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?
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.
Precisely. I would probably have a much easier time avoiding Amazon.com than I would, say, IMDB (owned by Amazon) or The Washington post (owned by Bezos).
> 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.
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.
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.
It can be anything, really. Look at the reviews for items. Sometimes you'll notice an item has great, 5-star reviews and about 10% are terrible 1-star reviews. If you read through those 1-star reviews you might notice that sometimes there's a trend of the reviewer discovering they received a fake.
How widespread is the problem in reality? I have no idea. But given that I can simply shop elsewhere, get a similar experience, and feel more certain that I'm not receiving a counterfeit, I'll do just that.
I'm a consumer, not an analyst. If I think that I might receive a counterfeit from Amazon I'll just shop elsewhere, I have bigger things to worry about.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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?