How Unlimited Free Stuff from Amazon Almost Ruined My Retirement

It all started last winter when I innocently posted a review for a heated vest I had bought on Amazon. I was happy with this fun new way to beat the winter and wanted to share it with others, so I gave it five stars. But soon after I clicked “Submit”, I got an email from Amazon which said something like,

“Congratulations! You’ve been selected to join Amazon Vine for writing helpful reviews!”

I was already aware of the basic idea of Amazon Vine since I had seen product reviews from other people in the program – typically called “Vine Voices.” The basic idea of this program is that you can order stuff from Amazon for free, as long as you agree to review at least 80% of the things you order.

“Hey, that’s cool”, I thought, “Who doesn’t like free stuff?

Especially since I’ve already been writing product reviews out of the goodness of my heart – why not be rewarded for it?”

So without giving it much further thought, I clicked “accept” on their terms and conditions and joined the program. 

And so began a saga that has taken me on a surprising journey over the past nine months causing me to:

• collect a surprising amount of stuff I wouldn’t have otherwise bought
• waste a surprising amount of time reviewing it all
• and realize that I actually became a bit addicted to this cycle, despite the fact that I’m already retired and was absolutely not looking for a side hustle.

Okay, I’ll admit that there were also some upsides. My original idea was partly to save some money, by getting stuff I genuinely would have bought anyway, in a way that sounded fun. And that did happen – I saved at least a few thousand dollars tools and materials for my construction business and the MMM-HQ Coworking space, for free. Plus, at least some of the motivation for signing up was to put myself through an experiment so I could write this blog article about it. And if you’re reading this, it looks like that happened too.

But I was still surprised at how powerful the combination of small nudges and incentives from Amazon was able to hijack my frugality instincts –  and get me to do a bunch of work that wasn’t really the best use of my time. 

So I thought if we review my journey and break down with a bit of Behavioral Science, we could all learn a few valuable things by laughing at Mr. Money Mustache’s folly.

Scarcity Brain and the Online Casino Effect

One of the most interesting books I’ve read in recent years is Michael Easter’s Scarcity Brain. It’s an exploration of the sneaky ways that modern gambling platforms, marketing and social media algorithms are all built upon two weaknesses in our evolutionary programming:

• Our desire to double down on hunting and gathering when we get even a small taste of success (because it’s a clue that there might be more food in the area, and
• Our desire to gorge on rich food when it is available and stockpile resources whenever we can, even if we already have more than we need.

As I look back now, I realize that I fell straight into those same traps, because the Vine program has some of the properties of a casino or a TikTok feed:

• Unpredictable Rewards
• The concepts of scarcity and limited time
• Fresh content every time you check back in

Every time you log into the exclusive “reviewers only” Vine website, you’ll see different stuff available for the taking. Sometimes there is almost nothing worthwhile – you’ll search for “porcelain plates” and get endless pages of pink plastic disposable party plates instead. You go searching for a toaster for your kitchen but instead there will be just a toaster cover with a cat wearing a witch hat. WTF!?

But occasionally, there will be genuinely useful things like super nice light fixtures, tools and plumbing parts, an EV charger, and even some clothing. My favorite ridiculous Eagle shirt as featured in the Mustachianism music video was an Amazon Vine find.

As were a whole supply of super-realistic artificial plants, which while tacky in principle, have been amazing for hard-to water courtyard garden areas at the MMM HQ.

I also had a lot of fun roping in friends and coworkers from HQ to help and share in the bounty. I let them help me request and review stuff that they wanted, and then they got to keep it. This seemed like a win/win because we shared the work and the fun of laughing at some of the ridiculous products available. 

Still, as I went through this experiment this spring and summer and allowed the system to coax me into doing 80 reviews so I could upgrade my account from Vine Silver to Vine Gold*, I noticed something didn’t feel quite right.

 I was checking the Vine page every day for scores, even when I didn’t actually need anything. It would usually be a bust, but just often enough, something I actually wanted would come up, and I’d order it before it was too late. Scarcity and unpredictable rewards at work.

Then the bounty would come, I’d unpack it and photograph it with assembly-line speed so I could batch-write all the reviews once per week or so. For every review I did, I was spending time I’d rather spend doing something else. And for every questionable item I got, I was creating pollution and trash from its manufacturing and packaging – directly contradicting the main values of my life and my reason for writing this blog. And I saw all of this, yet I kept doing it!

So Was This The Downfall of MMM?

During the worst of this consumerism bender, things were dire. I was getting packages almost every day and my recycling bin was overflowing with cardboard. My son and my girlfriend started laughing at some of my more frivolous purchases, so I found myself discreetly tucking away the boxes when they were around to evade scrutiny.

