This Post about How I Guilt-Buy Febreeze On Amazon is Going to be a Goldmine for Marketers

Yesterday, we got the usual Amazon box on our doorstep.  I say usual because we’ve gotten an Amazon or Overstock box filled with furniture and accessories pretty much every day since we’ve moved in, since we’re allergic to buying local furniture that looks like it’s been learning how to crossdress from my Aunt Cecile’s* 1970s Bingo outfits.  Or a bed that looks like it lost a shootout at the OK Corral and as a result was punished by being ripped apart limb by limb and reincarnated into smaller scary furniture. Or….

You get the point.

As a result, we’ve accumulated so much stuff that I’m worried if we move again, we’ll have to work on a three-step procedure to ship it back to Amazon in the same boxes and then on to our new house.

We’ve learned nothing.

So yesterday Mr. B opened the Amazon box and found this:

Mr. B: *opens box* *a minute of silence* Are you serious?

Me: What do you mean?

Jealous Hater: You are balling really hard.

Amazing Person Who Runs Home with Efficiency: How? I just didn’t know if I’d be able to go to the store, so I figured I’d buy it online during lunch before I forgot.

Sarcastic Hater: Yes….so you picked this product that you already know you’ll like, it’s cheap enough that you can take a risk if you don’t, and you’re too lazy to go the 10 minutes to Target so you bought it online.

Genius: Yes.

Fan and Admirer: You’re balling really hard.

At first, I was really proud that I could minimize all of our household tasks by doing them during lunch AND save the earth by not driving the 1.36 miles to Target.

But then I thought. I’ve become one of them. An American.

An American is the worst thing you can be called as an immigrant because Americans do things the easy way, like, for example buying cottage cheese instead of buying buttermilk, boiling it, and hanging the resulting mass to dry in a cheesecloth above the sink for three days where it scares the hell out of your 12-year-old daughter.  Or take their car to a mechanic instead of lying underneath of it lifted in the garage for hours at a time, yelling, “I think THAT part moved that time. Rev the wheels again. ” while said daughter steps gingerly on the gas, crying because she thinks she’s going to inadvertently kill you at some point.  No. Why take it to a mechanic when you could save $12.56?

The same with household items.  You have to go, mercenary-style, from store to store, Target to Walmart to the Dollar Store, looking for the coupons that will save you $.35 on the bottle of Febreeze and arguing with the store manager because the coupon is really for two Febreezes and you just want one and you want your money back but sir that’s impossible but what kind of business are you that rips off immigrants are you racist i’m never coming back here again oh alright here it is mike give the gentleman his thirty-five cents have a nice day sir and when you’re done, hold up the bottle aloft in victory, along with the receipt, and give out a yell. “This is how it’s done, kids! Those Americans aren’t getting my thirty-five cents! This is why WE won World War II.”

If you buy it online, without comparison shopping, without stressful yelling, you are going back on your roots and everything you stand for, and why did we bring you to America?  To sit and type www.com all day and not comparison shop on Amazon and Alice , like all the other Americans?

The shame. The shame.

The shame of a bottle of Citrus Febreeze

in an Amazon box.

On my doorstep.

I think I am

American.

Now.

Hold me.

*Not true.  The Soviet Union had a defecit on first names in the 1950s and 1960s and my aunts had to stand in line for names like Alena and Svetalana but unfortunately they ran out of all of them by the time my aunts got to the front and  all of them are named Lyuidmilla.