Dear Amazon

This arrived in my inbox this morning:

A screenshot of an email from Amazon.ca suggesting for some strange reason that I should buy power tools for my father.

Seriously? Fatherhood is more meaningful than power tools...

Dear Amazon,

In general, I don’t mind getting deals and recommendations emails from you, because you know my shopping history and my wish list and so you can easily present me with more interesting books than I have time to read. Having too many books is a problem, but it’s my problem and it’s a good problem to have.

However, can you stop sending me arbitrary gender-normative ones for father’s day and mother’s day? You really know nothing about my parents, so unlike the emails targeted at me, these ones are just annoying, boring, and irrelevant.

Thanks for listening and have a fantastic day!

Malcolm

(I sent them such an email, but got a reply saying “This is an automated response, but it contains information that should help answer your questions.” Obviously, it did not address my concerns. More about this in a later post.)

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