A reporter goes on the Amazon diet, to find out how much life one person can live through Amazon products and services
Amazon’s reach is greater than any other U.S. company, so WSJ’s Katherine Bindley decided to go on an Amazon diet, using its products and services whenever and wherever she could. I
By
Katherine Bindley
Updated Dec. 6, 2017 1:57 p.m. ET
It’s 5:30 p.m. on a Saturday and I’m on Day Six of my Amazon diet. An Amazon diet is when you use as many products and services from Amazon as possible and live in an apartment that looks like what would happen if Jeff Bezos’s brain threw up.
I’m getting a haircut, thinking it’s a mini-break because Amazon can’t cut my hair yet. George, my stylist, is placing rollers in my hair and raving about how they’re the best rollers ever. His friend brought them from London. Rollers from London! How chic! Except, it turns out, the friend ordered them from Amazon UK.
If Amazon were an animal, it would be an octopus. Its tentacles are in retail and grocery stores, consumer goods and electronics, home services, streaming media, cloud computing and publishing—to name just a few. Recently, the leviathan has been extending its reach toward pharmacies and conference rooms, and building new inroads into our homes and families. (Let the Amazon delivery guy into your home! Get your teen an account!)
A Whole Foods Market in New York City was selling Echo and Echo Dot home speakers on Aug. 28, 2017, the first day of the grocery store chain’s ownership by Amazon.com Inc.
Since no U.S. company has ever attempted to fulfill as many varied customer needs, it seemed high time for a gut check: How much of your life can you live through Amazon? And how much of it would you want to?
First, a confession: Before last week, I’d ordered 16 items from Amazon—ever. But I’m not a never-Amazoner. My paltry order history is better explained by a decade of city-dwelling in apartments that can’t house 12-packs of paper towels, no matter how quickly they ship.
But this past week, Amazon has been in my kitchen (an Echo Show lives there), my living room/bedroom (Echo Look, Echo Plus and Cloud Cam), my phone (six apps make my Amazon life run) and my stomach (Whole Foods). I used around two dozen products and services from Amazon and its partners. I even ordered a three-pack of Amazon’s house-brand underwear.
Getting to know Alexa
Amazon’s virtual assistant, Alexa, arrived in the Echo Plus, a speaker with a built-in smart-home hub. I started off with music requests but quickly put Alexa in charge of my mornings.
The Amazon Echo Plus.
Making my home smart with the Echo Plus was a breeze. Alexa woke me with an alarm, turned on my lights, cued up a news briefing and told me the weather while I made coffee. Though it was initially anxiety-producing, I find I love the extra seven minutes without my phone.
Alexa and I had our first fight when I tried to place an order. Actually, I wanted to buy items that were already in my cart. Instead, Alexa misheard me and added a $60 heart-shaped pendant. Another time she misheard me and added a book: “The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896.”
Amazon says Alexa is great with single commands, like “Alexa, order me paper towels,” but she can’t always handle more complicated steps like the ones I tried.
Dressing for a camera
As part of my Amazon diet, I was supposed to wear whatever the Echo Look recommended. A specialized Alexa device, the Echo Look takes pictures of you wearing competing fashions, then tells you, through an app, which outfit is better. (I don’t love cameras pointed at me, so I stuck the Look behind boxes when not in use.)
A screen shot from Amazon’s Echo Look app.
One day, I was in a ripped-jeans-and-loose-fitting-button-down kind of mood. I tried to force the Echo Look to pick that by contrasting it with something I thought it would never go for: a cropped sweater I wear only with high-waisted pants.
Shockingly, the Echo Look preferred me baring 2 inches of midriff. I wasn’t about to go to the office like that and tried on multiple alternatives. The app was hopelessly in love with the cropped sweater.
Finally leaving home (in high-waisted pants), I walked out in an outfit pout. The worst part: Several people complimented my sweater.
Searching for food
I’ve made several trips to Whole Foods. Despite the extra Amazon branding, it feels about the same—wonderful, until the cashier tells you the total.
The Echo Show was supposed to be my kitchen assistant. It has a touch screen, and a camera for video calling. If you have privacy concerns about devices with microphones, you probably won’t like ones with cameras: They’re creepier. I’ve never gasped and run from a talking speaker but I can’t say the same for the Show. Amazon has said the camera senses motion to wake up but doesn’t store or send that video over the internet. I still kept it on mute most of the week.
The Amazon Echo Show has a touch screen, and a camera for video calling.
I launched the AllRecipes skill and tried to make a meal. Whenever I hit pause to complete a step, the video would return to the homescreen and wouldn’t resume where I left off. Amazon says it’s working on a solution so paused video won’t time out so fast. I was so irritated I didn’t attempt another meal.
I much preferred ordering delivery from Amazon Restaurants, available in more than 20 cities. There are 69 restaurants delivering to my ZIP Code. That may sound like a lot, but Seamless and GrubHub each give me 145. I scrolled through the offerings, underwhelmed. Then I did a double take: Osteria Morini? I’ve wanted to try it for years and it isn’t on those other services. I ordered tagliatelle and 30 minutes later, it was at my door.
Spying on housecleaners
I reluctantly set up the Cloud Cam. I used it to monitor a new housekeeper. I was forced to cheat on my beloved Sonia because, yep, Amazon offers cleaning service. (Two hours for a studio apartment cost almost $90, though, so I can’t recommend it, even if she had done a great job.)
Amazon’s Cloud Cam, bottom, and app.
While at the office, I kept getting Cloud Cam notifications of movement in my apartment—helpful if there’s a burglar, not if there’s a cleaner. I felt like a total creep being able to see the housekeeper, even though I’d told her about the camera.
After my weeklong Amazon binge, there are some things I’d toss, and some I’d keep. I’m eager to get back to listening to Spotify during my runs instead of Amazon Music, but I have a newfound affinity for Audible books during my commute.
I can picture Alexa playing me songs, waking me up, turning off my lights and ordering a Lyft while I scramble around my apartment looking for my phone. But I expect she’d spend a lot of time muted. The cameras, though, would have to go. A smart home is one thing, a potentially omniscient one is another. And no matter how well the Echo Look functions, posing for it every morning is stressful.
Services like housecleaning would be improved if Amazon let you read reviews about the specific provider you’re hiring. As it stands, you know very little about whom you’re booking, and reviews “from around you” can be from towns an hour away.
The more we use Amazon in all its capacities, the more the company potentially learns about us. Unlike Google and Facebook, Amazon isn’t in business to sell ads, but it certainly can use data to target more and more of its own universe of products and services at us.
And the disturbing implications of such a retail juggernaut go beyond invasive marketing. When one company has so much reach, countless other sellers and service providers can lose relevance. If you can buy everything from car parts to cleaning service to caviar in one stop, will you shop anywhere outside Amazon’s own marketplace?
By week’s end, there was a short list of things Amazon hadn’t helped me with: booking a doctor’s appointment, picking up a prescription, scheduling a haircut, and buying a flight. How long before that—and all the other stuff on all of our to-do lists—can be crossed off with a click and a Prime membership?