Dundrum Town Centre opened its doors in 2005 when I was in college. My friends and I skipped our art history lecture – we were studying Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project that semester, a collection of his writings on the birth of window shopping and a consumer’s desire for stuff they don’t need – and made instead for H&M. I can’t remember if we bought anything.
What I remember about this and other global launches is the breathless hysteria. When Argos came to our hometown in the mid-1990s, my siblings and I fought to paw the catalogue over our Rice Krispies. When Ikea launched its flagship store in the Republic, hordes queued overnight to buy one of their unpronounceable sofas.
What is it about these retail giants gracing our shores that whips us into such an acquisitive frenzy?
Part of the draw is the lure of deals and variety. We’re a small postcolonial country surrounded by water. Until recently we didn’t have the population or the supply chains to sustain a demand for loads of stuff. (In the hit comedy Catastrophe, protagonist Sharon concedes that while the Irish are “a simple people”, her move from rural Ireland to London was motivated in part by greater shopping opportunities).
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But part of it, I think, is more existential. Call it postcolonial status anxiety. You buy a Zara dress or a Kallax bookshelf but, as Benjamin might have put it, you also buy into a version of yourself as a modern, European consumer.
Irish consumers have always had a grá for pastures less green, then, whether its nipping over the Border for a better deal, shipping to AddressPal to bypass fees, or joining a predawn queue for glazed confectionery. In the past, the friction associated with this “shopping around” helped to sustain allegiance to local retailers as much as any national fealty to the Guaranteed Irish logo.
Now Amazon.ie has launched, along with a dedicated fulfilment centre on the outskirts of the capital. It promises to smooth away the friction of shipping costs, queues and delays from this already widespread practice – at least from the consumer end. Customers can shop 200 million products priced in euro with next-day shipping. But in the frictionless future Amazon imagines, local sellers aren’t competing so much as learning how to live among giants.
Amazon claims that the new store will showcase local producers through its “Brands of Ireland” offerings, (a clever marketing ploy where Amazon styles itself as nurturing local retailers as opposed to simply absorbing them into its giant capitalist maw). Alongside an entire segment dedicated to tea on the landing page, there are scenic products such as Baileys chocolate, local skincare, homewares and Portwest men’s waterproof overalls.
The first thing prospective buyers logging on to the new Irish website are greeted with is a web banner with “Céad Míle Fáilte” set against a cartoon backdrop of outsize Irish figures doing whimsical Irishy things such as playing the harp, skedaddling through a field, wearing ugly sweaters and hefting giant Amazon deliveries over verdant countryside. In the background is a turbine like a child’s windmill chasing fluffy clouds, a cheery nod to the offshore energy that promises to power Amazon’s data centres in the near future.
Amazon Web Services established in Ireland in 2004, when shopping still meant visiting town centres. Positive externalities such as the favourable tax environment and temperate climate made the land of a thousand welcomes the ideal host for thousands of data servers that, along with Microsoft and Google, will account for more than 30 per cent of the country’s energy consumption by 2027. This, and not Amazon.ie, is the company’s real legacy on Hibernian soil.
[ The Irish Times view on Amazon.ie: good news for someOpens in new window ]
The Minister for Enterprise, Tourism and Employment, Peter Burke, described the launch as a chance for Irish SMEs to “expand their online presence and grow their business ... reach global markets and help create domestic jobs”. Many SMEs are more circumspect. “It will decimate small Irish businesses,” one business owner tells me, whose company has sold on Amazon for over a decade. Alongside fulfilment and referral fees (Amazon takes between 8 and 15 per cent of every third-party sale on its platform) and high costs associated with returns and chargebacks, sellers can expect to absorb all the friction that buyers don’t want to feel in their transnational and online purchases.
And Amazon is not here just to develop a mutually beneficial arrangement with the brands of Ireland. It’s not just hosting them; it’s studying them. Amazon can use the presence of second-party sellers as test data to learn about an emerging market. In time this data can be used to market Amazon’s own cheaper rival products and undercut those same businesses. Like the customer data in its servers, or the wind off Irish shores, this is just another resource to be extracted.
We’re all probably familiar with the vast economy of scale that allows Amazon to habitually charge less for a Sally Rooney novel than our local bookseller – but less so with the red tape that makes it hard for smaller businesses selling on Amazon. These include but aren’t limited to opaque selling, searching and listing algorithms, difficulties proving brand authorisation, or even that you hold the trademark for your own company.
Kennys Bookshop in Galway, a bricks and mortar and online store that has been in operation longer than Amazon, is unequivocal. “Local [Irish] businesses pay their taxes, provide shops on the high street, employ local staff and put money back in their communities,” the retailer posted to Instagram shortly after Amazon announced its plans to launch an Irish online store.
This is the great Amazon plantation. Local sellers will have to get creative, or get comfortable being the scenery in someone else’s empire.
