My Amazon Story - 2016
A couple of weeks ago, something that I did't use very often broke and given that I did't use it very often, I thought to myself... should I replace it or could I repair it?
It was something electrical so I'm not sure repairing it with 2 young children puttering around and insisting upon looking at things with their hands (just like the-mrs-gorilla does) was a good idea so it was replace it, or bin it (it actually ended up in my garage awaiting a decision).
But whilst thinking about it, I thought I'd find out how much I paid for it and what it would cost to buy now. I assumed that I'd bought it from Amazon (at some point within the last 3 years) and I set about trying to find the order. I didn't find it but whilst looking, my purchase history started to tell me a story. Amazon seems to be the "go-to" destination when it comes to buying stuff so it makes sense that your purchase history can tell a story, so this is my Amazon story from 2016 - a year chosen at random.
Page 4: January - April
I won't list everything I bought - that would be boring (and the idea for this post is already starting to fail to live up to my expectations of how awesome a topic this would be but I'll plough on for now).
Ok, so the most interesting thing on page 4 is a few books but these tell me a few things:
- I lived in Bristol and had fairly recently started my job there - The Impact Mapping book had been recommended to me by a colleague.
- I was studying for my MBA and was doing my Finance Module and Probably HR too - Why else would anybody buy a book about "Key Management Ratios".
Page 3: May - June
I bought plenty of DVDs on this page - all part of my quest to watch the IMDB top 250 Movies and with the likes of "The Lives of Others" and "Apocalypse Now" being bought, I must've been around ranks 50-60 at the time. The more interesting purchase though (in my opinion), is this:
I've still got about 3/4 of the bag in a kitchen cupboard where we've not eaten many. I had a "Mug Crumble" book and these were one of the ingredients. It can't have been up to much otherwise we'd probably have eaten more of them!
Page 2: July - October
Having thought that in January - April I'd just started my job, July appears to signal the start of my new life down in Eastbourne with the purchase of some gym mats. A strange purchase to make you think of moving home and they were bought to put on the floor in the conservatory of the house we were renting so that it wasn't so cold to use.
I also must have got a new tenant for my flat that I rented out in Wimbledon as I'd bought her a pocket-sprung mattress that she'd requested before moving in. I was a nice landlord. The previous tenant had fled the country to Bulgaria having racked up 10's of thousands of pounds worth of debt with various lenders. Perhaps strangely though, they'd always paid their rent and even posted the front door key back after they'd disappeared. The mind of a criminal...?
In this period, I'd also bought a Wedding Page Boy outfit. When I saw this, I initially thought it was for the-toddler-gorilla but he wasn't born until 2018 so that would've been some serious pre-planning. It must have been bought for the-nephew-gorilla for mine and the-mrs-gorilla's wedding in October that year. A very smart suit indeed...
Page 1: October - December
The month of our wedding (October) celebrated with the Amazon purchase of a "Giant Wine Glass". As part of my speech, I welcomed the-mrs-gorilla to the-gorilla family and since the women in my family drink far too much wine, it felt like a fitting gift. Later, I discovered that the-mother-in-law-gorilla has a habit of finishing off wine bottles because they're "cluttering up the side" in the kitchen. So it seems that our families were destined to be united.
I also bought a lot of books that month for my kindle - obviously preparing for our honeymoon and plenty of time doing very little on an island in the Indian Ocean. Ohhhh, the good old days...
☝🏼 My Photo
I hope you enjoyed my Amazon story. It felt a bit like I was writing Season 6 of Lost at the beginning but I think it turned out ok in the end. If you're inspired at all to write your Amazon story, tag me in and I'll be sure to have a read.
There is love and hate about Amazon, although we all disagree with the way how Amazon is treating their employees but on other hand we like the comfort and variety of products that Amazon offer. I do not know if you heard the time of lock down sometimes in 2020 I saw our nurses discussing some nights shifts and when I queried if someone is off, they just told that those shifts are offered by Amazon for night shift for filling up the shelves in one of their branches storage room and they were paying 500 per night. So the nurses were ready to go there instead of doing night in hospital.
Actually you are right our order lists can tell a story about our life. For us due to renovating, we buy a lot of stuff for DIY and must say they all come in time which is very important as we do not want to loose time.
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There seem to be mixed opinions on Amazon and one of the other comments even mentions the good they've done for employment in their town (although some staff complain, the majority are happy).
£500 per night though - that's going to be tempting despite having chosen a career which doesn't have money as the primary motivator.
Speaking of which, have you encountered many problems with the initial decision that "front-line staff cannot work unless they're vaccinated"? It's caused a lot of issues at the-mrs-gorilla's place of work and despite the government changing their mind, many staff are still leaving or off due to the stress of it all.
Dude, you are a real Amazon fan)))
I am ashamed to admit under your post ... but I have never used the services of this office.
Maybe I'm too old fashioned... :)
It took me a while to warm to them because they had serious delivery problems when I started but they're very efficient now and make it easy to buy things and just as easy to return things when there's a problem. I've grown to quite like them and even if you don't buy from them, they're useful to find a price benchmark to compare against 🙂
The main thing is that you like it))
I rarely use the services of online stores, but sometimes I have to))
I never bought anything at Amazon. The online shops will tell you soon how huge your carbon footprint/CO2 emission is. I noticed a payment option many online shops with us use started with it. Once that social credit fact is a fact I wonder how fast the shops will block their clients.
Sounds your overview brings back good memories.
That will be very interesting indeed. It would also be interesting to know the carbon footprint required to bring the goods to the factory before they're purchased. Something like that might start to change the face of capitalism - but it probably won't.
It's interesting looking at purchase history as it got me thinking about where I was in my life and how much changed within the 12 months... In January, I lived in Bristol, worked for a FTSE 100 company and was living with my partner. By December, I'd moved to Eastbourne, worked for myself and was married. I wonder if I've got an old bank statement from before I used Amazon which will tell me an older story 🙂
This way you won't need to keep a diary.
I don't think bank statements are kept long with us. I hardly buy anything and if it's for birthdays/December.
Tengo la ligera impresión de que compras muchas cosas que no usarán jajaja. Yo no uso Amazon 🤔 tal vez porque todo lo que compro es comida.
Tendre presente la fecha de octubre para futuras felicitaciones.
Saludos ☺️
I think we're good at using the things we buy - we don't tend to buy things just to have them and tend to live quite frugally... by Western standards anyway!
October 8th 🙂
Jajaja eso es bueno, lo entendí mal entonces 😅
Fecha anotada, me gusta recordar los aniversarios y enviar felicitaciones. 😊
hola, pues me gusto la historia, asi cómo la música del final.
Thanks - I like to put some music on whilst I "work" - I don't do it often enough 🙂
Carambar <3 makes me super nostalgic :)
I don't think they were ever really sold in the UK - It was really hard to find them. We've barely eaten any of them - I wonder if they still taste ok 😆
Hello friend, good story, I love how you describe everything. Greetings and good wishes to the gorilla family.
Thank you and best wishes to you too
Funny, I'm watching an Amazon story on TV right now
About the jungle?
About Jeff Bezos
Is it worth watching? I'm guessing it's on Amazon Prime Video?
Really good idea to let purchased products tell a story. I always have reservations about throwing away my old bookkeeping folders because the old bills bring back memories.
It's funny how something that would be considered as boring can tell a story. For many people, it's a photograph, for me, it's a shopping receipt 😆