(^36) The last word
The Amazon nomads
Ross^Mantl
e^business and Amazon is just an extension of
my arm,” says Sean-Patrick Iles, a nomad
who spent weeks driving cross-country dur-
ing Toys R Us’ final days. It was a feeding
frenzy Anderson and others also hit the
road for. “I find the products, and then they
mail them to people.”
Though nomadism offers competitive
advantages, most of the merchants I spoke
with cited more personal reasons for their
profession.
“Freedom,” Jason Wyatt quickly answers
when I ask him why he decided to quit his
job as an aviation electronics technician,
sell his house in Georgia, and buy an RV.
“Janis Joplin once said—though I believe
it was actually Kris Kristofferson’s song—
‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing
left to lose.’ And I found that that’s actually
the truth. Your possessions, you don’t really
own them. They own you. The more you
get rid of, the freer you are.”
This is a not uncommon refrain from the
nomads, who often have a complicated
relationship with consumerism. Too much
stuff can be a burden on the road, so
they can find themselves living like ascet-
ics amid the clearance aisles, servicing, in
Ander son’s words, “literally the best prod-
uct distribution system ever devised by the
human race.”
At 32, Anderson is burly, with a youthful
face and shoulder-length dark hair tucked
behind his ears. His black shorts and T-shirt
reveal tattoos of aliens, cats, skulls, and ico-nography from Radiohead
and Misfits. Coupled with
the white windowless cargo
van he drives, the whole
ensemble gives him the
appearance of a cheerful
roadie, one of the many jobs
he’s briefly held.
Anderson adopted the
nomadic life partly out of
necessity. A restless person
by his own admission,
he dropped out of col-
lege three years in, getting
all the debt without the
degree. He started making
jewelry—wedding bands
and titanium plugs, like the
Space Invaders ones he’s
now wearing—but it wasn’t
enough to live on. He
worked retail. He worked
in a call center. Then, looking for ways to
sell his jewelry, he came across Amazon. It
was a terrible platform for selling crafts. He
couldn’t make things fast enough to meet
Amazon’s requirements, but retail arbitrage
looked interesting.
He moved to Tyrone, and the nearest Wal-
mart was 20 miles away, so any shopping
trips would have to be road trips anyway.
He figured he might as well keep driving—
to Wisconsin, to Florida, to Nevada. Today,
he runs a warehouse, packing products for
other Amazon sellers, and spends half his
time on the road chasing product.
When you spend weeks on end traveling the
strip malls and big-box stores of America,
you start to appreciate small differences in
what can seem like archipelagoes of same-
ness: the way the Targets get cleaner as
you approach corporate headquarters in
Minneapolis; the novelty of an unusually
small Walmart in Indiana; the McDonald’s
in Pomeroy, Ohio, that served pizza, the
remainder of an abandoned experiment in
the ’80s. How was the McPizza? “Bad!”
Anderson says exuberantly. “But that’s not
the point.”F
INISHED WITH TARGET, Anderson stacks
the Jeeps in the back of his van and
gives the cart a shove, sending it rat-
tling into its corral. Sometimes, he confides,
when he finishes shopping late at night, he’ll
bump his cart with his van to knock it into
its pen as he leaves, a parting flourish in the
empty lot.Roving merchants scour the country searching for odd and quirky items they can sell through Amazon,
said journalist Josh Dzieza in TheVerge.com. It’s a life of constant searching, open sky, and nothing left to lose.Anderson: ‘So many people are owned by their possessions.’C
HRIS ANDERSON MOVES
through the Target
clearance racks with
cool efficiency, surveying the
towers of Star Wars Lego sets
and Incredibles action figures,
sensing, as if by intuition, what
would be profitable to sell on
Amazon. Discontinued nail
polish can be astonishingly
lucrative, but not these colors.
A dinosaur riding some sort of
motorcycle? No way. But these
Jurassic Park Jeeps look prom-
ising, and an Amazon app on
his phone confirms that each
could net a $6 profit after fees
and shipping. He piles all 20
into his cart.
It’s not a bad haul for a half
hour’s work, but it’s not great
either. He consoles himself that
he hit upon a trove of deeply discounted
Kohl’s bras the day before as he left East
Brunswick, N.J., on his way here to Edison.
Home is still 300 miles away, in Tyrone,
Pa., and there are plenty of stores between
here and there.
Anderson is an Amazon nomad, part of a
small group of merchants who travel the
backroads of America searching clearance
aisles and dying chains for goods to sell on
Amazon. Some live out of RVs and vans,
moving from town to town, only stopping
long enough to pick the stores clean and
ship their wares to Amazon’s fulfillment
centers.
The majority of goods sold on Amazon are
not sold by Amazon itself, but by more than
2 million merchants who use the company’s
platform as their storefront and infrastruc-
ture. Some of these sellers make their own
products, while others practice arbitrage,
buying and reselling wares from other retail-
ers. Amazon has made this easy to do, first
by launching Fulfillment by Amazon, which
allows sellers to send their goods to com-
pany warehouses and have Amazon handle
storage and delivery, and then with an app
that lets sellers scan goods to instantly check
whether they’d be profitable to sell on the
site. A few sellers, like Anderson, have fig-
ured out that the best way to find lucrative
products is to be mobile, scouring remote
stores and chasing hot-selling items from
coast to coast.
“It’s almost like I’m the front end of the