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| ▲ | nunez 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The way I look at it is that boycotting Amazon is similar to boycotting petroleum. Petroleum is in the supply chain of everything that we use, but energy companies would definitely feel the impacts of everyone getting EVs. AWS is everywhere, but Amazon Retail is a separate entity and would definitely feel the crunch of even 30% of its users deciding to shop elsewhere or cancelling Prime. (I cancelled my Prime membership a year and a half ago and do almost all of my shopping directly from manufacturers or from smaller stores. I spent thousands of dollars per year with them. I used Walmart Lists to replace my Amazon subscribe and save purchases for a year but was finally able to, mostly, move off of that earlier this year. As it happens, HEB, a grocery chain in Texas, has just about everything I need! I resisted doing this earlier because I thought I needed one/two-day delivery; I wrote posts on here defending this "need." It turns out that, no, I can wait a few days, and, yes, UPS, USPS, and FedEx are significantly more reliable than Amazon Flex.) | | |
| ▲ | makeitdouble a day ago | parent [-] | | Not disagreeing, but I see a gap between the reason and the means of the boycott. On petroleum, my main beef is not the chemical but how most behemoths managing the market are screwing with our health and the planet. There is an alternate world where BP is not a bunch of psychopaths and we have stronger environmental regulations. In that respect, getting electricty from BP instead of oil from BP isn't that much of a difference in my book, I don't believe they manage their solar farm better than their oil tankers. That's the lens I see for Amazon: if we're pissed at them because they killed their App store, does keeping AWS customers afloat really help on the moral standpoint ? I know we can't stick on principle on everything, I just see the very point of the boycott to be very blurry and not reaching it's target. |
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| ▲ | bogwog 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Is that really so hard? I cancelled my Prime subscription years ago and haven't missed it. Walmart, Target, Costco, BestBuy, HomeDepot, etc haven't gone anywhere. Smaller specialty retailers usually sell on their own website with shipping too. Plus, one genuine advantage the other retailers have over Amazon is that you can (usually) trust you're getting something of reasonable quality, whereas Amazon feels like an AI generated flea market filled with garbage quality Aliexpress drop shipping schemes. I thought losing two day shipping would suck, but it really hasn't. Most of the big retailers (in my area anyways) end up delivering online orders in two days or less anyways, and the delivery fee is free if your order is over a certain size (usually around $35) De-googling or De-appleing is hard, but De-amazoning (at least for me) was trivial and anticlimactic. | | |
| ▲ | Larrikin a day ago | parent | next [-] | | I cancelled my subscription and found I didn't really miss it that much, but could not find a good replacement for semi bulk or bulk purchases. Usually one to one items are priced the same elsewhere. But if I want to buy in bulk I have to go to Costco, but they are only good if I'm fine with anything, but out of luck for specific brands or any item they deem seasonal. They stopped carrying the only lotion I like replacing it with a different brand, the lens cleaners are now terrible, and they haven't had grape seed oil for months. There used to be a bulk site I was on before COVID, but they were bought and shut down. | |
| ▲ | develoopest 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > any service that pays Amazon If we go literal with this, it gets far more complicated counting Amazon web services | | |
| ▲ | dowager_dan99 2 days ago | parent [-] | | It's not reasonable or effective to delve into the private supply chain, IMO. Don't let perfect be the enemy of better. | | |
| ▲ | makeitdouble a day ago | parent [-] | | You're choosing to avoid Amazon on moral principles. It's kinda relevant that these principles only apply to services that have the Amazon logo, and not where more than half of Amazon's profit is coming from. Hypothetically you might be bringing more business to Amazon through any of their AWS customers than by buying your USB cables on the storefront. PS: I don't have a good answer to this, but boycott and "vote with your wallet" kind of actions have became a very complex thing IMHO. |
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| ▲ | dowager_dan99 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I spend $2/month on AWS and could change this, but use nothing else that I can think of; is this really that hard? |
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| Just stop giving Amazon money—at this point you can only blame yourself. Done. Mostly. I dropped Prime last year, and have been surprised by the results. 1. I don't buy a bunch of pointless plastic crap that I don't need anymore. It was the thrill/affirmation/addiction of near-instant gratification delivery that made me buy stuff on impulse. 2. I've saved a bunch of money because of #1. 3. Unless it's same-day delivery, "Prime" delivery is meaningless. Even with Prime, about 80% of my same-day, next-day or second-day deliveries were delayed. A couple of times for a week or more. I can't count the number of times the Amazon.com delivery tracker told me "You're next!" with a little cartoon truck on a map next to my home. Then an hour later, "We're doing a few more deliveries first." And then "Delivery date unknown." I do still occasionally buy from Amazon, when there's something I can't get locally. But without the instant gratification, I buy much less. And sometimes the things I do buy arrive with the same speed of Prime delivery anyway. |
