Boycotting Amazon

https://thenextweb.com/opinion/2018/04/16/its-time-to-boycott-amazon/

by phelm • 8 years ago

87 92 8 years ago

arbitrage• 8 years ago

There's a big difference between boycotting Nike, and boycotting Amazon. In the case of Nike, there were more than enough substitute goods to fill the gap for a consumer choosing to not purchase athletic gear from Nike.

How would that work with Amazon? Their product isn't only the stuff you buy. It's the ease of the process and the quickness of delivery. What can you substitute for that?

MrLeap• 8 years ago

Wont/cant are indistinguishable when you really don't want to do something.

I'm no moral crusader, but I very rarely use Amazon. In the last 12 months I've ordered 2 things, a jeweler kit and a charger. If I were trying to affect a boycott I could have last year easily!

I'm intrigued by the idea of someone who has tethered their life to an online shopping experience. Maybe THAT is who buy Amazon Echos.

deegles• 8 years ago

I very rarely use Amazon

It's interesting to think about... the extreme would be to stop visiting websites hosted on AWS.

davidhyde• 8 years ago

The thing that worked for me was to not renew my Prime membership. It then became much easier to force myself to use something like eBay. It's really difficult to wait those 5 extra days for shipping but makes me feel a little better nonetheless. For cloud I use Azure.

ReverseCold• 8 years ago

And if you absolutely need something within two days, USPS Priority mail comes within that time frame (though may be prohibitively expensive for large packages).

HillaryBriss4• 8 years ago

Also, for those who have one: cancel the Amazon Rewards credit card.

Jacqued• 8 years ago

Most of the time you can just buy the same thing in another place. Maybe it's different in the US but here in Europe I don't find Amazon better or faster than any random e-commerce website, so it's pretty trivial to boycott them.

In fact, I do avoid buying from them as I don't like the way they treat their employees.

Fifer82• 8 years ago

I get the impression Amazon are much "bigger" in the states. Size, reach, marketing? Not sure. I don't particularly find Amazon UK very user friendly and very rarely if ever do they have the cheapest price so I don't find myself there often.

I also consider them a bit dirty for the same reason as you as I know employees and they are treated like garbage. Maybe not in head office, but certainly in distribution.

mieseratte• 8 years ago

How would that work with Amazon? Their product isn't only the stuff you buy. It's the ease of the process and the quickness of delivery. What can you substitute for that?

Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death!

You can choose to boycott these companies and potentially suffer certain inconveniences that, ultimately, are not much of a big deal.

nkrisc2• 8 years ago

I've stopped buying from Amazon because of counterfeit goods being commingled with legitimate inventory.

Their process used to be uniquely easy and fast, but that's no longer the case. Buying from nearly any large online retailer is just as easy and fast these days.

Believe it or not, my life did not collapse when I stopped buying from Amazon.

megaman22• 8 years ago

People complain about this constantly, but I look at my experiences with Amazon, and I have to wonder what they are buying that they have things that can be counterfeited so easily. I buy a ton of stuff on Amazon, and have never received anything fake.

ernesth• 8 years ago

Their product isn't only the stuff you buy. It's the ease of the process and the quickness of delivery.

I find Amazon to be very bad on ease of the process/quickness of delivery/price: Their dark patterns to sell prime subscription. Their hiding the delivery cost. Their asking and storing credit card before telling you the final price. Their 8 (yes eight) screens buying process!

Any other web-merchant is better than Amazon if you are not already an Amazon client.

amelius6• 8 years ago

Everybody is talking about a decentralized Facebook alternative, but can't we build "federated shopping", where independent shop owners join in an Amazon-like shopping experience (for the customer), with reviews based on proof-of-purchase, using smart contracts/blockchain technology?

TsomArp• 8 years ago

Isn't that a little like ebay or aliexpress?

amelius6• 8 years ago

Those are companies. This is about a federated/decentralized approach.

Amazon uses a lot of third-party sellers, so in a way Amazon is more like EBay.

ebiester2• 8 years ago

What does blockchain add to this?

ameen• 8 years ago

Investor interest.

jamra2• 8 years ago

You can prove that your reviewer is the same person as the person who paid with blockchain. I'm just not sure how to do so if the customer pays with traditional means.

amelius6• 8 years ago

Ensuring that you can only place a review for an item if you have purchased the item.

Or similarly for placing a review about a shop.

gringoDan• 8 years ago

This is similar to what Jet's original vision was. Since the shipping cost is baked into the price of items sold online, Jet would have you buy from local retailers who could bundle the items they sold you, allowing the consumer to save money since the shipping costs were cheaper.

