The Secret Meaning of Prime Day
5 min read
This year marks the tenth Prime Day, the shopping holiday that Amazon invented for itself in 2015, in honor of the company’s 20th anniversary. The marketing effort was so successful, according to Amazon, that sales exceeded those from the previous year’s record-breaking Black Friday. Early Prime Day success was also measured in Instant Pot 7-in-1 multifunctional pressure cookers: 24,000 were purchased on the first Prime Day; on the second, 215,000.
The event has only grown since then, and not just in revenues but in meaning. Black Friday celebrates (and laments) the commercialization of holiday gifts—things people want, and that people want to give. Prime Day, as a ritual observance, has a different focus: not the desirable, but the ordinary. It celebrates the stuff you buy for boring reasons, or for no particular reason at all. This looseness is the point: Laptop computers are on sale, but also batteries; you can find a deal on ceramic cookery, or microfiber cleaning cloths. Yet what was once essentially a colossal summer tag sale, created for the sole purpose of enriching one of the world’s largest companies, has somehow managed to take on certain trappings of an actual holiday. I hate to admit it, but Prime Day has attained the status of tradition.
When I say, “It’s Prime Day,” you know what I mean. In that respect, it reminds me of other holidays, in the way that other holidays suggest a time of year, a thing to do, and a memory of how they’ve been before. Easter, Purim, and Día de Muertos are repeating events that work like keyframes in our lives. Their rituals used to be grounded in cultural systems such as religion, but everything is fair game now. Today is Prime Day; but it’s also corn-fritters day. A couple of weeks ago I somehow missed National Ian Day. Arbitrary, invented celebrations have become so numerous that they descend into parody. To make every day a holiday is to undermine the very idea of allocating a day on the calendar to mark something notable.
But Amazon has, I must confess, earned such a marker. Although the company was not the first to sell goods via the internet, it did become the world’s symbol for doing so. For two decades it expanded and perfected that craft, and then for 10 years more it marked the fact with Prime Day. I have spent nearly 30 years buying things on Amazon, and over those years I have earned degrees, moved cities, had children who themselves grew up, started hobbies and abandoned them, grayed and wizened. The dumb certainty of Amazon’s made-up holiday accompanied me, and now I can recall previous Prime Days like prior Halloweens.
I lost my first Amazon account, from 1997, but my current one still stretches back 20 years. Looking back across my purchase history, I find a surprisingly touching summary of my life through commerce. At the start, mostly media: the third Lord of the Rings movie on DVD, Angelina Ballerina for my then-2-year-old daughter, esoteric books for my scholarly research. By 2005, the lure of the everything store had taken hold, inspiring my purchase of a little Le Creuset demi kettle whose loud whistle and tiny capacity I forgot I remembered. I bought not one but two CDs by the French dance-pop artist Alizée—a fact I can’t believe I’m admitting in a national magazine. I would rip and listen to those tracks, beside others, on my iPod Nano on the international flights I took to give lectures using the Kensington wireless laser pointer I also bought from Amazon. I bought microwavable noodles, a red pocket camera as a Valentine’s Day gift for my wife, a 1080p HD television when such a resolution would have been impressive, a 52-piece socket set I still own and use regularly, the unreasonably high-end Italian ice-cream maker that runs my gelato hobby.
I am embarrassed to have felt feelings while browsing my Amazon purchase history, but Amazon—like any brand that manages to infuse itself into American life (Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Apple)—has had a role in my actions, and therefore my accomplishments, memories, accidents, and errors. Prime Day makes me think back to all the purchases I made before the holiday existed, when the mere act of buying something from a website felt miraculous. My first-ever purchase on Amazon.com, when the site still sold only books, was of three copies of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s book about his contemporary Michel Foucault for a (very 1990s) reading group. The existence of the site allowed me to realize my interests and identity at the time, in a way that was distinctively Amazonian. Now the goods I buy (and sometimes try to return) reflect the person I’ve become: a guy who needs foam paintbrushes, bags of roasted coffee beans, weatherproof outdoor-outlet enclosures, M6-size machine screws; a guy who would sooner read the instruction manual for his neighbor’s drill than revisit French philosophy from the 1980s.
Amazon wants you to celebrate Prime Day by buying things. But you can mark the event in other ways. Maybe think of buying things for others. Prime Day strips Black Friday of its gift-giving aspects, but these might be worth reclaiming—perhaps with an eye toward everyday necessities: a gift of diapers, or a ream of paper towels with a ribbon, or a package of the deodorant your partner likes. Another option is to use the day to avoid all online purchases—or even as an excuse to cancel your Prime membership. Or else just look back at all the stuff you’ve bought this year. In reviewing my own order history today, I wondered whether I might like to share past orders with my friends and family, as a kind of retail reminiscence.
Amazon itself seems more or less indifferent to the meaning that Prime Day has accrued, as a moment for reflection on the delight and absurdity of the online shopping age. The company has tried only to supersize its holiday, extending what was once an actual Prime “Day” to 30 hours of discounted prices in 2017, then 36 hours in 2018, before landing, in 2019, on the excessive conclusion that it should be a two-day event. Amazon “celebrates”—if that’s the word for what this $2 trillion company is doing—Prime Day the way it always has, by moving goods and collecting dollars. Today it’s hawking Amazon Echo devices, prebiotic sodas, dietary-supplement powders, electric toothbrushes, and pickleball paddles, among a zillion other products. There is no logic to this sale. The ritual is randomness.
Prime Day’s holiday spirit is simple: It doesn’t matter what I buy, so long as I buy something. But Amazon’s accomplishment, and the cultural gravity of its annual event, comes from having done the opposite. It has given me a way to find what matters in the things I buy. Through itself or the copycats and competitors it inspired, Amazon popularized a way of life, and one that we’ve been living for 30 years now. Like the summer solstice, that’s notable enough to be observed.
