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> I understand it, it's really hard to compete with Amazon in today's environment, and I'm not judging anyone for using Amazon instead of buying from a store

I am. :-)

> I buy online too, and fundamentally these are for-profit businesses and I don't feel any obligation to give them charity.

You can also judge people for prioritizing profit over all else.

Even from a purely utilitarian-calculus perspective, it's a bit strange to me when people say "I wish we had X" but then "but I understand people need to make money". Like, if you wish you had X, then X has utility to you. Now, it may be that the amount you would pay for X is less than what was needed for X to survive, but that's not necessarily implied by the mere fact that X has to make money.

And that's leaving out all the other positive and negative utilities that come from these various choices. Like living in a town where you can go to a place and have interactions with people, or even just browse unfamiliar and interesting products, instead of just a big warehouse.

There isn't any reason not to judge people for doing things that you think make the world worse.

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tombert 5 days ago | parent [-]

I'm not 100% sure what you're getting at.

I didn't mind paying a bit more for stuff at Fry's because it was directly available and I liked walking around the store, but I certainly had no plans of buying a product I wasn't already going to buy just to patronize Fry's. These stores, while I do like them, are not charities. I don't want to needlessly give them money for stuff if I don't want it. I am not going to directly donate to them either.

I agree that the experience does have some amount of value if I am reminiscing about these things, but fundamentally what gives me (and I suspect most people) the most value is simply lower prices, and I think these things are at odds.

Big fun stores like Fry's have overhead, and they have to pay for that overhead somehow, meaning that it is rolled into the prices. Amazon is more boring, leading to lower prices.

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BrenBarn 4 days ago | parent [-]

My point is essentially that there are enormous higher-order effects that are totally ignored by just focusing on the price of individual consumer transactions, and many of those higher-order effects are detrimental to our society.

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tombert 4 days ago | parent [-]

Isn't this kind of a privileged perspective though? Not so much saying that something is lost, but judging people for shopping on Amazon (which you said in an earlier comment).

It's easy to say something like "there's more to life than prices!!!!!" when you're a yuppie software person on Hacker News making six figures with full benefits, but a large percentage (most?) of the population isn't as fortunate. Something being five percent cheaper can be a meaningful difference to those people, and I certainly cannot blame someone in that situation for prioritizing their finances over some nebulous completely undefined and arbitrary "greater good" that you seem to be hinting at.

Now, I am one of those software people who (generally) makes plenty of money, so you could reasonably judge me for shopping on Amazon and focusing primarily on prices. I don't know what to tell you; even if I make plenty of money, it's not infinite money, I still have to prioritize how it's spent, and again I just don't feel the need to try and optimize for some undefined greater good.

	▲	BrenBarn 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		You're right, and when I say "judging people" I don't mean buying on Amazon instantly means I think you're irredeemably evil, I just mean it's a negative factor in my overall judgment. It can be mitigated by other things, in particular whether the person thinks critically about their Amazon purchases, and whether they take other mitigating action (e.g., voting for government policies that would punish Amazon and similar monopolistic businesses). What I'm talking about is at least slightly less nebulous than what you describe. My claim is something like "The more that people buy from Amazon today, the lower the expected quality of your own life in 25 years." It's similar to other negative externalities like climate change. I'm not saying someone is satan incarnate for driving their gas car to work. But the less they realize that there are problems with that and the less they take action where possible to mitigate them, the more dubious I'll be about them. (Incidentally, I'm not "one of those software people who makes plenty of money". I make in the mid five figures with no benefits, so I'm not arguing from quite as privileged a perspective as the one you mention. But my position is still more privileged than many, many other people who can't order from Amazon at all because, for instance, they have no credit card or fixed address. And those people are also harmed by the growth of Amazon as it gradually reduces their options for buying things in person.)