Amazon blows off its poorest shoppers

On the centennial day of President Donald Trump’s second administration, a D.C. tabloid dropped a turd in the oligarchs’ punchbowl by reporting Amazon would start listing the cost of Trump's tariffs alongside higher prices. The kerfuffle that followed isn’t a fraction as discombobulating as most other Trump-related news such as the horrifically disturbing saga of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, or the dissociative moment the president deemed foreign films “a national security threat.”

Unfortunately, this makes an overlooked dimension of the Amazon Haul story that much easier to miss: the poorest Americans, increasingly reliant on these supercheap discount retailers, which themselves are reliant on China’s supercheap costs. As Trump’s tariffs stand to raise prices, these consumers are left with few other options in the private market for affordable, readily available goods — something that should be seen as a monstrous failure of our current capitalist system.

In the predictable hours that followed the tabloid’s story, the turd was dealt with. The president called Jeff Bezos while the White House called the proposal “a hostile and political act.” Amazon issued two statements, the first clarifying that the plan “was never a consideration for the main Amazon site" and the second saying the idea “was never approved and is not going to happen.”

“The team that runs our ultra low cost Amazon Haul store had considered the idea,” the spokesperson said in Amazon’s first statement, referring to the company’s new Temu-style megamall it launched in November.

After Amazon’s emphatic clarification, Trump called Bezos a “good guy,” “very nice” and “terrific” before heading to an event in Michigan to celebrate his 100th day. “He solved the problem very quickly,” the president said. And as he jetted off to the Midwest, the oligarchs’ party was back on track.

Amazon’s word choice, in its statement that its Haul team had the idea, is what first caught my eye. To be fair, a lot of wording caught my eye in that exchange, including Trump’s identification of “the problem” not as his tariffs raising our prices, but Amazon publicly disclosing that his tariffs are raising prices. But in Amazon’s first statement, it described Haul as hawking “ultra low cost” goods — not “imported” goods, or goods “uniquely reliant on global supply chains.” And it’s easy to imagine Amazon choosing to use the words “ultra low cost” to capitalize on some Trump-related press and boost awareness of its new Temu-like offering — that would make sense, considering that in its first three months, most people hadn’t once tried Amazon Haul. 

But the cynic in me – and I’m typically OK with cynicism toward people and corporations demonstrating no limit to their personal greed or avarice for the common good — sees the word choice as capitalistically Freudian, a dark reminder that both Amazon and Trump know those price increases were only going to be seen by the company’s lowest-income shoppers, most of whom have little other choice in the market. 

It’s a billionaire’s dogwhistle, flagging that there’s nothing to see here, and there never was, because those price increases weren’t going to be seen by Amazon’s flagship demo: white, high-consumption women in their 30s and 40s who earn around $60,000 per year and spend nearly $2,660 on Amazon in a given year. Take away even 25% of that income for taxes, and that Amazon spending amounts to nearly 6% of their annual income. 

Instead, Haul’s disclosure was going to be seen by consumers whose annual spend on the site might be closer to $300, and whose economic security is, to people like Trump and corporations like Amazon, an abstract thought experiment. 

For America’s most financially vulnerable shoppers, Trump’s tariffs make a dire situation wholly unsustainable. Dollar stores like Dollar General and Dollar Tree are culling the number of products priced at $1, while others like 99 Cents Only and Family Dollar have shuttered hundreds of stores. In 2023, the discount retailer Five Below went full cognitive dissonance with its new “Five Beyond” brand, featuring items priced above $5. And the discount grocery Aldi’s prices have gone up in the last year, too. 

Walmart and Target, the two most popular retailers among low-income Americans, imported extra inventory before Trump’s tariffs took effect and have so far managed not to raise prices. But over a week ago, executives from those companies, as well as from Home Depot, told Trump that they can’t hold on much longer without raising prices. 

Christopher Wimer, director of the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University, told Salon "anything that's driving up prices further is going to directly harm those living close to the edge of poverty and make an already untenable situation even worse.” He said the number of Americans living below the poverty line has been “really rapidly increasing in recent years,” as the costs of food, housing and every other basic necessity rise.

More than one in 10 Americans, or around 37.9 million people, were living below the poverty line in 2022. In 2023, the most recent year such data is available, the share of Americans living below that line increased again, Wimer said.

