I think we should be a bit more aware about the impact of ordering everything through Amazon. Not only regarding delivery, but also the message it sends to local stores.
Is it because you want a distributed network of inventory across the country near you in case of emergency?
Is it because you like talking to someone when doing purchases?
Is it because you think someone is doing a societal good by parking money in inventory they brought near you?
Is it because you just don't like someone doing it more efficiently and getting "too" rich? ie dislike of big corporations?
Like I feel like I should want to support local business but it is way less efficient and I can't really convince myself that I'm not just repeating something my parents also said.
Because they don't have the same unlimited inventory capacity, local stores have to put at least some effort into selling products with some base level of quality and focusing on the products most likely to sell in each category. Local stores are by no means perfect here, but they're vastly better than Amazon in this regard. And it's especially important because finding good independent product reviews on the internet these days is also a challenge, and even where they exist they're not reviewing whatever no-name Chinese brand Amazon is selling anyways.
Local stores supply the cheapest crappiest version of something, but sell it at full price. This maximizes their profit.
Online, I can actually see from the reviews which product is best, and buy that one.
I spend the same, but get a much higher quality product.
There are so many products only sold on Amazon that have 20,000 reviews because they're so much better than anything you can buy locally.
I'm not talking the random Chinese brands with 50 reviews -- I'm talking the #1 best selling item in each product category.
[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Extender-Antennas-Repeater-Wireless...
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Extender-Antennas-Repeater-Wireless...
But if you visit the page for the product's category:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/bestsellers/computers/430578031/...
You see the #1 option has 36K+ reviews. Looks pretty solid to me.
Yes, you can purchase pages and change the product, it's a known scam that I agree Amazon should crack down on. That still doesn't change the fact that there are super-popular items that are usually way better than what you can purchase locally.
An even better way to do it is don’t use Amazon for discovery, and only buy stuff you’ve researched off the site. But walking into Amazon to buy something is just as likely to land you with crap as going into your local shop and doing so.
However, now "local store" includes the giants like Walmart, etc.
Ironically, it's the big chains that seem to be the best on this. They have some curation and their pricing is usually a little higher than What I'll see on Amazon but isn't outrageous.
The big exception is anything edible, such as groceries. Anything edible on Amazon is going to be wildly overpriced. For edible items I definitely go to big chains that are local
Shopping from retailers that employ actual buyers feels like a real upgrade.
If a global business decides to just toss all the plastic it uses it in its backyard you'll never notice because it's 2000 miles away. If Amazon decides to treat their workers unfairly, you'll never notice. But you'll notice if a local business does it because you'll be walking in there every day. There's a level of accountability.
Regarding me not noticing crimes, I think we have police and regulations for that.
(1) That is because technology also takes away components of life that one can enjoy without being rich such as accesss to nature and local food production.
(2) The global economy is only so "good" because it takes advantage of the commons in poorer places. We simply should not have the capability to do that. You only benefit off the suffering of others.
I will take technology and some globalism any day. My 2c.
People living poor don't like it. They may have accepted it, and may have learned to deal with it, but they don't tend to like it. They want out, and generally jump at the chance to do so.
People in richer communities may have fantasies about "living closer to nature," but that doesn't usually involve things like shooing rats off your kids at night, or having your house collapse, when there's a 3.0 earthquake.
People in poorer communities may have unreasonable expectations of what having money will bring, and we often see poor people that get rich quick (think Lotto "winners"), having pretty miserable lives.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.
The downside is that she has a 1 1/2 hour commute. Not because of distance but because of congestion. She is willing to take public transit, except it takes roughly twice as long to take the train, then a bus, then another bus, then a third bus, and not be able to do errands during the day or on the way home.
life is all about trade-offs.
But my opponent, to whom I responded, wants to "severely restrict technology". And this is what I have beef with. Those folks tend to be from rich countries and want to freeze things at their current, comfortable for them, level. They do not want to give up the running water, swear off vaccines and antibiotics or go through dental work without painkillers. Which is where a large part of the world would be stuck under this "technology restriction".
Wisdom combined with restricted technology would be ideal, such as with the Amish. They have their problems but they show that a technologically restricted society is best. Note: I am not arguing for NO technology, but severely restricted technology.
And anytime a self-appointed elite start doing "what is best for the people" against their will, police repression and labor camps are also on the menu. Nah, I will take my freedom, including the freedom to make mistakes.
Because 1 billion years from now, even if humanity is back to before the wheel technology plants will have disappeared and the oceans evaporated due to the sun.
If we want Earth originated life to have a chance to go over this bump something will have to go forward.
But isn’t the entire universe also going to meet its end as well, in an anticlimactic heat death? To overcome that, a civilization would have to reach universe-level Kardashev-like energy utilization capability, which would necessarily consume every particle in the universe, including themselves. It seems infeasible and unwise.
