For most of this year I've been on a self-imposed Amazon ban.
It's been a challenge. The tempting notion that I can buy any book or DVD I want at the touch of a button is one I've frankly succumbed to all too often over the past few years. And if I'm honest I did crack and buy a second-hand book - Penelope Houston's 1960s film book The Contemporary Cinema (I haven't read it yet, so don't ask) - a couple of months ago. Even so, for some time now I've managed to restrain myself.
It's the smallest of gestures, I know. I doubt that Jeff Bezos will be losing sleep over the loss of my business, or maybe even the business of the 2000 (and counting) people who have signed up to Amazon Anonymous in protest at the corporation's low-wage culture and tax-avoidance tendencies (corporation tax paid on approximately £7bn sales between 2009 and 2011? Umm, approximately nothing. Things have improved slightly, but only slightly, since).
Still, gestures matter. To the people making them first and foremost of course. But more than that, they can reverberate.
Last week the 85-year-old author Ursula LeGuin, best known for her much-loved Earthsea fantasy series, made her own gesture when she made a speech at the National Book Awards. Accepting a medal for her "Distinguished Contribution to American Letters", she alluded to Amazon's recent battle with publisher Hachette over the pricing of ebooks. "We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa," she said.
Authors, she added, should not let "commodity profiteers" (she didn't mention Amazon by name but I think the link is obvious) "sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and write".
Some time back in the late eighties I worked for a book shop. Part of a chain that is no longer in existence (these two things are not necessarily linked, I should add). Rising to the heady heights of assistant manager I sometimes had to attend training days in London where we were once told - quite seriously - that we should recognise that there was nothing special about selling books. That it was the equivalent of selling baked beans.
Even now, the wrong-headed stupidity of that as an idea and as a motivational tool (back then, as now, book shops were staffed by book-loving arts graduates) seems astonishing. But it keeps coming back to me as a perfect - if admittedly minor - manifestation of the kind of corporate thinking that has blighted the retail sector and many others over the last 30 years. A contempt for staff and products that - let me theorise wildly - may arise out of an obsession with the bottom line combined with alpha male bullishness.
Banking is the most obvious and the most deleterious example of this trend. We are all paying the cost for their blunders and have been for years. But, more than likely, every one of you can offer your own example.
We live in a capitalist world. Selling - whether it is beans or books - matters. Of course it does. But it is not the only thing. How companies treat employees matters. How corporations recognise their social responsibilities - you know, paying your tax bill, paying a living wage; small things like that - matter.
The challenge will be in changing an attitude that has already become an orthodoxy. The idea that this is how it is and this is what works. The question that needs to be asked is who is it working for? And if it is an elite group of shareholders then shouldn't that be changed?
Conceiving what that change might be brings me back to Ursula LeGuin. In her acceptance speech last week she also said the following: "I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom."
And not just writers. We can all do our little bit. So I'm off Amazon for Christmas. And beyond. Gestures matter. Change can start small. Just ask Rosa Parks.
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