The Time I Accidentally Became a Hoarder

Thanks, Jeff Bezos.

I remember the first time I heard about Amazon Prime. I thought it was a truly silly idea - who would pay $79 a year for the right to buy stuff with free shipping?

These are the questions you ask yourself when you are not the world’s richest man.

Like almost everyone else I know, I soon became an Amazon Prime member, and fell even deeper into the well when I discovered Subscribe & Save. As you may well know, this is a feature where you can have items shipped on a regular schedule - every month, every three months, whatever - so you don’t have to remember to order things. If you time it right, as soon as you are about to run out of something, a package magically appears with exactly what you need.

When it works, it’s great. We are a family that is pretty deep into Spindrift, and we have some arriving every other week or so. It’s great (and it has basically helped us get soda completely out of the house, and yet I digress).

Here’s where I’m supposed to go on a rant about the evil of Jeffrey Bezos and Amazon and how it’s killing small shops. And I agree, and yet I’m part of the problem. It’s just the world we live in, folks.

But then, sometimes you guess wrong - in terms of what you need and how often you need it. And folks…that’s what happened to me and paper napkins. And the thing with napkins is - they come as a case. Like 12 individual packages of napkins. Great, right?

The question you need to ask yourself - which I clearly did NOT ask myself - is how many napkins one really needs. Also, when you get a case and don’t need it right away … don’t just put it in the back of the garage and forget that it exists … because you’re gonna get ANOTHER case sent sooner than you need it. At some point, I realized we had multiple cases of napkins in the garage and cancelled the subscription.

It was a decision I made far, far too late.

Folks, I stopped buying paper napkins three years ago and this is a picture I took just now.

It might be hard to tell, but by my count there are at least twelve packages of napkins still in there. When the pandemic hit and for some still unknown reasons people started hoarding paper products, I gave away a few packs of napkins to my brother-in-law. It didn’t make a dent. I never wanted to be a hoarder. I didn’t want to live like this. And yet, deep in my heart, I can almost see the business plan that suggested Subscribe & Save would be a winner because of poor decision making like this.

Thanks, Jeff Bezos.

Also, anyone need a napkin?