“Over the last three years, Prime Video has become an important part of Prime,” Amazon said in the e-mail. “It’s important that the streaming media players we sell interact well with Prime Video in order to avoid customer confusion.”

I’m confused.

Part of me says it isn’t a big deal. The other part of me says the Butthurt is strong with Amazon.

This is similar to if Walmart refused to sell devices that didn’t support Vudu, the streaming movie service they own. Walmart is a department/general and so is Amazon.

I’ve been having some curious difficulties with Amazon for the last several months. They have changed their system in some way which makes it impossible for me to place orders. The system gives problems only when logging on, or during the checkout phase, and never while merely browsing through the listings. It is difficult to determine what the cause is, in technical terms. Amazon’s highly arrogant support representative in India thought it was the dial-up connection speed, but that may be incorrect. However, what I suspect is happening is that the video games and what-not are coming to inform the construction of the Amazon website, and they have stopped worrying about backward compatibility. They are getting locked into the idea that someone who does not have an expensive video-game computer and a 25 m-bit connection is not a real customer, that kind of thing, because the only kind of customer who counts is the one who is downloading movies and playing video games. I do not have, and do not want, the equipment, internet connections, etc., to play the neatest new video games. “Walled garden” entertainment systems leave me completely cold and unmoved.

My sister agreed to place orders on my behalf, on her Apple I-thingy. So I click through the Amazon website on a non-logged-in basis, collect URL’s, and send them in an e-mail to my sister, who puts in the order for such mundane articles as office (desktop) computer parts, plastic forks, and bathroom scrubbing brushes. Of course, Amazon may decide to make it impossible to place an order on an Apple I-thingy. I came up with the work-around because, even though Amazon had done some stupid things, I still felt they were worth salvaging. My attitude is:

“Bad Amazon! Bad! Bad Dog! Baaad! Bad Jeff Bezos! Bad. Baaad!”

What I want from Amazon, first and foremost, is an efficient means of purchasing used/remaindered/distressed stuff, primarily books, but, secondarily, certain types of computer items where compatibility is the main issue (eg. printers), and I affirmatively want something manufactured ten years ago. Beyond that, I want something pretty much equivalent to Target, which doesn’t involve three hours and a forty-dollar taxicab fare to get a hundred dollars worth of household sundries. I used to buy computer stuff from Tiger Direct and Cyberguys, over the telephone, but I now get things from Amazon, instead of going on to NewEgg, because I am not really pushing the limits on computers anymore. I am now getting basic computer supplies like blank CD’s and DVD’s, memory sticks, and printer paper at the Walgreen’s on the corner.

There are some rather weird specialty items, like egg powder, which is practically a Mormon religious item. The Latter-Day-Saints are supposed to keep a year’s supply of food on hand, as a memory of the time when they were penniless fugitives, the time of Nauvoo. Of course in Brigham Young’s day, self-sufficiency meant having a cow and a chicken coop, like everyone else. In a nineteenth-century city like Detroit or Chicago, every moderately prosperous Irish or Polish workingman had a vegetable garden, and a cow, and a chicken coop, and a pig to eat up the kitchen garbage and turn it into ham and bacon. The livestock provided fertilizer for the vegetable garden. That was simply practical economics. The kind of people who bought fresh groceries at the store were the kind of people who employed servants to clean their houses, do their cooking, and look after their children. The Mormon difference consisted in keeping enough grain on hand to feed the beasts for a year. With the transition from rural to suburban living, where everyone started to live like the upper classes, only with machines instead of servants, the Mormons have re-interpreted the obligation of maintaining a year’s food supply to mean keeping supplies of powdered milk and powdered eggs, along with the more usual canned goods. You can get powdered milk in any grocery store, but you can’t get powdered eggs so easily. By force of circumstance, powdered eggs have come to symbolize the Mormon willingness to move out into the wilderness to worship in their own way.

All religions have food rites or food restrictions. Food is so basic an experience that no religion can avoid it. So there are companies in Utah which produce powdered eggs, and sell them through local stores in Utah, and traditionally sold them mail-order via church newspapers, and now, of course, by Amazon. It works more or less the same way as Kosher food. The iconic piece of Kosher food is a piece of Matzoh bread. Same principle. I get most of my spices from a mail order firm down in Texas, but down there, they are probably Baptists. Baptists and Mormons _really_ don’t get on. Before 9/11, cases of religious discrimination, forced indoctrination in the public schools, etc., practically always turned out to be Baptist vs. Mormon. The result is that the spice company in Texas, which carries some very obscure items such as powdered tomato, not to mention dozens of blended spice mixes from various parts of Asia, does not want to carry powdered eggs.

In a way, I think that the powdered eggs represent Amazon at its best, rather like a United States Postman carrying ten different magazines in his satchel, all ideologically incompatible with each other, and delivering all these magazines to their respective subscribers, without fear or favor. Amazon took the view that, obviously, powdered eggs are wholesome food. They won’t hurt anyone. They are good for children, so Amazon doesn’t have to collect IDs, the way it would have to do for tobacco or booze. The powdered eggs fall within Amazon’s normal economic shipment parameters, the same as spices or coffee, so there isn’t going to be a problem with stuff getting damaged in transit. Therefore it is none of Amazon’s business how people use powdered eggs in religious rites and sacraments, or what the food is believed to symbolize.

The new emphasis on Walled Garden entertainment media represents a turning away from this kind of value. The written word has always been democratic. Anyone willing to spend the time has always been able to write a book. In recent years, the internet and websites have made it highly practical to publish and distribute a book without money changing hands. With so many people willing to give their books away, book-selling is ultimately a doomed enterprise. Amazon is moving away from that, towards the idea that it should expensively produce its own television shows, which everyone who wants to shop at Amazon will be expected to watch.

I got an email that said we can’t “Send to Kindle” any books we purchase from there anymore.

I am done with Amazon. It’s jumped the shark.