Buy From Seller Not Amazon

With the advent of the giant companies like Amazon and their race to the bottom policies like Walmart, it's no wonder that many businesses are being decimated by these giants that have no qualms undercutting people and hurting their bottom lines. I've known it for a while that it was going to be a better thing to do but sometimes we get a little lazy and don't do something because it makes us do something a little different. I told myself get out of that habit!

With Amazon and their global reach for products, one of the really good things with them is being able to locate all kinds of different things that would have been a little more difficult to find in a traditional brick and mortar store. This is especially true when one is shopping for things like health products. The particular instance I am referring to is the toothpaste I buy. I know that it may seem foolish to some to buy toothpaste that's a bit more expensive but I find it actually works out quite well for me, this is purely just toothpaste!

The particular toothpaste I use is one that one might expect to find in a high end store like Whole Foods or something, and with that high end store comes a high end premium for the price! I had been looking for a good, natural toothpaste for a while and was having some difficulty finding one I liked and had ingredients I wasn't concerned about. I know it's difficult to find something that's completely perfect but it's good to find things that are pretty darn close! This toothpaste was it for me and I have been using it for a couple years at this point.

What was a bit of a change for myself was switching up how I got the stuff! I had been buying it off the devil website Amazon and was overall satisfied with that but I have been looking for ways that I can support the business itself which needs the money as desperately as ever, instead of buying it and supporting a giant conglomerate like Amazon. What's really interesting and cool is that I decided to visit the website of the company itself to see what I could get! This is what I find to be incredibly important and I think more people should do this exercise.

By buying from the company itself instead of a third party that obviously reduces a lot of fees and overhead. The company gets the money directly if you buy it from them and often times you can get a decent deal on it, if not a better deal! Many of the groups on Amazon, calling them groups on purpose because many aren't anything besides someone reselling something else, have to make some profit as well so they add a bit ontop depending on the product. When we go directly to the seller though, it's between us and the company, with the card agency in between (which they would be anyways since most people can't use cash online) so it helps them out directly.

I know this is certainly not a life changing revelation but it's definitely a change in daily habits that is required. We are so accustomed to just logging into a site we are familiar with to make our purchases but in that laziness or convenience, whichever you would like to call it, it has allowed a company like Amazon to wield massive power and influence over us and our daily activities. If you think Fakebook made lots of money off selling our data, wait until you look up how much Amazon makes off selling the sales trends of what goes on with its website!

Small changes to how we use our money like this will go a long way. Small businesses need our support now more than ever, not to parrot some horse shit talking point of a politician but in true terms, these are the types of things that we need to start to do on a large scale to be able to shift some power balance back to people instead of it being so focused on the big companies. We've done this with some children's books we just recently bought that I posted about, the Tuttle Twins series, my toothpaste here and some of the other things around the house that we normally buy or bought on Amazon before. We are shifting our purchasing habits and its small steps like this that add up over time!