One-Click Shopping on Hold

A friend today was regaling us with her tale of misadventures with Amazon.com and her credit card. She concluded—and summarized--this shaggy dog of a story in a despairing tone: “And now, I have no One-Click Shopping!” Perhaps the story of all of us, all over the world. We have run into a loss of our one-click shopping. And now what?

On one of the internet groups I belong to where you trade artist trading cards, the members were all announcing that they’re never going to buy any more art supplies, that they have enough to last them until their deaths, that all they are dealing in nowadays is real needs, not just wants. I felt like I had fallen into a group-therapy experience. Or maybe an AA meeting. There was a lot of confessing of bad behavior and promises never to do it again.

I look back at that long line of refrigerators at the local dump, all X-ed out (as if for execution as another friend noted), and wonder if they are there because of one-click shopping. Buying errors? “What was I thinking? How could I have bought a harvest gold/avacado refrigerator?” How indeed. Or are they all lined up there awaiting disposal because they failed to be sufficiently energy efficient for those who need to save the earth? How many new refrigerators could Point Roberts possibly need in, say, any given year? Surely not that many (the picture includes only half of the death row group).

This is all a very mysterious time, I think. I can’t at all make out whether we are all watching the end of the world as we know it, or a movie of the end of the world as we know it. Does our collective (Western) future hold the ocean at my doorstep, an ocean currently a half mile and 180 feet away from and below me? Or gasoline at $50/gallon? Or food riots? Or is it just that everyone will have to give up their private gym memberships and instead walk briskly around the block where the rest of us can look at them when they feel a need for movement? Cook something when they feel hungry rather than ordering out or going out to restaurants? What’s really there at the fork in the road ahead, just over the top of that hill? Can't see yet.

It is clear that there is a big up-tick in rentals here on the Point since Christmas; most of them long-term, not just before summer stuff. Many houses for sale at high prices, but the realtors are urging that people make offers, strongly implying that owners will accept considerably less than the stated price. I guess we will all get to stay tuned for this.