Tired of Amazon’s dominance in the retail sector, a Toronto-based graphic designer is criticizing the company with a cheeky exhibit in the city’s east end.
Since Jan. 17, Christopher Rouleau’s three-dimensional window installation, entitled ‘Amazon Sucks,’ has been on display at the Secret Planet Print Shop on Danforth Avenue.
Paying homage to Andy Warhol and his famous Brillo Boxes artwork from the 1960s, Rouleau’s recreation features about 40 stacked cardboard boxes with a similar colour scheme and layout to the American artist’s concept.
The project is part of DesignTO’s arts and culture festival, which is celebrating its 15th anniversary this week.
Rouleau's piece features stacked cardboard boxes bearing the slogan, “Amazon sucks. Stuff you don’t need… Fast!”
Rouleau’s artwork will be on display at the shop until Feb. 2.
“The goal was to go a bit over the top,” Rouleau told TorontoToday. “Warhol was made famous by taking mundane, everyday objects and exaggerating their scale and putting them in these staged environments.”
Rouleau, who is normally a graphic designer specializing in branding logos and other print materials, is new to artistic political commentary.
When it comes to discussions surrounding Amazon, however, he said he couldn’t help himself.
“There’s something about this topic that just gets me really riled up,” Rouleau said. “It’s a micro-protest. I can’t fight Amazon in a big way but I feel like I can fight it in a small way.”
Rouleau was quick to point out that his frustrations with Amazon are not new — and neither is the exhibit. The freelance designer first debuted his ‘Amazon Sucks’ project at another storefront in the west end when pandemic restrictions began to lift in 2022.
He said small businesses in Toronto and beyond — whether they have an online presence or not — are having an increasingly challenging time competing with Amazon.
Rouleau said the e-commerce giant is “taking up all the oxygen in the room.”
“You can pretty much buy anything on Amazon,” Rouleau said. “I know people who have litter subscriptions that they just get delivered from Amazon automatically. And I get it, we’re busy people and we want to save money and get the best price on things.”
For Rouleau, Amazon’s convenience is not enough of a trade-off.
“Cumulatively, that saving of money is killing all the businesses on our main streets who are trying to keep up,” he argued. “Our local hardware stores and drug stores who stock a lot of the same products cannot compete with the prices of Amazon because Amazon just purchases so much more at wholesale cost.”
Amazon has made Canadian headlines in recent days as all seven of its warehouses in Quebec are scheduled to close, eliminating 1,700 permanent jobs and 250 temporary ones. The closure comes after workers in Laval unionized last spring.
Rouleau felt other recent news, like the Canada Post strike, exposed several advantages that Amazon possesses over other delivery companies and services.
“The Amazon model has had a huge effect on Canada Post,” he said. “This idea of non-unionized drivers who can just deliver something to your door within a day — Canada Post and the small businesses who use them just can’t keep up with that.”
“It’s a monopoly, and just by everybody’s acceptance of it — they only get bigger.”
At first glance, the project might look like just a stack of boxes to pedestrians walking by the Danforth Avenue window display. But Rouleau said the exhibit has been drawing people in just as he intended.
“I wanted to juxtapose the blunt message with the more playful visuals — it’s sort of a perfect balance,” he said. “The letters are multi-coloured and bounce across the box, so it has kind of a playful and joyful composition while the message is not playful.”
Rouleau said the reaction to the exhibit has been positive. Some passersby have told the artist on social media that they have already been personally boycotting Amazon for many years.
In an attempt to keep the momentum going after the DesignTO project wraps up, Rouleau hopes to display the boxes in other storefronts and neighbourhoods around Toronto. He’s even open to sharing the design with others across Canada and the U.S. in an effort to bolster the message on a wider front.
“We all have a voice and if we stay silent — nothing happens,” he said of grassroots artistic activism. “This conversation is not over.”