Great idea in theory, not sure how it's working out in practice. I think Jet had trouble establishing a brand - it was acquired in September 2016 by Wal-Mart.

TheRealWatson• 8 years ago

It took decades for technology mature enough to make it truly easy for even a mom & pop shop, an individual creator, or a service provider to set up shop, accept payments, fulfill and deliver orders on the web.

A lot of the new technology that could potentially become the backbone of the proverbial New Internet is still in its infancy. I will be probably evolve quicker than the first few waves but at the moment it still feels like nerdy tools built by nerds for other nerds.

amelius6• 8 years ago

By the way, similar tech could be used for the gig economy, e.g. ride-sharing services and food-delivery services.

rasz• 8 years ago

Not when >80% of independent shops sell same Chinese crap.

nugi• 8 years ago

So? Then the market will adjust. Seems a net win for customer and seller.

magissima2• 8 years ago

Doesn't this also describe amazon?

CodeCube• 8 years ago

What recourse would a buyer have if they pay, and then never receive an item? If your answer to that is, "smart contract wouldn't release funds until they verify they've received item", then what recourse would a seller have if they send product, but the user never completes the transaction and verifies that they received the product?

This isn't a pithy response, I'm genuinely curious how this kind of thing could be worked around. Independent third party mediator that can contact both parties to figure out what happened (perhaps incentivized with a % of the smart contract's value?)

amelius6• 8 years ago

Independent third party mediator that can contact both parties to figure out what happened (perhaps incentivized with a % of the smart contract's value?)

Yes, I certainly see that as an option.

And perhaps a system like this needs more types of "special actors", e.g. for supporting alternative payment methods.

jrruethe• 8 years ago

There is a concept of Mutually Assured Destruction, where both the buyer and seller put 1.5x the value into a special 2-of-2 multisig address (I'm using Bitcoin as an example).

Then, two transactions are created (but not yet signed); 1 that pays the seller their share and returns the remaining deposit to the buyer, and one that is the other way around (refund).

When the item is shipped / received, and everything is good, both parties sign the transaction to unlock the funds. If either side attempts to scam the other, they are out 1.5x the price of the object. It becomes both party's interest to ensure that conflicts can be resolved so the deposits can be unlocked.

In other words, it is escrow without the 3rd party.

There is more information here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/215yn2/mad_ransom_...

friedButter2• 8 years ago

So, basically eBay with buzzwords?

fiedzia• 8 years ago

Large part of this experience comes from having central management that forces all parts to follow same standards, and from investing money into many things that are not essential for smaller stores, but overall contribute to the experience. I believe some sort of shopping platform could be created, but most likely independent stores would need to feel even more pressure to subject itself to stricter rules and more importantly, to understand that better technology equals more sales (or any at all) and that they have to cooperate to continue to exist.

phelm• 8 years ago

Sounds like OpenBazaar https://www.openbazaar.org

em3rgent0rdr• 8 years ago

What you describe sounds like Open Bazaar.

londons_explore5• 8 years ago

Sounds like the days when you bought your firewood from firefuel.com, your bicycle from speedbybikes.com and your coats from warmjackets.com

It turns out people didn't trust a large number of separate sellers without a central organisation to set rules, offer refunds and make a consistent shopping experience.

amelius6• 8 years ago

Meanwhile, there are lots of reports about counterfeits on Amazon. And can we really trust their review system?

cryptoz• 8 years ago

Why does an article about boycotting Amazon try to convince you to share their content directly to Amazon's servers? Seems to me like the author does not believe in this mission one bit and is just writing clickbait.

Author, if you're reading this, you ought to live by your words and reduce at least your Amazon supporting activities in the very article you are complaining about their doninance in. Remove that Reddit share icon and everything eles that sends data to Amazon, or we'll all assume you don't care about this, you're just in it for the money and the fame and the clicks. With that Reddit share button, you make it clear you want us to use Amazon a lot to spread your content far and wide.

Can't have it both ways.

jhasse• 8 years ago

I guess not the whole team at thenextweb.com shares this author's opinion.

TomAnthony• 8 years ago

TNW is a well respected and well established tech news site with a large team [0]. The author likely doesn't have direct control over the sharing buttons.

I take your point, but on the other hand it is probably quite difficult to be aware of all sites that use AWS, especially if they sit behind a CDN. I didn't know Reddit use AWS.

[0] https://thenextweb.com/team/

falcolas2• 8 years ago

So long as we can save a few pennies and a few minutes by utilizing Amazon, there will be no boycott of any meaningful size.