Amazon Haul was created to compete with Temu, the digital megamall that sells directly from Chinese manufacturers, translating to cartoonishly low prices: $5 sneakers, a $6 foam mattress topper. Just one year after Temu launched in the U.S. in 2022,  Reuters reported the website had already gobbled up 17% of the discount e-commerce market.

Temu’s success didn’t happen in a vacuum, and it may mirror the remarkable financial insecurity fueling demand for crappy, $3 table lamps. To be fair, Temu’s popularity isn’t totally tied to how broke everybody is — Temu’s hyperactive interface is a masterclass in gamified consumption, rendering a purchase of new socks a trip to the digital casino. 

But it’s also fair to say that if American shoppers weren’t so desperate for a break from high prices, Temu wouldn’t have grabbed a fifth of the discount market in under a year. More than half of the app’s regular users earn less than $50,000 a year. 

And while these supercheap retailers are a bigger part of the problem than they are the solution, their absence in the U.S. retail marketplace leaves America’s poorest with virtually no reliable provider of their most basic goods. 

“Looking at the broader picture, it’s hard to pinpoint any major retailer or chain stepping up to truly serve the needs of low-income Americans right now,” George Carrillo, a former director in Oregon’s state health office and expert on health’s social determinants, told Salon. “This leaves families in an impossible position, forced to make tough choices about cutting back on essentials like groceries, medical care or even utilities.”

If we’re living in an era of late-stage capitalism, and if every dimension of the human experience – culture, dating, art, everything — has been commodified, monetized or become inextricable from spending and consumption, then what does it say about capitalism when the poorest Americans still can’t afford basic goods? Adam Smith might think it’s failed. 

“For Smith, a good measure of national wealth was how readily available, how plentiful and how cheap and how accessible basic necessities are. So, he really cared about whether you have enough food to live on and to survive — not just survive, but actually live a meaningful life.”

That’s Glory Liu, the author of "Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher became an Icon of American Capitalism," speaking with Sean Illing on Vox’s "The Gray Area" podcast. Her book is aimed at correcting the modern understanding of Smith, an 18th century moral philosopher widely regarded as the ideological father of modern-day capitalism. But Smith’s best-known works and ideas — the 1776 book "The Wealth of Nations," his invisible hand theory — have been misappropriated over the years, twisted into support for capitalism as some sort of morally good, biologically determined atom-smashing that takes place anytime two or more humans exchange goods or services. 

In reality, Smith was first and foremost a philosopher, and someone you might even call a spiritual thinker. His interest in capitalism, ultimately, was rooted in his interest in morality — and how a rapidly-industrializing society could do so justly. 

Liu said Smith acknowledged “there are certain kinds of goods that we might consider superfluous, or maybe more than basic, like a linen shirt.” But Smith also said that “if, in our society, a person who doesn't have a linen shirt cannot go about in public life without facing shame and ridicule, that's a basic necessity,” Liu said. “And people should be able to access these basic necessities cheaply and plentifully.”

She continued: “When the kind of lowest members of society have cheap and ready and plentiful access to basic goods so that they not only can survive, but also live in public life without fear of shame or ridicule, that is when a nation is prosperous.”

Shop like a billionaire: That’s Temu’s now-ubiquitous slogan, offering folks the chance to experience life as a consumer without restrictions. And when you remember that those words, and all those other businesses shilling the same fantasy, are coming from billionaires who experience that reality every day, it’s insulting, isn't it? 

Cynically, it would’ve been a smart move by Amazon to publish Trump’s tariffs on its Haul offering. By doing so, Amazon might’ve been to spin it as sensitivity to its poorest customers’ financial woes, and critics may not have flagged that the company was being transparent only with consumers with little other choice. Trump would’ve been pissed, of course — but that, too, might’ve given him another chance to rail against how reliant American companies have become on cheap Chinese manufacturing. Point being, Amazon wasn’t strong-armed into submitting to Trump’s will, anymore than activists are forced to protest in the streets. Amazon made a choice. And it’s a choice that should remind all consumers, but especially those with the fewest choices, that corporations purporting to serve you don’t see you as fully human, or at least not as human as themselves.