Vote with your dollars folks. I'm 5 years in to an Amazon boycott and hardly even notice really.
Why is the consumer or shareholder being asked to solve a legislative problem?
Buying consumer goods shouldn’t be a political statement. It’s just ignoring the actual problem of insufficient legal protections for workers.
If Amazon can orchestrate a scheme in which they subcontract deliveries to absolve themselves of the responsibility for employee health and safety, that is a legal issue, not a “I gusss I shouldn’t order dental floss off Amazon” problem.
I can boycott Amazon immediately, with only a small effort.
I encourage you to do both.
Every item on Amazon is available somewhere else. Every retail / online shopping experience can be contactless these days. You might have to wait 5 days instead of 2 for a package but that can be okay.
Anecdotally, the store experience here from Walmart, Target and Best Buy have provided contactless parking lot delivery via app throughout much of the pandemic.
Can't speak for Walmart but Best Buy has a price matching policy and the typical corporate return policy which works fine for me but I'm sure has been annoying for many, just like all corporate policies.
It's so strange to me how defensive people can be over corporations when people are told about the option of boycotting. Just...keep shopping there? It's fine. You don't have to boycott and a mob isn't going to judge you if you don't.
That doesn't mean you have to pretend it's because it's this like inherently impossible thing. It's a capitalist economy and Amazon has won you over. You feel they provide the best options and there aren't any viable alternatives.
In my area there are...but it's just Best Buy and WalMart. "Oh boy, really fighting the power by switching from Amazon to Walmart /s"
I go to Best Buy. Never been crazy about that either but I still don't know at what point we all decided waiting two days was somehow preferable to driving for 10-15 minutes to grab a new PS4 controller or whatever.
Suggesting that it isn't a noble effort to boycott a clearly unethical corporation though just because you don't want to do it honestly just stinks of insecurity over the fact that you buy things from a company that isn't exactly turning out to be ethical.
The situation is far more complicated than that and ultimately each of us get to pick our battles day in and day out. You don't have to pick this one - that's fine.
You also don't need to defend a massive corporation on the basis of their competitive advantage in order to make yourself feel better about not boycotting. Sometimes the point of boycotting is that the competitive advantage has come at some other cost to society which is deemed to be too severe. Do you not agree that Amazon has crossed some ethical lines lately? Because _that_ is the discussion we should be having.
Amazon can, will and certainly already has been known to defend themselves using their vast fortune. Please stop helping them or if you're going to at least go fill out a job application and get paid to do so.
This was also over the Christmas period, so when I returned it I was asked to pay customs charges (thanks brexit), and it took the guts of a month from the initial order to refund.
You don't know in advance whether you're going to have that sort of experience with a manufacturer, or whrther it will be easy, but with Amazon they accept returns at a post office and you send it to your own country which skiets all the issues above.
In Switzerland I can give any returns just to the postal guy that comes by everyday anyway. Couldn't be more comfortable than that. I rarely have to return anything tho
The ease of the process of doing that varies mightily with sellers.
> In Switzerland I can give any returns just to the postal guy that comes by everyday anyway.
That is definitely not the case in either the UK (pre brexit even) or Ireland. You need to drop the package off, and depending on the seller their preferred return method may be on the opposite side of the city to you, or they might let you drop off at a supermarket.
I don't need a lot of things, and I just buy local, or for tech, sometimes Newegg, or again, a local outfit. Hit up Costco once a month, too.
At first it was a conscious choice not to use Amazon, but later it just kind of doesn't matter anymore. If they didn't exist, it wouldn't matter to me.