Prime Numbers

We are members of Amazon Prime. Why did we decide to help make Jeff Bezos richer? He makes our lives more frictionless and sedentary, allowing us to embrace our inner sloth.

We like the efficiency of saving time and gas, and are willing to pay extra to reduce aggravations; before COVID hit, Prime Video was our sole subscription streaming service (supplemented with one dollar movie and TV series rentals from the local library); finally, MotE abhors shopping.

I was curious to see how our spending on Prime in the months before and after COVID compared, so I proudly present an entirely unscientific study of one family.

Are we channeling boredom into (gasp!) gratuitous unnecessary purchases?

Here’s what the data show:

January 2020: $122.78

February 2020: $144.38

April 2020: $256.65

May 2020: $211.58

When I break down the spending, it mostly falls into normal categories (healthcare, nonperishable food, replacing electronic cables that deteriorate with use, minor home repairs). The outlier items that appear to be directly related to COVID include a new thermometer, printer ink and a printhead cleaner kit from our ill-fated attempt to repair a found printer, and toilet paper purchased when panicked hoarders cleaned out in-store supplies. These items total $72.71. One might additionally argue that a budget standing desk for my laptop (purchased because I was developing back pain from excessive sitting due to more time at home) could be tangentially attributed to COVID, adding another $45.34 to the total.

These gratuitous COVID expenditures total $113.05. Might that explain the increased spending? If half of that gratuitous total ($ 113.05/2 = $56.53) were subtracted from the after COVID months’ spending, April would be $200.02 and May would be $155.05. So April remains a bit higher.

But are we comparing apples to apples? A better comparison would be to look at April and May of 2019 to look for increases in year over year spending. Here’s that that reveals:

April 2019: $ 266.21

May 2019: $ 55.74

Pretty large variation there. April 2019 was high because we restocked certain items in bulk (household cleaning supplies, muesli) that we tend to purchase 2-4 times per year. April also included $ 75 in gift cards for children’s birthday parties. Still, April spending increased in 2020.

How do I interpret this increase? With the additional time we all reclaimed at home, we had greater opportunity to pay attention to our surroundings, taking inventory and noticing supplies that ran low.

The typical batching of Amazon Prime orders for things like household cleaning supplies usually occurs when a particular supply runs out. Instead, I suspect we ordered supplies that were dwindling in advance. Restocking shelves offered us some much-needed distraction during COVID.

If you have other suggestions or feedback on how to improve methodology, provided it does not require me to sift through more old Amazon orders, I’d love to hear it.