Leave me the fuck alone

I hate to shop. For a long time, I used to think it was just a personal thing, but I'm starting to think that's its really not my fault.

The other day I tripped over a song my Micah Wolf that impressed me so much that I decided to buy the CD. (remember CDs?)

Micah isn't quite Aerosmith, so finding someone who was selling his older album was a little difficult. Amazon had it, but I don't like Amazon, so I looked around a bit in the hopes that someone else would be selling it to no avail. So, back to Amazon.

It was only a few steps into the purchasing process that I remembered why I hate them so much. "Please create an account?" Why the fuck do I need an account? I buy something off Amazon once every few years -- I don't need, nor do I want an account.

I sure as fuck don't want them keeping a copy of my credit card numbers in their database. I want them to execute the transaction, then delete the CC #s.

But no, they are under the misguided assumption that I'm going to buy shit off them so often that the repeated typing of my credit card number will cause carpal tunnel syndrome. Good to know they're looking out for me.

Try to imagine this kind of bullshit in the real world:

While on a road trip, I walk into a convenience store to buy myself a chocolate milk, because road tripping is parching work.
Clerk: Do you have an account with us, sir?
Me: No, I just want to buy this choco, because I'm horribly parched from road tripping.
Clerk: That's OK, we can create an account right now, for you.
Me: No thanks, I just want to give you these legal tender notes so I can walk out of here with this delicious dairy product without the store's alarms going off.
Clerk: I can't check you out unless you have an account, sir. Please choose a password.
Me: Why the hell do I need a password to buy milk?
Clerk: The password is used to secure your information.
Me: What information? If you just take the dollar, we can be done.
Clerk: It's not that easy, sir. I'll need your billing address and certain other information, such as what type of condom you prefer.
Me: What? No. I'll tell you what, I'm going to leave this dollar on the counter and walk out of here. You do whatever you have to to keep you manager happy.
At this point, the clerk hits the panic button and I get arrested for shoplifting.

Scary thing is that many real companies already do this, they just don't require it. Instead, they bribe you with measly discounts if you use one of their "advantage" cards. Internet vendors are a little more demanding, though, and Amazon is the worst I've seen, absolutely refusing to sell you anything unless you have an account.

If you don't know why they do this, it's pretty simple, really: They track everything you buy, when you buy it, how you clicked to get there, and everything else about your shopping habits, then they remove your name from it and dump it into a huge database with the same information about every other customer, and sell that data to marketing firms, which turn it into pie charts, and bar charts, and spend endless hours in board meetings trying to figure out what the peaks and valleys in those charts really mean. They then compile this information into reports that they sell to smaller companies who want to be as rich as Amazon, and their marketing executives then make marketing decisions that are wholly arbitrary anyway.

It's all OK and legal because they remove your name from it.

But first off, I know for a fact that my data is useless. I'm not a consumer whore. I don't buy nearly as much shit as most people, and I don't buy the kind of shit that most people buy. You know that part where it says, "people who bought this also bought ..." -- I never buy any of that stuff, because I'm atypical.

So, the result is that I'm required to do a bunch more work for absolutely no reason. On top of that, Amazon is now storing my credit card number in an account with a password that can potentially be broken!

It's one of those things. In actuality, it's not that big of a deal, but it's a little deal that serves absolutely no purpose, and those irritate me more than many other things.