Also, user comments in the Reddit thread about the "comfort break" incident indicate that AWS is Amazon's primary source of revenue these days. This is backed up by much of Amazon's own PR reporting. For a boycott to have any meaningful impact against Amazon, it would have to include a hit against that revenue.

Call it pessimism, but it's my opinion that few if any companies will incur the costs to move their own business out of Amazon simply to penalize them for poor working conditions in another section of the company.

whistlerbrk2• 8 years ago

AWS is Amazon's primary source of revenue these days

Source on that please? I'm highly dubious.

falcolas2• 8 years ago

Inaccurate wording on my part. AWS is amazon's primary source of "operational income" (i.e. raw revenue minus operational costs) these days. $1.17 billion for AWS vs. $0.35 billion for Amazon as a whole, for Q3 2017.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/26/aws-earnings-and-revenue-q3-...

lcampbell• 8 years ago

Just pulled up their filings[1], and I'm almost certainly misreading it, but in Q3 2017:

  NA Retail Revenue: $25,446M
  NA Retail Profit:  $   112M
  AWS Revenue:       $ 4,584M
  AWS Profit:        $ 1,171M

Pedantically, it seems like AWS is not Amazon's primary source of revenue, but is the primary source of profit.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000101872417...

londons_explore5• 8 years ago

AWS is also the primary driver behind amazons stock price.

Within a few months or years amazons shopping marketplace could become eclipsed by another. Consumers can switch brands quite quickly if they see a better service elsewhere.

AWS on the other hand is very hard to migrate from. Can you imagine the investment necessary to move a large company off AWS infrastructure, when you have legacy and unsupported services that nobody knows how they work, depends on intricacies of amazons managed services, and have no way of doing zero downtime data migration?

Basically, Amazon can gradually increase the price of existing AWS services, while lowering the price of all new services to attract new customers. (Think "From 2019 we will be releasing S4, the new cheaper data storage system!").

quietbritishjim• 8 years ago

For a boycott to have any meaningful impact against Amazon, it would have to include a hit against that revenue [AWS]

I disagree, for two reasons:

1. By that logic, Amazon would shut down or sell off their consumer sales business because it's not worth bothering with.

2. Even if (hypothetically) the shareholders and top-level managers of Amazon didn't care about consumer sales, there is a lower-level (but still fairly high) manager whose sole responsibility is consumer sales. If a boycott substantially hurts those sales, their personal career prospects are hurt, so you can bet they would care enough to change how their part of the business operates.

Of course, this is academic because I agree with this:

So long as we can save a few pennies and a few minutes by utilizing Amazon, there will be no boycott of any meaningful size.

auntad2• 8 years ago

"The reporter, Alan Selby, reportedly saw some staff members “asleep on their feet, exhausted from toiling for up to 55 hours a week.” Toilet breaks were timed, and workers were admonished by supervisors for stopping to catch their breath.

Conditions are so dire, a recent poll of 100 Amazon warehouse workers from labor advocacy group Organise showed that more than half suffer from depression, and eight percent had contemplated suicide."

While I acknowledge it's not a totally fair comparison, I find it interesting that you could replace "55" with "90+" and "Amazon blue collar workers" with "Lower level financiers and consultants on Wall Street" and get probably the same statistics. Maybe even true for some spaces in tech/entrepreneurship.

Is this an Amazon problem, or a modern world problem?

cafard• 8 years ago

Are the lower level financiers and consultants on Wall Street working for roughly 1.8x Amazon warehouse pay?

dx034• 8 years ago

I'd like to see some statistics comparing Amazon to other retail jobs. Low-skilled retail jobs are often physically exhausting and not fulfilling. Many amazon workers might feel depressed, but would they feel better if they worked at Walmart instead?

magissima2• 8 years ago

I can't comment on Walmart specifically, but from my experience working in a warehouse for a couple months it seems that Amazon is totalitarian in a way your average crappy low-skill job isn't.

friedButter2• 8 years ago

While I acknowledge it's not a totally fair comparison, I find it interesting that you could replace "55" with "90+" and "Amazon blue collar workers" with "Lower level financiers and consultants on Wall Street" and get probably the same statistics. Maybe even true for some spaces in tech/entrepreneurship.

