Buying a birthday present for a 3 year-old grandson...

... when I'm in Hong Kong and he's in Brighton, England. (or, as recently, in Wales. Before latest lockdowns!  So all perfectly legal.... I assume...)

Rocky, striding out in Wales
(cropped from the original below)

First I go to my default, which is Amazon. 

A quick word about my relationship with Amazon. It goes back to 1994, when I found it on my Mosaic browser (remember them?). I was blown away. Books on the internet! Wow! 

I told  friends about "this amazing bookshop, where you can buy books over the internet!” You click on the book, you pay, and it arrives! 

I ordered some books. Two days later they arrived. As promised. And I thought, wow, what neat and simple idea! What genius! Why I hadn't thought of it? And how did the nerd Jeff Bezos come up with this killer idea? 

I was an early adopter. I've used Amazon to buy heaps of books and now to buy just about everything there. In the 26 years since it opened, Amazon, for me, has done nothing but deliver, on time and on budget. I have never had a bad experience with Amazon. Not a single one.

During the pandemic, they've been delivering more than ever... And, again, not just for me. For the world. 

We bought Amazon stock some years back. It's also delivered. [I know, I do know, about employee dissatisfaction and a lot of bad stuff about the company; not to mention the most recent exercises of brute, in-Cloud, power). 

So, to Amazon. And of course all the toys and games for 3 y-o are what you'd expect, pretty much in the Fire engine and police-car category.

Then... bling! I thought, why not buy something from an enviro company?  A fair trade company. An ethical company. An eco-friendly company. I wanted one in the UK, googled and found tenthousandvillages.com which has a lot of funky, fun stuff. I ordered a bunch -- a gourd piggy-bank from Peru, an embroidered dog from Nepal, hand puppets from India -- for Rocky and a couple extra for his mum. Went to Check-out ... only to find they don't deliver anywhere outside the US. The drop-down menu gives no clue of this, as it has every country in the world. I I don't get why, when they could just as easily ship o/s as in the US, by courier if not mail. But that was it. 

Try again, focus again on the UK, and get to wearthlondon.com, which I confirm is a UK site, but, oh my goodness, the offerings are soooooo booooring.  Bamboo toothbrushes or "ethical bathroom sets"!? Be still, my beating heart! Other sites were not much better. 

So, kind of reluctantly, but with a sense of having tried to do the right thing, with some relief, back to dependable Amazon, which delivers anything to anywhere. Even England. Thanks Jeff!

The original that I cropped for above phote

ADDED: I read the book about Jeff Bezos, “The Anywhere Store”. It’s a good read, with insights into what drives Jeff Bezos. 

ADDED (ii): A friend had a book published and when I said I’d buy a copy, she asked that I do so via an Australian site, something like Aussiebooks.com.au, because she hated the cruel capitalist Amazon. 

I tried to buy it on the Aussie site. And failed. Again it was because they didn’t deliver outside Australia, and you only find that out at the check-out after going through all the palaver and form filling. Grrr.... So I bought it on Amazon. The place where my friend had said “please don’t; I hate the way they treat their staff”. To which I’d only comment that any time you’re running an organisation with hundreds of thousands of staff all over the world, there’s bound to be a problems somewhere. In fact, the average wage at Amazon is some 20% higher than the state requirements (in the US). All these Social Justice type companies would do rather better if they just provided the same level of service as those horrid capitalist companies do....