In May of last year, I canceled my Amazon Prime membership.

The pandemic had just devastated New York City. Some Amazon warehouse workers protested their working conditions, demanding hazard pay and adequate sick leave. Two Amazon engineers spoke up in solidarity — and were fired.

Enough was enough. And so, after being a Prime member since 2014, I quit.

One year later, I don’t miss any of it.

Do I still buy shit I don’t need on other websites? Sadly, yes. But let me tell you, that $119 Prime membership fee is an anchor. Once you fork that over, any product that doesn’t include “free” Prime shipping seems like a waste of money.

I put “free” in quotation marks for a reason. Last week, the attorney general for Washington, D.C., filed a lawsuit. It claims Amazon punishes merchants who sell products for less elsewhere on the internet, including on their own websites. How? By limiting their visibility on Amazon. Conveniently, one way companies can increase their visibility is to pay Amazon a hefty commission to handle their merchandise.

As Matt Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, put it in his BIG newsletter, “the reason you can’t find better prices isn’t because Amazon sells stuff cheap, but because it forces everyone else to sell stuff at higher prices. All of this is done so Amazon can continue to offer ‘free shipping’ while using access to its hundred million plus Prime members as a cudgel to force third party sellers to pay high fees.”