I linked to this on my other blog, but wanted to say a bit about this portion.

Up until my teenage years, ordering something meant it arrived in six or eight weeks — now Amazon can get some packages there on the same goddamned day — the first time it happened, I thought it was a prank. I remember when you couldn’t get every kind of fresh produce year-round — they couldn’t just import that stuff from warmer climates like we do now, which is why I didn’t see a mango or avocado until I was in my 20s.

I’m old enough to remember all of this. Even though I grew up in Florida (North Florida), I didn’t see a mango until my late teens. An avocado was something I saw once or twice, but was not common, and was not something I ate until I was in my late 20s.

Cherries were rare and expensive and exotic.

And as the author mentions, ordering anything from a catalog meant a bare minimum of six weeks of waiting — often far longer. When I saw that Amazon was delivering items in two days routinely (much less same day), I thought it was an impossible, doomed to failure marketing stunt that just could not be true.

Now, though, I use this service all the time. I buy more big-ticket and even everyday items from Amazon than I do from local stores because the selection is so superior and the service is just better.

The world has changed so much since I was a kid, and people tell me it has not.