It occurred to me today that I buy a lot of stuff on the internet.

We have four Alexa devices in our home; if you don’t know what an Alexa device is, it is a voice-activated, internet-enabled smart device that you can use to do different things in your home, in connection with Amazon. We are BIG Amazon fans in our house.

The Alexa devices have become a big part of how our home works. The lights in our kitchen, living room, and master bedroom are all controlled by Alexa. We ask her for information about the weather –A LOT– and when we have questions about the definitions of words
–> we are all pretty decent readers in our house, so it’s not uncommon for someone in the house to be coming across a word, in a book, that they don’t know the meaning of.

When it comes time to put a grocery item on our shopping list, everyone in the house knows that we do that through Alexa. When one of the kids notices that we are out of Lucky Charms, they walk up to an Alexa and they say, “Alexa, add Lucky Charms to the shopping list”. Then, when it’s time to go shopping, we check our Alexa app on our phone to get the shopping list taken care of, lickety split.

We even use Alexa to buy items directly from Amazon, which is even more convenient. When I notice that I’ve used the last furnace filter, I walk up to an Alexa and I say, “Alexa, reorder furnace filters”, and she’ll say back, “Based on your order history, I’ve found 3M Filtrete furnace filters. The six-pack of filters is $22.89. I’ve put the order in your Amazon cart for review. To purchase, say, ‘Buy it now’.” At that point, I reply, “Buy it now”, and the order gets placed and it shows up at the house a couple of days later. We do this with candy and laundry detergent and bar soap and dryer sheets and all sort of other stuff.

Like I said, we are big Amazon fans at our house.

And I’ve heard people say that they’d be nervous about 1) having all of those Alexa devices listening to you all of the time, and 2) having Amazon know so much about your purchasing habits. In my experience, people who are nervous about those kinds of things often 1) have something that they’re trying to hide as they protect their privacy rights, and 2) think more highly of themselves than they ought. I’m pretty sure I’m not important enough for Amazon to care much about what my family is saying around the dinner table, and I’m also pretty sure that it’s not a matter of national security that Amazon knows that I order Downy Unstoppables about once a week.

* * *

Up until just recently, I would say that the strangest thing that I’ve ever ordered online was a mattress. That was an interesting experience.

A few years back, my wife and I were in need of a new mattress; I think you know it’s time for a new mattress when it takes mountain climbing experience in order to get out of the divots that you’ve worn in your side of the bed. Anyway, we started thinking about going to stores and trying out mattresses, and the thought of doing that started to overwhelm me. So, instead, I started looking on the internet, to see if I could do some advance research on mattresses, to try to ease the experience that I expected that we were going to end up having in these mattress stores.

What I ended up finding was that you could buy mattresses online.

So, I pitched the idea to my wife, and it wasn’t a hard sell, but it did require a little bit of persuasion. We ended up getting a mattress from Wayfair that arrived in a box that was two-feet by two-feet in diameter, and about as tall as my wife.

When we opened the box, it said inside that we shouldn’t open the box unless we were in our bedroom with the box. So we closed the box.

Then, we took the box, to our bedroom, and opened it (again) and followed the instructions inside. The mattress was shrink-wrapped into a tube-shape inside the box. So, when we cut the mattress’s shrink wrap, it –over the course of several hours– took its appropriate shape on the bedroom floor.

And now, I can say, a few years down the line, that it was a great internet purchase. But, I can’t any longer say that it’s the strangest thing we’ve bought online.

* * *

Moments ago, I just bought the craziest thing that I’ve ever bought on the internet. My wife and I just bought a car from Carvana. Let me tell you about how weird that was.

I’m not an expert when it comes to buying a car, but I’ve done it a few times. Often enough, at least, to start to understand how the whole process works. So, when it came to buying a car online, it’s pretty similar to the experience of buying one in person at a dealership.

I know that the big difference, for me, was not being sure of what I was doing as we were ‘checking out’ with the car that we’d chosen, but then again, I guess I feel like that when I’m in the dealership, as well, filling out all of the paperwork. I will say that I was pretty nervous, making sure that I was clicking on the right things, making sure that I was reading all of the fine print. That final button on the final page of the check-out process, the button that says, “Submit Carvana Order”, I had to nudge myself into clicking that button.

Of course, the problem here is that I feel a little guilty about taking advantage of the dealership that we used to get some test-driving done (sorry, Wendi). The idea of buying a car that we’d never even driven before was a bridge-too-far in our minds, and my wife –it will be her car when it arrives next week– was adamant about getting to drive what we were going to end up buying. And, we most definitely would have bought from the dealership, if they’d had what we were wanting.

That’s one of the most appealing things about buying stuff on the internet, at least in my mind; if I want something specific, and my local grocery store, or local hardware store, or local car dealership, doesn’t have exactly what I’m looking for, I can probably find that specific thing on the internet. My wife wanted some specific things in her next vehicle, and she wanted them at a specific price point, and that wasn’t available from the dealership. Shopping online gives me, as a consumer, a higher level of control over the product that I’m getting.

That’s all I have to say about that.