If you subscribe to my newsletter, you know that I’ve decided to forgo purchasing Christmas gifts from Amazon this year. Why? Let’s get the negative out of the way first, because it’s holiday season, and I’d rather finish on a positive note.

In the past, I’ve relied heavily on the e-commerce giant that is Amazon to get gifts to friends and family in record time. Admittedly, I’ve hit the ‘Order’ button as late as December 23rd to get a gift to someone by Christmas Day. What I didn’t realize when I was doing this, thought, was furthering Amazon’s incentive to get its employees to work faster and faster and faster in order to fill the consumer demand of uncannily fast delivery turnaround times.

Last month, the Atlantic published an article about how Amazon’s insanely ruthless quotas are causing injuries–sometimes permanent–to their factory employees. The article details stories of workers being put under extreme pressure to meet increasingly large quotas in order to just keep their job. We’re not talking about someone working hard to get a raise for increasing how many orders they fulfilled or tasks they completed. We’re talking about employees living in fear of being written up or, even worse, fired for not meeting those nearly impossible quotas on a daily basis. Some have incurred injuries that have put them out of work permanently and severely altered their quality of life.

This type of work environment where one is constantly being pushed to be faster has fostered an unhealthy pattern in Amazon’s factories, to the point that workers are avoiding using the bathroom because they’re afraid of not meeting their performance targets. One investigative reporter even found a bottle of pee on a factory shelf when he went undercover as an employee to see what it was like to work for Amazon. Amazon even monitors the length of time employees spend in the bathroom. Anything over five or six minutes is considered a no-no. Imagine how degrading it would be to have to pee in a jar in the middle of a factory in order to simply keep a job?

While I can’t say that I have completely stopped purchasing from Amazon (I’m working to cut back purchases from the site overall), what I don’t want to do this holiday season is contribute to a company that uses this time of year as an excuse for treating their employees in such a terrible way–all year ’round.

But there are more reasons than these that I’m not shopping on Amazon for Christmas gifts… This year, I’m putting more of a focus on three things for holiday shopping:

1) Shopping locally

Over the last few years, our neighborhood has seen many new small businesses open up. As someone who lives in a part of Brooklyn that used to not have many amenities, it’s something I’ve been incredibly grateful to now have within walking distance of my apartment. I had a conversation with Rich a few weeks ago about how it’s important that we spend our dollars at these places in order to keep these small businesses–owned by hard working people with a dream–in business. Shopping local in the general area of NYC is also important for me in order to lower my carbon footprint. Having everything shipped to me in ridiculously large boxes filled with mounds of plastic padding seems to be incredibly indulgent when I could easily take the subway a few stops and find something more unique.

2) Shopping women-owned

Many of you know I put together a women-owned gift guide last year featuring a carefully curated list of products from businesses owned by women entrepreneurs. As a women advocate, I’ve sought out even more women-owned brands over the last year, and made friends with many of them. Supporting my friends’ businesses feels so much more meaningful than buying something from a random seller on Amazon. I want to support my friends in their pursuits–it makes me feel connected to what I’m buying. And even for those who I don’t know, there are so many women working hard to create amazing products and services, and I want to do my best to support them, too.

3) Valuing experiences over accumulation of things

I saw a movement called ‘Buy Nothing Day‘ really making the rounds on social media this year on Black Friday. The idea of the movement is to combat holiday consumerism culture. While I understand this sentiment from the standpoint of overconsumption contributing to environmental and psychological damage, I couldn’t help but be reminded of an old Southpark episode that was a commentary on the global recession we all experience several years back. The town of Southpark decides that saving, rather than spending, will repair the economy–as if buying anything is a sin. Of course, in the end, the town realizes this actually makes it worse.

If you’ve taken any sort of basic economics course, you know that the exchange of goods and services for money is what fuels a health economy. So buying nothing all the time means a less healthy economy. While keeping this in mind, I do understand that we feel an unnecessary pressure to get the new and next best thing from constantly being marketed to. I also undersatnd that most of us don’t need more “stuff.”

What many of us do need, though, are more experiences. There have been numerous studies recently that show experiences make us much happier than things do. Instead of giving things, I’d rather put money towards the next trip my friend wants to take or give a spa or restaurant gift card to a family member. I love the idea of those people remembering me when doing something that makes them happy. After all, isn’t that what giving and the holiday season is all about? Making people happy and creating cheer?

A Note: Covering lifestyle, fashion and beauty are all staples of You Must Love Life, but even more so is putting focus on being multidimensional. We can love all of these things and have deeper conversations like this post on societal values. I hope you can enjoy all of these topics as a multidimensional woman, yourself. Much love!

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