Online Shopping Paradise?

I hate going to stores, waiting in lines, having people try to convince me to buy another item, even just driving there makes me cranky.

I have long been a fan of the convenience and comfort that only online shopping can provide (where else is shopping in your pajamas completely acceptable?), but after reading this article about how terrible the working conditions of the warehouses I’m starting to realize that online shopping isn’t the paradise we all imagined it to be.

“DON’T TAKE ANYTHING that happens to you there personally,” the woman at the local chamber of commerce says when I tell her that tomorrow I start working at Amalgamated Product Giant Shipping Worldwide Inc. She winks at me. I stare at her for a second.

“What?” I ask. “Why, is somebody going to be mean to me or something?”

She smiles. “Oh, yeah.” This town somewhere west of the Mississippi is not big; everyone knows someone or is someone who’s worked for Amalgamated. “But look at it from their perspective. They need you to work as fast as possible to push out as much as they can as fast as they can. So they’re gonna give you goals, and then you know what? If you make those goals, they’re gonna increase the goals. But they’ll be yelling at you all the time. It’s like the military. They have to break you down so they can turn you into what they want you to be. So they’re going to tell you, ‘You’re not good enough, you’re not good enough, you’re not good enough,’ to make you work harder. Don’t say, ‘This is the best I can do.’ Say, ‘I’ll try,’ even if you know you can’t do it. Because if you say, ‘This is the best I can do,’ they’ll let you go. They hire and fire constantly, every day. You’ll see people dropping all around you. But don’t take it personally and break down or start crying when they yell at you.”

Which is worse then, online shopping or in the store? I guess it depends on each store, each warehouse, each item… Instead of buying an extra item because it’s only a few clicks away we should consider the social and environmental impact of each item and live with what we have or buy used before we buy new.