My Amazon Prime conflict

Amazon's Prime shipping program is an insanely wonderful convenience, particularly for someone who buys as many books, CDs, and DVDs as I do. If you don't know about Prime, it's a simple arrangement: You pay Amazon a $79 annual fee, and just about everything that Amazon sells comes to you with free two-day shipping. There's no minimum order size, so if you see a single paperback or a CD you want, you just order it, it ships the next day, and you have it two days later. Often, it arrives sooner.

I love it.

Amazon's Prime shipping program is drowning me in cardboard and shipping materials, wasting untold gallons of shipping fuel, and increasing my carbon footprint enormously. It also (all too often successfully) tempts me to make dumb impulse purchases. (No, I'm not including in this category Recon 2023; that one could be a winner. Maybe.) Yes, I know all of these bad aspects are the result of my use of the program, and I could wait to bunch orders, shop locally more often, and so on, but Amazon's great prices and this insanely fast gratification, coupled with the huge lack of free time in my life, make it irresistible.

I hate it.

How do I resolve this conflict? Right now, I don't; I just order whenever I feel like it, and I try to take small solace from the fact that our household recycles everything we reasonably can.

It does, though, often bother me.