A very urban take. Here where I am in a semi-rural place, there are no specialty shops. At least beyond tea and furniture. So if Walmart doesn't carry the products my child needs in order to bath and not have her skin split open and bleed, what should I do? When I was injured after the birth of my kid and couldn't drive, I guess my kid should have starved rather than have amazon deliver a monthly supply of formula. I definitely couldn't drive and covid make support difficult.

Maybe I'm just weird and and specific, but I've found that often Amazon is the only place to get specialty items. Walmart and gang killed a lot of businesses and what's left often only sell via Amazon. Mail order has been the name of the game in rural areas forever. I don't agree with what's happening in the article, but realistically I'm going to keep ordering my high quality supplements that keep the brain fog from covid away and other stuff.

>it is perfectly fine to exist without consuming

So did you borrow someone else's device to post this?

> I hate to break it to you, but there is no doctor’s order that say you must buy anything, it is perfectly fine to exist without consuming

That's a very extreme Hobson's choice. Sure there's no "doctor's order," but you can't actually do that without being a subsistence farmer or hunter-gatherer. And you'd have to be a squatter, because if you own land you'll have to pay taxes on it, and there's no way you're going to be able to do that without buying anything in the broader economy.