The local businesses I was worried about going under were restaurants and others in the food/service industry(would lump experience in there as well; the zoo, botanical garden, museums, and etc).
Is that because you don't believe in the negative externalities or because you think they're worth the convenience?
I drive 20 minutes to the mall. After finding parking and getting into a shoe store, there’s no one really there to help me. Once they get around to me, they don’t have my size. And it’s also apparent the person working there has no interest in helping. Whether they have my size or whether I found what I was looking for is basically not their problem. So I drive at least 40 minutes round trip, plus the hassle of parking, finding the store in the mall, and waiting on someone to help me.
Now my time is valuable. I lost my time. I paid for gas. I also put miles on my car. And depending on the day, I also had to deal with traffic.
IMO businesses refuse to compete. If Amazon is doing it better than them, then hats off to Amazon. If a business is doing better than Amazon, then I’ll go with that business.
IMO the “negative externalities” puts blame on Amazon while pretending like these other stores even try to compete.
Btw this binary view of the world where Amazon is bad and others are good (or vice versa) seems to be a very American thing.
These threads of Amazon-bashing always read like something out of parallel universe, I should go have a worse shopping experience because of some "greater" objective of opposing Amazon?
I don't want a future dominated by mega-corp with 99% market share but traditional retail need to get their shit together at some point.
It's not.
In France it's the same thing. But the "Amazon is bad" is not really about destroying businesses (since it was done decades ago by malls, now cities are just banks, insurances and clothing crapshops like Zara) but about the fact that they are not paying taxes and they provide awful work conditions to people.
So you tend to be considered as someone who doesn't care if you buy at Amazon. (But we're still waiting for proof that companies trying to compete with Amazon don't act the same way).
People are sick and tired of Amazon deriving huge profits out of the UK market ($17.5 billion in 2019) and paying just a minuscule amount of tax on those UK sales (£6.3 million in 2019) using a mixture of clever accounting techniques (not available to other businesses) and funnelling profit out via subsidiaries in low tax jurisdictions (Luxembourg).
Shoes fall in the category "things I want to physically try before buying". And that category of things does not work with on-line shopping.
In general, there is no standing in the way of progress that improves efficiency and gives consumers what they want. Interestingly, there seems to be an overlap between the crowd that says we need to hold business accountable for packaging waste and those who believe if they virtue signal hard enough Amazon will disappear and everyone will flock back to inconvenient, higher priced shopping.. Going against the general consumer demand grain typically ends up niche. But I digress.
Amazon(and other online retailers) are destroying lots of low skill jobs, but that's true for most major gains in the efficiency of producing a product. Usually this is associated with automation, but this shift touches many aspects of the logistics providing a shopping experience to consumers. This is a good thing to me as it will ultimately increase our GDP and standard of living. Resources, particular labor, are freed up to work on other stuff. Over 600k small businesses are created every year. There are millions more small business than there were a decade ago. These efficiency gains create a TON of potential.
I think that's good, so what of the net negative in raw job numbers? People without jobs. Well, weren't we at "full employment" pre-pandemic? In any case, I'm a big fan of tackling that with job re-training. We do a really poor job of that in the USA compared to other countries.
But there are a number of solutions to different negative externalities that aren't swimming upstream against consumer trends. Unionization failed but it could happen. That could help address some of the workplace issues. The government can trust bust.
I don't view this as a binary choice. Different people seem to have different pet grievances with Amazon. Some of them I agree with, some I don't(like Amazon doesn't pay taxes, which is a sound bite to me; ya basic), but generally I believe boycotting Amazon(and other online retailers) isn't really going to affect real change.
Furthermore I am very convinced it makes the lives of everyone, except the tiny minority that are actively exploiting everyone else, much worse. Good jobs are lost, supply chains are made fragile, and monopolistic tendencies are encouraged. I would rather the inconvenience of shopping around than encourage a world with a private entity as the sole source of all consumer goods.
If we think Amazon business practices are immoral, we need to make them illegal.
There is a fundamental difference between stopping an abusive business practice with a vote verse with your wallet. With a vote, your choice is to allow the bad business practice and get the benefit of shopping there, or don't allow the business practice and don't get benefit of shopping there. The choice goes together with the consequences, good or bad.
On the other hand, choosing with your wallet doesn't couple the choice with the consequence. Even if I don't shop there, it is very likely the business will continue. Me losing the benefit of shopping there doesn't cause the business practice to stop necessarily.
Lots of people would be willing to give up shopping there if it meant the business stopped, but not if it doesn't.