Editorial: The Glory Of Christmas Without Amazon

Life in a country unscathed by Jeff Bezos feels more and more miraculous

My favourite goggles went on sale this Cyber Monday. I announced to the office that it pained me not to buy them. They were half off. Nobody understood my impulse. After thinking it through, I acknowledged that as the editor of this paper, I am not in the income bracket to own two pairs of swimming goggles.

Since I returned to Iceland, I have not used Amazon, the tech giant that began as a bookstore and now provides web services to the CIA, gives lavish balls for President Trump, sells counterfeit and deeply age-inappropriate goods to anyone with Amazon locker access, and essentially lives inside most American consumers’ subconscious.

Amazon, and their ilk, do not function in Iceland. If you place an international order, you can track that package, but you’ll eventually lose interest. I have tried to explain same-day shipping, lightning deals (deals that last a matter of hours with a clock countdown on products that are placed in front of you based on an algorithm) and Prime Day. It sounds like science fiction. Dystopian science fiction.

Most orders from abroad will result in the following message: “Your Fedex/TNT shipment is stuck in customs and needs an invoice to clear it. Please send data to tollmidlun@icetransport.is.” This isn’t a scam. A massive, arbitrary tax bill is coming for you, and you will likely decide the product isn’t worth it. Or you might pick up your order, paying the assigned VAT, and, if it’s Amazon, you discover the product isn’t as advertised. In a Trump 2.0 America, try returning a product. Tariffs and products with a high return rate don’t play nice.

The result of Amazon not taking hold here is that in Iceland we have, among other things, functional shopping malls. We have bookstores; five, for example, within two miles of this office. There are stores in Iceland for an amusing number of functions — in the Haul for this issue, you can locate a custom chess set-designing craftsman. While shopping here is stressful, it is a finite stress. You go outside, you interact with people, you make the best choice you can, you take a product home, and then the experience is done.

I was delighted to read a quote from the band symfaux in this issue, the instrumental group who refuse to put their music on social media or streaming. “[Our music] is accessible to anyone and everyone in the spaces where it does exist, and that just gives it more focus there.”

That is how life is here. We exist where we exist. Sometimes, it’s not particularly cheap, but experiences, and even products, mean more.

While I am not a deeply religious man, I have a relic I think of in times of religious fervor. The perfect image for our time is the smile of MacKenzie Scott in 2019, when she divorced Jeff Bezos. Her smile at that moment should be on stained glass.

In the 1980 American film Caddyshack, a group of swimmers is subjected to a suspected turd, or “dootie!” floating in a pool. If you watch this scene, you will discover that the turd, which was actually a candy bar, has an uncanny resemblance to Jeff Bezos. More and more, in most of the Western world, one is stuck swimming in the pool with this turd.

This is why, while I cannot afford a second pair of goggles, I’m trying to find my inner MacKenzie Scott, and find grace in a less tainted life.