Amazon’s now-legendary “Prime Day” is July 8-11. Much like Black Friday or Cyber Monday, this means sales on lots of items on Amazon’s vast marketplace, and as such many people flock to the giant’s website to get sweet deals on everything from computers to small kitchen appliances and more. While many of us are feeling the financial crunch more than ever, I urge you, dear reader, to resist the allure. I don’t typically have strong opinions about where people chose to shop or how they decide to spend their heard-earned money, but in this post I hope to lay out a convincing case for why Amazon is full-stop evil, no caveats, and is undeserving of your money on a moral and ethical level no matter what your values are. Amazon needs to be stopped, and legislation will not do so. Only its loyal consumers – who keep the beast alive – can do that by taking their money elsewhere. No matter your political or personal beliefs, I’m certain Amazon violates them in one way or another, and you should vote with your dollar by buying from other places whenever possible. Here’s why.
How does Temu compare to Crapazon?
Shut up! If you don’t use Amazon how will the rich people go to space?
Amazon is already dead to us. Just like Tesla, Target, Starbucks, and Meta.
They will never be purchased from, or supported in any way- ever again.
ITT: “I agree they’re systematically fucking us over (and don’t get me started on their horrible politics!) but will continue to enable them because it’s convenient and saves me a few bucks” this defense doesn’t make you look reasonable it makes you look like a clown
The thing is, it doesn’t save money to shop there, either. 90% of what you see is Amazon Marketplace, where you’re just paying people to dropship you trash from Aliexpress
The only reason you need - it’s a monopoly. Fuck its all.
And I also hate with passion that 5 years ago you’d need AWS in your CV.
Amazon basically solved this problem for me: they locked me out.
Thanks to my country here is no amazon
As someone from Russia, we have Ozon and Wildberries and Yandex and Mail.ru, neither of which exists in all business niches of Amazon, but in the overlapping ones seem close.
It’s not that they are really bad, but I don’t like monopolies.
I think for all of these - marketplaces with delivery, social networks, cloud hosting, - there has to emerge some standard, some global system. Similar to the Internet or maybe to the postal service. Something has to be done, because these unfortunately work in a way encouraging monopoly.
Even when I was almost unconditionally ancap, infrastructure was a special case (and it still is for most ancaps, theoretically unconditional private property applies to hypothetical things fully created by a person, and for territory, infrastructure, discovered ideas it’s closer to the other extreme). These things are infrastructure.
In the Internet one person can host their stuff on one hosting, another on another, and their email on different providers, but they’ll be able to interact. A buyer on Ozon and a seller on Amazon are not.
That’s because email and web hosting require only the Internet the functioning system to exist. A social network requires more (if we want it to be interoperable and global),
I think the missing part to make such a standard is automated payments in the Internet. The platforms’ inner management of resources is hidden from us, but for a global system computing and storage resources are necessary, and they are neither provided by governments nor pooled by enthusiasts, it’s impractical to rely on pure altruism for such. And to have a global system with monetary encouragement of providing infrastructure means that we need payment for resources as simple and general as how we pay for landline or Internet service. ISP’s no longer provide shell accounts and web hosting, but even when they did, this wasn’t quite the thing.
The platforms emerged because it’s bothersome to pay for infrastructure and maintain it, there’s not even a straightforward way. You need a humongous service with plenty of computing, someone should pay for it.
So - there was Usenet at some point solving a lot of the similar problems, except, of course, a news server would store lots and lots of stuff for each hierarchy. But that wasn’t reimagined for the new things we do in the Internet.
For twiddling and various kinds of power abuse to be impossible they should be technically impossible in the system. So:
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Various functions of platforms should be decomposed into different pooled untrusted services (to pool anything you have to design for untrusted) in the Internet. Pooling can be done the way similar to bittorrent trackers - a service comes online, announces itself and repeats that regularly. A client needing a service requests a few trackers and picks a few services from the results. Services might be, say, storage (anything, like FTP servers even), computation (submit bytecode, receive result, or something like that), indexing (a search engine, returning results in standard machine-processable format), notification (like NOSTR relays). Maybe trade for resources can be a separate type of service. And user identity caching.
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It should be possible to provide a paid service and pay for that service, easily enough, like MMORPG scripted marketplaces - a setting like “buy no more than 2G of storage, by price no more than N per K, stop if remaining money less than K”. Or same for selling on a service you host.
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The history of platforms in the last 20 years shows us that the Internet is for the machines. The user representation should be in a local application, and the logic combining those non-application-specific services should work on the client machine. Say, aggregating results of a few indexing services, or aggregating trade offerings from a few trade services, or online users from among friends from a few notification services.
Shit, I wrote this again.
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Which country, if you don’t mind telling?
Alternatively, is that a decision made by your country’s people/government? Or did Amazon just not want to operate there?
Very inspiring, if it is the former.
Not a fan of Amazon in any way shape or form, but for some purchases here in the UK they are simply miles ahead of other firms. Latest purchase by me, though not paid for by me is 2 x batteries for my wifes mobility scooter. 20% cheaper than anywhere else, took 1 week to arrive (not bad, not the best) but was so easy to order without all the hassle other solutions involve. We have a prime account still as there is some streaming stuff we also like to watch. Still (just) more pros than cons
True. I ordered a book from them last week; it arrived in 2 days. Everywhere else, including Waterstones, was “oh we might be able to get it out the door sometime next year, if we can be arsed” so Amazon got the order.
