The Amazon Public Wish List

ON THE DAY after Christmas, when Americans in their tens of thousands are happily returning unwanted Christmas presents, I am afraid that it is my duty to report that there is disquieting news from the on-line shopping front. I learned purely by chance of this unhappy development, one that I had not heard reported previously in the mainstream media or indeed any other, more reputable, media outlet. And I was shocked.

A young acquaintance told me that Amazon now allows you to publish your Amazon Wish List to the world. If your friends and admirers are wondering what to buy you for your birthday, they can save themselves a lot of trouble by going to Amazon.com, entering your name or your e-mail address and checking your Wish List.

Many of us have grudgingly accepted the idea of gift registries for weddings and even for babies. There was in the old days a solemn bourgeois gravitas about the department store wedding registry, and indeed a definite social utility to the rationalization and systemization of the harrowing business of choosing gifts for newly-weds, that is, if we pass over in silence that the wedding gift problem was created by the department store phenomenon in the first place. In the old days, there wasn’t much that you could give a newly wedded couple. But when the first miracle occurred on 34th Street (the opening of Macy’s, not the later, hyped up affair) a whole world of choice opened up to the human race. Women learned that they could gift each other without limit, and so they did.

Now Amazon has extended the sensible and practical gift registry concept beyond all bounds, encouraging rampant and unnecessary advertisement of needs, wants, and wishes online. With just a couple of clicks, you can publish your Wish List for all the world to see. How crass! How horribly dirty! How incredibly low!

But it’s worse than that.

Up to now, we American shoppers could at least hide our shameful little lusts away in the back of our minds, reasonably safe from the prying eyes and ears of judgmental liberals. An American man was required to advertise his choice in career, his choice of tailor, his taste in whisky, his house, and of course, his taste in women, but not much more. But now everything has changed. Now a man will be judged by the taste he displays in his Wish List. It’s just another darn thing that the modern man, pushed and shoved and pummeled as he is already, would rather not have to do.

The menace of an Amazon public Wish List is that it threatens to expose the universal banality of our tiresome little appetites. We are all so boringly alike; we want what everyone else wants. Take a look at Amazon’s top seller lists. The top-selling book this hour is Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (pre-order); the top selling jewelry item is a Genuine Amethyst Peridot Citrine Crystal Chip Bracelet (for $3.99!); the top selling electronics item is a Philips DVP642 DivX-Certified Progressive-Scan DVD Player. What do you think? I agree; there’s no other word for it: Boring!

If I were to have a public Wish List, it would have to be more about me than about what I want: it would advertise what I thought that someone like me ought to want, not what I really want. I’d be like the insufferable college professor who feels the need not just to be the world genius on the Duke of Wellington’s opposition to the Reform Bill but an expert on wine and a sophisticated art connoisseur as well.

Of course, you may say that I’ve missed the point entirely. The real problem with Amazon’s new wheeze, you’ll say, is that they will use America’s Wish List in their marketing, figuring out how to market new products to us based upon the contents of our Wishes. You’re wrong, of course. A bigger danger is that Amazon’s Director of World Domination will be able to call up Scholastic Books any time of the day or night and ask the Harry Potter account executive how much it would be worth to know how many copies of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince are backed up in Pre-order.

Could Amazon’s public Wish List bring the end of civilization as we know it? It could, but somehow I can’t get too exercised about it. You see, I don’t plan to use the Amazon public Wish List. Not because I don’t want other people to know how boring I am, but for a mean-spirited, selfish reason. I’d rather go out and buy stuff myself. And anyway, I buy my on-line books at BarnesandNoble.com. On Amazon, you have to pay sales tax on orders shipped to Washington State.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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