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.

  • traceur301@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    5 hours ago

    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

  • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    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.

  • 3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.com
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    6 hours ago

    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

    • jaupsinluggies@feddit.uk
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      5 hours ago

      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.

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      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:

      1. 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.

      2. 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.

      3. 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.

    • AusatKeyboardPremi@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      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.

  • IHeartBadCode@fedia.io
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    19 hours ago

    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.

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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      11 hours ago

      anymore money.

      1. any more money
      2. money anymore

      You can’t straddle the lanes: you have to pick one.

      • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.com
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        9 hours ago

        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.

  • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world
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    18 hours ago

    I have yet to see a single item have a significant discount on prime day, it’s not even a sale.

    • thesohoriots@lemmy.world
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      18 hours ago

      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.

      • burrito@sh.itjust.works
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        16 hours ago

        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.

      • meyotch@slrpnk.net
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        16 hours ago

        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.

  • ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world
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    20 hours ago

    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.

    • Quik@infosec.pub
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      5 hours ago

      Know the struggle, just keep trying local stores or other sites first, maybe we can be a small part of change for the better ;)

  • Plebcouncilman@sh.itjust.works
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    12 hours ago

    If I lived in a city where there are lots of different retailers that carry varieties of products then maybe I wouldn’t use Amazon. But when you live in a more rural area where the selection is limited and you like better stuff, there’s really not many other options.

    It also seems like a very one sided criticism of Amazon. No corporation is good, and Amazon might very well be evil™️ but not everything about it is negative. It has also brought thousands of jobs to rural or semi rural areas that pay better than anything else in the area. They increase access to products that people like me wouldn’t be able to access otherwise. And they are actively trying to disrupt the healthcare industry by lowering prices and giving greater access to healthcare to people who are far from cities.

    I also suspect that these descriptions of working conditions at Amazon centers seem to be cherry picked and might be attributed more to bad managers than company policy, because I’ve met people who work at Amazon warehouses and they don’t complain about this kind of stuff at all. In fact they seem to generally like their jobs.

    • e461h@sh.itjust.works
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      11 hours ago

      Their business model has been to undercut and extinguish their competition for as long as they’ve been around. The ‘good’ you talk about is about controlling the market and leaving you with no choice as they’ve already largely done with your ‘nicer stuff’. Workers will be shit-canned without a second thought if they realize their ai/robot dreams. Drugs will become more expensive again once they capture the market.

      The world depends on everyone voting with their wallets despite the inconvenience. You don’t have to be perfect, just make some changes. Pay more and support your small local businesses whenever possible.

      • jumping_redditor@sh.itjust.works
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        2 hours ago

        the buisnesses near me will never sell rp-sma to mhf 1 cables as there is approximately no demand for them. Not everyone lives in mega cities with dozens of stores selling the same products.

      • Plebcouncilman@sh.itjust.works
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        8 hours ago

        It’s not about paying more. It’s that Amazon has products that local retailers simply do not stock and will never stock because the demand just isn’t there.

    • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
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      7 hours ago

      they bought Wholefoods a while ago, but the pay and benefits, if your part/full time is generally better than WF. still its a in-between job jobs though, and they arnt really a stickler when using your PTO/UPT like WF.

  • romantired@shibanu.app
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    7 hours ago

    It’s time to admit that any of you would have dreamed of being at the helm of Amazon, but simply aren’t talented enough to build such an empire.

    • Blemgo@lemmy.world
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      48 minutes ago

      I’d argue most people just aren’t parasitic enough to willingly exploit both their sellers, workers and customers in the scale of how Amazon did and still does.

    • quetzaldilla@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      I accepted a position at Amazon as a finance director for one of their many divisions, and it was hands down the most toxic work environment I have ever experienced-- and I’ve worked in public accounting for other a decade, so that’s saying something.

      I resigned within a couple weeks and found myself a much better job elsewhere.

      • Vreyan31@reddthat.com
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        7 hours ago

        This matches every account I’ve heard from friends in Seattle that have worked for the HQ.

      • romantired@shibanu.app
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        6 hours ago

        Not your business, so you’re getting annoyed, which means the problem is with you…

        • Voytrekk@sopuli.xyz
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          60 minutes ago

          If a company’s culture causes a high turnover rate, that is a company problem.

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      I would dream of coming up with a solution to existence of such monopolies, which is not exactly the same.

      In any case, no. I suppose you are simply incapable of understanding it, but no, not everyone wants to be the biggest turd in the room. There are people who want there to not be turds in human habitats outside of intended compartments and environments.

    • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
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      7 hours ago

      if you ever been a manager, admin or even a developer, you wouldnt be saying that. they are worked to being burnt out comparatively to other tech companies.

  • Broken@lemmy.ml
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    17 hours ago

    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.

    • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
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      17 hours ago

      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.

      • athairmor@lemmy.world
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        13 hours ago

        ACE is more like a franchise than other retailers. Most are locally-owned. Some are employee-owned.

        • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
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          16 hours ago

          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.

          • setVeryLoud(true);@lemmy.ca
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            16 hours ago

            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.

        • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
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          16 hours ago

          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.

    • Fredthefishlord@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      14 hours ago

      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