Amazon makes the majority of its money from AWS. Literally using the Internet makes them buckets of money.
People can boycott it all they want. I just don’t use them, but none of that really hurts Amazon in the end.
If people want to actually hurt Amazon they need to call on the Government to break up AWS, Ma Bell style.
Hell, I guarantee there are Lemmy instances running on AWS.
17% is not “the majority”.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-amazon-makes-its-billions/
Your looking at gross income not net. By net income, AWS is over 50%.
Amazon is a parasite. That’s all the reason I need.
I’ve gone 3 years without ordering a single thing from amazon. I never intend to give them anymore money.
anymore money.
- any more money
- money anymore
You can’t straddle the lanes: you have to pick one.
Or you can accept that it’s a typo… and not freak out about a simple error that didn’t diminish your understanding of their comment.
Oh my god, yes.
I have yet to see a single item have a significant discount on prime day, it’s not even a sale.
www.Camelcamelcamel.com for all your Amazon price comp needs.
Owned by Amazon, FYI.
What’s the source for this? Can’t seem to find details about this online.
I can’t seem to find evidence of that. All I see is they’re Amazon affiliates, which pretty much anybody can be.
Do you have a source?
Oh no way
It’s not.
Prices mysteriously go up about a week before prime day sales, then drop to a few dollars below normal, scream “39% off” and you feel like you beat the system.
Prices mysteriously go up about a week before prime day sales, then drop to a few dollars below normal, scream “39% off” and you feel like you beat the system.
Gladly this practice is illegal in Finland at lest. Here companies having sales have to show the lowest price of that product within the last 30 days just for this very reason.
i usually find the good deals randomly outside of any holidays, i mostly ignore prime deals.
Or sometimes they remove a 25% off coupon that usually shows all the time and for the “sale” they just reduce the price of the item to that same amount without and then remove the coupon from the page. It will then look like it has gone on sale from camelcamelcamel because it wasn’t accounting for the price after the coupon it was only showing the item price.
i use another tracker, KEEPA.
I remember at my first job in high school in a store on Main Street. We had a sidewalk sale with other business owners.
My innocence was lost when my boss instructed me to place higher prices using our ordinary white stickers and then cover them with ‘discounted’ orange sales stickers at slightly higher prices than normal.
These dicks just do it at scale. Amazon is a tawdry crime organization. We all know it.
I try to use local stores or other websites, and only use Amazon if I can’t find what I need there. But at least half the time I end up having to use Amazon because I can’t find what I need.
It’s probably a kind of vicious cycle: as Amazon eats further into profits of other companies they are more limited in what they can offer.
Know the struggle, just keep trying local stores or other sites first, maybe we can be a small part of change for the better ;)
I dont agree with every point made, but agree with the overall sentinent. My problem is that the same thing can be said about other retailers, especially the brick and mortar ones. Walmart, Target, Home Depot, …whoever. They’ve all done it, and continue to do it.
Small business? Yeah, those essentially don’t exist in this context.
I have always said, ecommerce isn’t killing brick and mortar retail. They are killing themselves. Why? Because I’ve never felt like a valued customer at any of the retailers out there. I’ve been absolutely shit on by all the big retailers out there. And that’s not even getting into their policies, politics, and other behind the scenes stuff that I do care about, but it doesn’t directly impact my shopping experience.
So then I can buy something online, from a wide selection, with competitive prices, have it delivered to my door quickly, and if there’s any issues have zero problem with returns? That works for me.
Now in modern times I can argue that they don’t always have great customer service, don’t always have great pricing (for what you get), and its not all sunshine and roses. But I don’t see a viable alternative.
Find me another retailer online or brick and mortar that can supply me well and treat me well and I’ll go. But small business cant compete. And big retailers when they had all the money and power they didn’t do that so now that they are the underdogs why would they do it? So it’s just not happening.
I’ve never felt like a valued customer
I only have once, and it’s made all the other ones seem so much worse by comparison.
Thank you Ace Hardware. You fucking ruined me.
That’s because Ace Hardware is franchised. It’s essentially a bunch of small businesses that use the same branding.
ACE is more like a franchise than other retailers. Most are locally-owned. Some are employee-owned.
Story time?
The staff was friendly and helpful without being overbearing. They also knew what they were doing and could advise on projects. They weren’t understaffed, and they generally all seemed to enjoy working there.
It was strange.
That sounds so pleasant! Here, you go to Rona / Lowe’s, you ask them a question and you’re met with an “iunnodude”. Maybe home hardware is comparable.
Not OC, but here’s no single story. Any time I pop into my local Ace I can instantly get help getting what I need, which is not always what I think I want when I enter the store. Consistently knowledgeable, helpful, and friendly staff, combined with my money staying in the neighborhood, makes it worth it.
ACE is awesome compared to the competition. Especially if exchanging your propane tank.
Strictly, over consumption is the enemy. Less so where you buy, but the rampant rush to the bottom in price and quality is what the issue is. I shop where I get the best quality, rather than the best price
Enshittification.