I believe the difference is, the wall street guys are in it voluntarily (they could probably take up a lower paying white collar job and still survive), and have a massive reward to look forward to after spending a few years there. While the warehouse workers are picking between unemployment\hunger and working in Amazon warehouses.

deft• 8 years ago

You've got to be kidding me. THATS what you take out of it? Are wall street bankers being forced to pee in bottles to avoid getting fired?

currymj• 8 years ago

it's true of many doctors as well. the difference is both doctors and bankers do it for a few years at the beginning of their careers, and in exchange are promised a path to a real reward -- they get promoted, and their pay increases in a job where they can work more reasonable hours.

these Amazon warehouse jobs don't lead to being a millionaire. they don't even lead to a decent career. i doubt you could even get promoted to Amazon low-level management out of one of these jobs. it is pure exploitation.

auntad2• 8 years ago

Fair response, appreciate your thoughtfulness. Your point about lack of advancement is compelling.

Doctors, financiers, etc prove that people are willing to go through life phases that tear them down mentally and physically (could easily argue that for them it can be worse than "peeing in a bottle"), but you're right, they'll all justify it saying "it won't be like this 5 years from now".

I'm curious as to how Amazon would respond to a question like, "what opportunities for advancement do your lower level workers have?"

londons_explore5• 8 years ago

It's a "paid by the hour" problem.

If, as a company, you pay someone by the hour to complete a task, it's in your best interests to employ only people that do the most work per hour, and then to treat them in a way which gets more work done (to an acceptable quality) per hour.

If instead workers were paid for getting the work done to an acceptable quality, then the workers could decide for themselves what quality of life vs income they wanted.

Salaried work with performance based bonuses are somewhere in between, and perhaps strike a good balance.

foota• 8 years ago

You probably should also consider that below some productivity it's probably not worth hiring anyone, even if they're willing to be paid very little.

flycaliguy• 8 years ago

Both are also self medicating up or down.

Two high pressure jobs. One voluntary, one not so much.

c2h5oh2• 8 years ago

No, it's time to have labour laws making what's happening in Amazon warehouses too costly due to fines to continue.

reacweb2• 8 years ago

We have a legal system that contains far too many greys areas. It is not clear if Amazon is using legal loopholes or deserve fines. I see the legal system as something always getting more bloated and more complex. Evidence of its malfunction is that the outcome of a trial is often unpredictable (see Oracle vs Google). I think the legal system should try to become more like a deterministic algorithm.

dragonwriter3• 8 years ago

Evidence of its malfunction is that the outcome of a trial is often unpredictable

No, that's not evidence of malfunction. If the outcome is predictable, there is no reason to have a trial, and you'd expect a settlement without trial, which is exactly what happens in most cases, civil or criminal.

The only reason for the cost and expense of a trial is an unpredictable outcome.

notyourwork• 8 years ago

I agree the legal system needs a good refactor from time to time. It’s like software, over time accrues debt.

c2h5oh2• 8 years ago

- the non-deterministic part is largely a jury trial system, which has people who are not legal professionals, nor have domain knowledge required to grasp the problem at hand sufficiently to be able to pass a judgement. Same applies to judges of course, but specialization is likely to help

- the legal system is lacking a hard rule requiring the penalty for a violation of a law by a business to exceed the profits the business made due to the violation by a significant margin. If a car maker failing to recall faulty cars was guaranteed to be fined no less than 10x the cost of the recall if caught the decision making process would be quite different.

mcfrankline• 8 years ago

Well I guess anytime the Internet has a problem these days, we are either going to delete the problem or boycott it into oblivion. If you look deeply into any giant Corp or business serving millions of people you’re going to find faults and deficiencies like this every time. Follow the production Chain of Apple, Google, Tesla etc etc you’re going to find someone at the deep end bearing the entire cost of their success.

So what happens now ? Assuming everyone boycotted Amazon and the unlikely event occurred and it shut down. What next? Tens of thousands of those works go home to what? Does the editor then start another campaign to employ all the people laid off? Think they’d be working there if they had a lot more options?

How about trying to fix the problem or at least fix as much as humanly possible? How about putting pressure on your reps to draw up some regulations? How about the government? Isn’t that what they’re there for? Do we have to resort to Social justice for everything now ? Because it obviously doesn’t work with these corporations. See Equifax, See Facebook ?

ukulele• 8 years ago

How about putting pressure on your reps to draw up some regulations?

I think the idea is to convince the company directly rather than relying on politicians.

Because it obviously doesn’t work with these corporations.

There are some pretty glaring examples where it has worked. Nike sweatshops probably being the most visible. Boycotts and lawsuits hit the bottom line, which is what they ultimately care about.

didibus2• 8 years ago

Did Nike stop employing child labor for real? I thought people just stopped talking about it.

not_kurt_godel• 8 years ago

I think the idea is to convince the company directly rather than relying on politicians.

