Hey Amazon - Do Better

I found Amazon in the late '90s, and not because it was trendy. I found you because I had lost my driver’s license after a seizure.

I was going through a divorce. I had children who needed things—school supplies, shoes, groceries eventually, the thousand small items that keep a household running—and I couldn't legally get behind the wheel to buy them. Delivery wasn’t a perk for me. It was how I stayed independent. It was how I stayed a functioning parent during the hardest stretch of my life.
You were there for me. I have been a loyal customer ever since — nearly three decades now.
But I want to be honest about that loyalty: for millions of us, it isn’t really a choice. If you live with epilepsy and you can’t drive, Amazon isn’t a convenience. It’s infrastructure.

It’s the car we don’t have.

Which is why your returns process has become a real problem.

Somewhere along the way, returning an item became something that required a driver's license. Drop it at the UPS Store. Bring it to Whole Foods. Take it to Kohl’s. Every one of those options requires the very thing that brought many of us to Amazon in the first place: the ability to drive somewhere. For a customer who can’t, a “free and easy return” is neither.

THE ASK

So here is what I’m asking for — not for myself, but for the nearly 3.5 million Americans living with epilepsy, and everyone else whose disability means they can’t drive:

Create an accessibility accommodation for customers who can’t drive.
1. At-home pickup returns, at no charge, for customers with a qualifying accessibility need — the same driver who delivers the box takes it back.
2. An accessibility flag on the account, set once, so we don’t have to explain our medical situation to a chatbot every single time.
3. A commitment that “convenience” features get tested against one question: does this work for a customer who cannot drive?

Amazon has the logistics network to do this tomorrow. Your drivers are already at our doors — pay them well and give them the time to knock, because for customers like me, that person is the whole company. This isn’t a moonshot — it’s a checkbox.

You were there for me in 1998, when a seizure took my license, and life felt like it was coming apart. Millions of people with epilepsy are in that exact spot right now. Be there for them the way you were there for me.

I’d genuinely love to talk about this — on the record, on our show, or off it.

With respect and nearly thirty years of order history,

Kelly Osborne
Co-host, Sudden Blackout — a podcast about living with epilepsy