December 12, 2025
Over the summer I canceled my Amazon Prime subscription. I wasn't buying things terribly often, I wasn't using the streaming, and I wanted to give less of my money to Amazon (and therefore Jeff Bezos) in general. Which meant doing actual Christmas shopping this year, instead of Christmas type-stuff-into-a-box-and-hope-for-the-best.
And it... kinda worked. I don't know if it's just that so much of sales has moved online, or if it's because the bottom is going to fall out of the economy in the new year, or if I just picked opportune times to shop; but nothing was particularly busy when I went. I even found a serendipitous present at the mall that I otherwise wouldn't have while browsing around. In Akron on Black Friday I found a little marketplace with small individual sales booths, like Alexandria's Torpedo Factory.
All-in-all it went better than previous years: I'm only buying gift cards for one person, who I only ever see for a few minutes a year. Everyone else gets all presents with no cards for the first time in I-don't-know-how-long.
So yeah, not only is doing Christmas shopping in person (still) doable, it's probably preferable for a few reasons. It just requires that one get off one's ass before the middle of December.