 But eventually, I moved into a recovery stage. I had been letting this habit continue out of laziness and as a form of procrastination: it’s very easy to order shit online and pretend I’m doing something useful, and much more difficult to get moving to do the things that really make my life enjoyable. 

But I’m old enough to know that hitting the running trails and the gym for my daily workouts, and making progress on all my construction projects, and focusing on the computer as a creative tool rather than an entertainment device so I can get stuff done like this blog post, are the things that bring me the most joy.

Admittedly, some of the sucky factors of the Vine program helped make it easier to recover too. For every genuinely useful thing I found like a contractor-grade extension cord, I had to scan through endless screens of trinkets which not only wasted my time but actually pissed me off at their very existence. 

I also noticed some of the deliberately reviewer-unfriendly features built into the program which reminded me that we reviewers are definitely just low-wage workers rather than any form of VIP. The search functionality is crap, and there is no way to filter or sort the results, because they want you to have to look through everything and they don’t care about the value of your time. 

Then there is the hilariously bureaucratic AI-based evaluation system which would occasionally flag my totally tame, factual reviews as “Not meeting our Community Standards” without explaining what the problem was. So I’d have to go in and edit my review, randomly changing a couple of words and maybe some punctuation, and suddenly the AI would be pacified and accept my review. Just dumb. 

This is What “Fuck You Money” is For!

It dawned on me that for many people, this is just what “work” looks like. You are given a bunch of tasks and a bunch of rules to follow, in a system you didn’t create and don’t get much say in changing. And then as long as you crank out your TPS Reports without rocking the boat too much, you get your paycheck. 

It reminded me of the Uber Driving experiment I did way back in 2017: as soon as I started working as a driver, I could immediately see dozens of improvements that could be made to the system that would make it function better for both drivers and passengers. But since I wasn’t the boss, nobody wanted to hear my ideas.

Experiences like these remind me that while I love hard work and I love learning new things every day, I greatly prefer being the boss. And I’ve gotten pretty damned accustomed to it after 20 years of financial independence, so I see no need to give it up.

Final Numbers

One interesting “gotcha” of the Vine program is that they do keep track of all the free stuff you get and send you a 1099 for its retail value at the end of the year. So it’s not really free, just discounted to whatever your marginal tax rate is (about 25% for me this year). If we peek into my account right now, this is how my 2025 is looking:

So I got about $7000 worth of stuff, and could owe up to $1750 of tax on it. In my case, about 75% of it was “sold” to my business for commercial use (construction supplies which I used on jobs or HQ renovations) so it was effectively converted into real income rather than just tax burden. Some of it was stuff I would have bought anyway for my own house which I’ll gladly pay the taxes on. But there is also probably about $1000 of pure nonsense in there as well, for which I’ll owe a tax bill of $250 as penance for my itchy trigger finger on that “Order” button.

Epilogue

So here we are today. While I admit that I didn’t explicitly cancel my account, I used the “Keystone Habit” trick to override the temptation to view the Vine page – mapping that browser bookmark to my daily habits list instead, a little chart which I call my “Badassity Tracker”. The net result is that every time I click it, I’m taken straight to a reminder to get up from the computer and do a quick round of exercise, so I do that instead.

And of course my writing of this article may be a violation of the terms and conditions of the program (“the first rule of Vine is to not talk about Vine”), so it might even get canceled on me. (and if so I’ll let you know because that would be funny story as well)

But I learned a lot about habits and addiction, and realized that this same feeling might be what drives people into One More Year Syndrome, as they keep working even when they can afford to quit. I have now coached enough people through this situation to see it is way more common than I would have ever guessed. 

As with all MMM articles, there’s a real life lesson in this story. It’s not really about Vine or me or my habits, it’s about you continuing to look at yourself and your life, and always questioning your own assumptions or patterns. And asking the people you trust most for feedback as well:

• Am I running my life a reasonably optimal manner, given my goals?
• What would you do differently if you were me?
• Who are some people that seem to handle these things better than me, and what can I learn from them?

We will never be perfect, but the great news is we don’t have to be. All it takes is a little bit of self reflection and putting ourselves on a slightly better path, as often as we can as life goes on. We are all on a very long journey, so even a tiny course correction can make a huge difference in where we end up.

—

*(Vine Gold is not all that useful as it turns out as 99.9% of the available items seem to be the same trinkets you see in the Silver tier)

** What about the Heated Vest that started it all? Well, I still love that thing and now that fall is coming back it is already helping me be warmer in a cooler house. There are lots of good choices on Amazon, here’s one of them. Then pick out any USB battery pack to go with it, which also doubles as a very useful travel phone charger.

FTC: this blog uses affiliate links (including for Amazon) when possible so if you do buy anything through them, it will benefit the website. And thanks!