Shop Wherever You Want on Prime Day: Should You Ignore #SmallOverPrime?
You’re reading this on your phone. Chip and Jo’s homewares brand is available at Target. My spiritual director wears an Apple Watch. Our kiddos have Nugget play couches.
WHAT DO THOSE EXAMPLES HAVE IN COMMON?
They all include Christians patronizing or partnering with companies whose values may not align with ours.
For the past few years I’ve seen well-intentioned Catholics bring up the “Small Over Prime” movement, in which they ask their fans to shop their items (or those of fellow Catholic businesses) on their sites rather than visiting Amazon on Prime Day (which is usually sometime in July).
While I applaud their mighty efforts to take 0.001% out of Amazon’s (70%? 80%?) share of the market, and I might consider shopping from them that day or whenever, we’ll also shop on Amazon if we need something those days, thank you very much.
A recent Pints With Aquinas video addressed this dilemma and the message resonated w/us: (And I’ve brought up his video before when talking about why we still buy from woke companies.)
As we understood it, he concluded that we should be free to patronize those organizations whose actions we may deem questionable BECAUSE OUR INTENTIONS don’t match such actions.
(His explanation was longer and more philosophical, but that’s what I took from it.)
MEANING: A Catholic iPhone/Android user didn’t necessarily buy their phone to directly support those companies’ pro-choice agendas: they simply needed a phone. We don’t buy Nuggets for the sake of their drag queen partners: we just think the couches are so fun for the whole family*. We shop at Target and Walmart because we feel like it.
(*Though for what it’s worth, we stopped buying from Nugget and got our most recent set from a company called Foam Oh.)
And so on.
As long as our will, our intent, has nothing to do with those companies’ immoral behaviors, we should be free to patronize them because, well, we still need their products, and their Conservative counterparts more often than not fall short.
Don’t forget that some small, Catholic and Christian (be they Protestant- or Orthodox-founded) businesses actually rely on Amazon to reach bigger audiences, too: Therefore, not supporting Amazon out of a noble-but-misguided sense of duty and good feelings can end up hurting them!
So shop wherever you want this Prime Day and any day. YOU know your conscience best.