Relying on politicians is hard in the short term, but regulatory policy fixes the problem more or less permanently in an accountable, democratic, and globally applicable (in a national context) way. If we as a society believe what Amazon is doing is fundamentally wrong, why not prohibit legally rather than rely on an ad-hoc solution that will probably be circumvented once attention fades away?

nicoburns• 8 years ago

Amazon wouldn't shut down if successfully botcotted: they'd mucg more likely fix their employment practices.

JFFalcon• 8 years ago

Generally, the goal of a boycott isn't to force a company to shut down, it's to force them to change their ways to end the boycott.

discreditable2• 8 years ago

This isn't just an Amazon problem. I've got a friend who worked at Wal-mart for a while. They give points against you for taking sick days no matter how bad it is. One time she got sent home for having some poison ivy on her arms and was still punished for it. Workers who have high points, but not so many to get fired get their schedules screwed with until they quit.

test6554• 8 years ago

I mean if you are in the top 90th percentile nationally for taking sick days, then working you into the schedule would probably be a nightmare for managers. By reducing your hours, they are reducing the scheduling work that managers need to do. Also, It's likely expected that every employee has some points, but taking way more than everyone else is what this type of system is likely designed to catch.

discreditable2• 8 years ago

It's not just reducing hours. For example you might start getting rotated around different shifts. They'll make your schedule as irregular as possible to encourage you to accrue points or quit. My friend saw this happen to several coworkers in her two years there. Towards the end her direct manager even asked her why she hadn't quit yet.

HillaryBriss4• 8 years ago

Even without a boycott movement, we may already have reached peak Amazon.

This year, the Supreme Court may create a revolution in the ability of US states to tax consumer purchases from online retailers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota_v._Wayfair,_Inc.#...). This could erode Amazon's online retail profitability enough to seriously slow its ever-increasing sales volume and give the competition enough breathing room to survive and even grow a bit.

And Trump keeps complaining about the prices the USPS receives to deliver Amazon. Whether or not there's any merit in Trump's complaint, as a convenient piece of political theater, this cause could easily be picked up by the next president and renegotiated. It would be a crowd pleaser for someone like Elizabeth Warren.

Perhaps the playing field will be tilted just enough to slow the whole Amazon machine.

ikeboy• 8 years ago

Amazon already charges tax on all 1p purchases, changes in that law wouldn't hurt them much.

HillaryBriss4• 8 years ago

But what about all the small retailers that do business under the Amazon umbrella?

Somehow, a lot of those little businesses still do not charge sales tax. A significant fraction of Amazon's sales are those little retailers.

dwyerm3• 8 years ago

Or perhaps the playing field will be tilted even further in Amazon's favor. Collecting taxes is difficult. There are hundreds of thousands of variables depending on where you are currently standing and what you are buying. Consider, for instance, that you pay different sales taxes in different parts of Disney World.

There's a space for a service that manages that burden for you. The service might already exist and is probably called 'Amazon Fulfillment'.

portmanteaufu• 8 years ago

Consider, for instance, that you pay different sales taxes in different parts of Disney World.

Whoa, what? This sounds interesting--do you have a link you could share?

HillaryBriss4• 8 years ago

There sure seem to be a lot of sales tax calculation service and software companies already, aside from Amazon:

https://www.capterra.com/sales-tax-software/

A lot of them are revealed by googling 'sales and use tax software'

I think that sort of software solution has been around for about 20 years.

sigsergv• 8 years ago

Boycott isn't a solution, proper media coverage is. Nike was damaged not by boycott campaign but by a massive media outbreak. Just image effect of good documentary film created by some famous talented director. It's much much worse for reputation than disorganized boycott campaign.

dragonwriter3• 8 years ago

Boycotts are, among other things, tactics to get media (and thereby public) attention. Saying a result. wasn't produced by a boycott because it required media attention which was in significant part drawn by the boycott, which had drawing such attention as a goal, is, well, missing the point of active protest entirely.

drinchev• 8 years ago

I always wondered why Amazon doesn't have some labor union which at least negotiates normal working conditions.

Boycotting usually doesn't have the same effect as a 2-days strike.

danirod• 8 years ago

They seem to have an union at least here in Spain, and maybe in other countries as well. Last month, workers at a local Amazon ware house in Madrid did a 2-day strike, which was pushed by a national workers union as a complain on the working conditions [1]. I've been out of the loop on news so I don't know how things are going since then.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-spain/spains-a...

apple4ever• 8 years ago

Boycotting Amazon

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