lead writer/editor of “Our Greatest Journalists.”

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