How to review your life’s Amazon buying history—and what we learned from our own

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Ahead of the United States' Memorial Day weekend, Ars staffers were milling about the virtual water cooler when someone happened upon some intriguing data: their personal Amazon shopping history. This spreadsheet, which consisted of years of purchases and thousands of dollars of receipts, was easy to compile within the Amazon account interface, and it fit nicely into that day's chatter about other companies' issues with data privacy and GDPR compliance.

So, for funsies, a bunch of us reviewed our past decade-plus Amazon existence by grabbing a giant spreadsheet from our individual "order history" pages. As Americans who've spent many years ordering things off the Internet, we at Ars all have Amazon shopping histories in common, but that doesn't mean we all use the site the same-or feel the same about Amazon's reach, quite frankly. See below for charts, examples of our first non-media (book or film) purchases at the site, and personal recollections about how Amazon has figured into our shopping lives over the years.

If you want to play along at home, by all means. This link should force you to enter your own Amazon credentials and then redirect you to an "order history" page. The first drop-down menu on the resulting page should already say "items." Confirm that's the case, then set the date range from January 1 of the earliest year on record to today. Then pick "request report" and you'll receive a CSV spreadsheet file that can be parsed by Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets. You may need to split this into multiple reports (like, 2005-2009, 2010-today), should your shopping history be as big as some Ars staffers'.

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