The portal to endless shopping: Amazon Haul has items $20 or less

In mid-November, as election post-mortems focused on inflation worries and the holiday shopping season began to pick up steam, Amazon introduced a new storefront.

Known as Amazon Haul, and currently available only on the app and in the United States, it promises “a place to discover even more affordable fashion, home, lifestyle, electronics and other products with ultralow prices.” Everything on the site is $20 or less. One long-sleeved emerald-green stretch velvet minidress is $12.99; opaque purple tights are $3.99; and a cherry-red elastic belt is $1.99.

The offerings all come from third-party sellers and take two or so weeks for delivery, which is presumably the source of some of the price cuts. The more you buy, the cheaper the tab, according to the site: “5% off orders $50 and over, and 10% off orders $75 or more.” And for a limited time, customers get an extra 65% off at checkout.

But is this really about savings? Or is it about something more complicated and potentially insidious? Maria Boschetti, a spokesperson for Amazon, said that the company was simply responding to customer behavior, giving them more of what they wanted. That’s probably true. But it seems that what Amazon thinks customers want isn’t just more money in the bank. It’s the ability to acquire more and more stuff.

At least judging by the name of the new store.

Amazon declined to comment on the inspiration behind the “Haul” moniker, but presumably that’s the whole point of the concept — at least as a defining principle of 21st-century shopping. By naming its new store after the practice, Amazon is simply offering what Ken Pucker, an adjunct professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, called “truth in advertising.”

Perhaps it is time to actually face what that means.

The term “haul” became popular on YouTube in the early 2000s as a reference to fashion and beauty buying sprees and entered the Urban Dictionary in 2009. Vloggers would share their purchases with their followers, tapping into the growing sense of shopping as vicarious thrill and emotional sustenance.

Facilitated by the dual rise of fast fashion with its emphasis on novelty for all and the explosion of social media and influencer culture, hauls became a form of performance art and shared practice, a cultural phenomenon. They were boosted in 2022 by the arrival of the instant fashion digital marketplace in the form of Shein, which adds up to a reported 10,000 garments a day to its site, and Temu.

At this point, there are 17 million posts under the hashtag #haul on TikTok alone, according to the platform’s analytics, with 16,000 added in the last seven days — and an additional 1 million videos on YouTube and 3.7 million posts on Instagram. There are subhashtags like #sheinhaul and #targethaul, and this fall, back to school began “flooding” social media, according to Vogue. You can spend hours staring avidly at strangers surrounded by veritable mountains of new things.

“It became almost a human right to participate in consumer culture,” said Lucie Greene, the founder of trend forecasting firm Light Years. “We’ve gotten to the point where you feel left out of society if you are not part of the shopping cycle.” And the shopping cycle, which used to have ebbs and flows, is now less a cycle than a constant stream, a fire hose of product.

“The hyper-consumption that triggers, just because of the newness and the price point, creates this instant need for the next thing,” Pucker said. “And if you can satisfy that at a price point that’s half what it was, you can buy twice as many.”

To be sure, there is nothing wrong with shopping, nothing wrong with the concept of treats and extras. There is a human desire for beauty and its delight and self-expression. People should have access to that pleasure, at whatever price point they can manage. There is something comforting and reassuring about abundance, especially at a time when there seems to be a free-floating sense of malaise in the air.

But that’s not what hauls are about.

Hauls are the shopping equivalent of a dopamine-chasing overdose. That is the essence of the idea, which is less about any one thing than about the sheer number of things. It’s the elevation of quantity over quality, muchness as an end in itself. Like social media itself, and smartphones, the haul creates its own subset of compulsive behavior.

“It accelerates the consumption addiction,” Greene said. That addiction isn’t officially a part of the DSM-5, the most recent version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but it is recognized by the Cleveland Clinic and the journal World Psychiatry, among other official bodies.

By embracing hauls, we are training ourselves, in a Pavlovian way, to chase the thrill of delivery, the joy of unboxing. By sharing endless haul videos, we are seducing other people into sharing our compulsion for more and more and more, because the more people who buy into any one idea, the less bad we feel about our own behavior.

But by focusing on the stuff — on the pleasure of piles, the allure of excess — each thing becomes less important, which means it is even more disposable. When the excitement of getting all that stuff wears off, the stuff itself doesn’t really matter. It just takes up space. And that means it’s easy to throw away.

There’s a tendency to be preachy about the sustainability of all this. And there’s no question it is an issue: in terms of the human labor that almost always bears the brunt of low-cost production, the chemicals and waste and carbon emissions involved, and the piles of disposable stuff that end up in landfills.

“It’s the privatization of profit and the socialization of cost,” Pucker said.