No one is on Lemmy because they like shitty corps so I need your help
I’m at a loss. Increasingly whenever I order New on eBay or wherever, the order gets fulfilled by Amazon.
When I complain to the site I bought it from they shrug.
I’m regularly paying more for items and still funding an undeniably awful company
Retail is drop in bucket for Amazon. Their main revenue comes from AWS. How do you plan to avoid that?
I used to believe this stat too, then I looked it up. AWS is about 12.5% of their income. Online retail is about 50%. Your point still stands though, you can’t easily avoid Amazon’s revenue stream.
AWS is about 12.5% of their income.
I mentioned revenue, not income. The income from AWS is low because much of the revenue is reinvested in expansion of AWS.
Then we’re both wrong. A deeper dive into newer numbers shows AWS REVENUE is 16% (12.5% is a year or two old). online stores REVENUE is 50%. The thing is that online stores recently started losing money so AWS INCOME is currently Amazon’s bread winner. (Edit: swipe type spelling mistakes)
What’s the difference?
This was my thought a well. Just using the internet at all guarantees that we’re supporting Amazon, Google, and Microsoft because they host most of the content.
This conundrum points back to our need to have agency, and something OP will/should address. One way to lower anxiety is to understand where we have personal agency and where we don’t. No matter how hard or how long I beat on a brick wall with my bare hands I will not damage it, only tire and damage myself. This isn’t limited to man made/capitalism. I also cannot swim across an ocean. Recognizing when I can make a difference and accepting my personal limits allows me to focus my goals around things where I will succeed or produce results. They may be (globally) small, but they affect me and my community in a meaningful way. I might even use that brick wall to provide a brace for leverage or the water in the ocean for salt or brackish irrigation. Expending energy that I know will not affect change only lets them beat me twice.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cloud-firewall/
But honestly I don’t AWS is as bad as their retail side to there employees.
I have the exact same issue. I thought buying directly from the manufacturer’s site would fix it, but I still get Amazon boxes from some of them. I don’t buy from them again, but it still sucks. I have ended up buying even less, and I wasn’t buying much before.
I try to buy things used, but sometimes that’s just not possible. If it has to be new I try different sites until I find one that doesn’t go through them. You can even call customer service for some smaller sites and find out ahead of time.
I don’t agree with the “don’t bother” hopelessness in this thread. Trying to do the least bad thing is still worthwhile, even if you can’t do something perfectly ethical. I’m proud of you for doing your best.
I don’t agree with the “don’t bother” hopelessness in this thread. Trying to do the least bad thing is still worthwhile, even if you can’t do something perfectly ethical. I’m proud of you for doing your best.
Yup. Don’t let others choose your ethical views and decisions for you. I know boycotting big companies makes life more complicated (and sometimes more expensive) but I’m still doing it myself.
If you don’t want to support a cause because of whatever, go for it and look for an alternative. Enough asking around and studying the Internet should bring out more options eventually, if you got the resources for this study.
It is shitty corporations all the way down to the turtle my kind dude.
I buy from online stores (eg, clothing, jewelry, beauty) who don’t use amazon, and fortunately I’ve never seen evidence of amazon involved in those purchases. I admire your efforts to find alternatives from that awful company
You can’t avoid Amazon entirely but your order is still a drop in the bucket that tips the scales in the right direction.
For small brands trying to establish a presence, the first thing retail buyers and distributers ask is how their Amazon sales numbers look. Having an Amazon presence is not optional for small brands that are trying to grow.
If 90% of orders come from amazon and only 10% come from their own website, it frequently doesn’t make sense to both pay for Amazon distribution and keep their own warehousing and distribution capabilities. But if more people like you and I convince people to order directly and 40% came from direct orders, that math starts to bias more heavily in favor of setting up their own fulfillment.
So find some comfort in that you are playing a small part in paving the way to a better future for these companies even if they are beholden to the Amazon monopoly currently.
Why not create a logistics company to compete with amazon? It’s not the outsourcing of logistics that’s the problem — it’s outsourcing it to Amazon specifically because of their specific culture and nature as a company.
Agreed. But then what?
Don’t consume anything.
I advise that you just don’t give a fuck if the order is coming through Amazon or not. Who’s to say whether they’re more evil than some other company that might fulfill your order. The thing you’re buying was probably made with exploitative labour practices from unethically sourced materials anyway. Simply shipping it to you is probably dependent on a global logistics network of fossil fuels and colonialism.
Just don’t think about it. There’s no way to buy things in this world and “do good” at the same time.
But then what
Do good in other ways
eBay is just as filthy of a corp as Amazon. Who are you fooling?