Maybe it would lead to the next big bang… but that still is a death and rebirth.
I think ultimately folks that support post-earth transhumanism operate on a notion that they themselves or their direct descendants that they will know and love in their own lifetimes will benefit from this space-colonial survivalist utopia. But IMO the reality is that if it is even possible, it would only happen long, long after they and everyone they could know or imagine are dead. It would likelier be accomplished by a society and civilization that they would hate and believe should be exterminated, due to the tradeoffs that would have to be made to accomplish it.
It’s essentially an individual’s desire to live forever and avoid death, projected onto the human race. I’m not convinced it would actually be nice to live forever. Better to focus on how to make the short time we have be as good as possible. IMO the idea of eternal life leads to all sorts of perversions of the now in exchange for an assumed eternal afterward.
Get off and go where? Anywhere we could go is a million times worse for human habitation than post-demise Earth.
But I can imagine scenarios where we have to leave earth with intergenerational ships and only then acquire the ability to terraform, harness a star’s energy or travel at light speed.
Economies of scale and local advantages make the world better off. There’s no advantage to growing bananas in greenhouses in Iowa when you can grow wheat and trade with Panama.
That is to say everything isn't objectively always 100% better with globalization and specialization at least not until come up with faster methods of shipping.
You can grow bananas in Alaska, but you can’t simply plant them outside. Thus my example assumes greenhouses built to a large enough scale to handle trees which is a major economic and environmental cost.
Comparative advantage applies to a huge range of things not just bananas. You could mine cobalt basically anywhere at extreme expense, but everyone is better off when that happens in locations that naturally have extremely high concentrations of cobalt.
So no, in this case local production is simply worse for the commons. More broadly things that cost dramatically more are generally worse for the environment in subtle ways.
On the other hand even occasional imports supports global trade and a dramatically higher standard living. The option to decarbonize global trade is exists, ‘local’ is more feel good nonsense than an actual path forward.
Isn't this basically collectivization, which empirically has been shown to a massive failure? Without a monetary incentive, it's hard to get people to actually do stuff rather than lying on their couch and watching tiktok.
I do not think your second point stands. Almost the entire world is financially better off than it was in the past. Lots of third world economies are visibly richer than they were a few decades ago. Whose suffering are they benefitting from?
Because they lack wisdom and human beings en masse operate on instinct, not wisdom.
> Almost the entire world is financially better off than it was in the past. Lots of third world economies are visibly richer than they were a few decades ago. Whose suffering are they benefitting from?
The classic reply of the economist. It's because the industrial world measures better off with variables like "life expectancy" and "money".
But a longer life does not a better life make, nor does money always equate to better off.
For example: if I could live next to a beautiful national park and walk there every day, that would be more valuable to me than a million dollars but living in a huge city. How does the prevailing evaluative mechanism account for that?
I'd take arguments with objective metrics over handwavy arguments involving vibes, because with the latter you can make whatever argument you want with them and it's impossible to refute.
>For example: if I could live next to a beautiful national park and walk there every day, that would be more valuable to me than a million dollars but living in a huge city. How does the prevailing evaluative mechanism account for that?
You can ask for how much people are willing to pay for access to such a scenery and put a dollar value on it, or try to infer it based on housing price patterns (eg. house next to national park vs equally rural house next to corn fields).
You can define other concrete metrics. Distance to wild nature for example. That's concrete.
Also, there has been a visible improvement in living standards in third world countries. More money does not mean people have a better life in a rich country because there are diminishing returns on having more money. In a country where most people are a lot poorer and desperately need more money, more money does mean better off.
I am pretty sure people who can afford a proper house instead of a slum stack, or have a proper toilet, etc. are better off. As I said, there are visible improvements in the lives of the very poor.
"For example: if I could live next to a beautiful national park and walk there every day, that would be more valuable to me than a million dollars but living in a huge city."
That is your preference. Many people prefer living in a big city.
Also, what about how good your conditions of life are next to the beautiful national park? A nice house in a big city with good food and leisure time vs a shack in the beautiful place, hard work to grow a barely adequate amount of food?
But there's also people like me, who say that sounds great but don't really mean it, because it's cringe to admit that you care about money.
Vice president Vance marrying a woman from India was a look into the future. The rich elite know what's happening.
The dominance of the economy by a few big companies also has the same effect - elimination of competition.
That's what "too big to fail" corporations can get you: failed products, anti-competitive environment, regulatory capture, no responsibility.
Getting fined for a few (hundred) million dollars is not responsibility, it's chump change for multi-trillion dollar corporations.
Most of the cheap stuff we buy is from other countries, they don't have the same regulations and protections that we have, hence part(not all) of the reason they are cheap.
Take a look at the cheap chargers on Amazon for example, marked as UL listed but you open them up and you see a circuit that is liable to start a fire. Someone reports it, the vendor vanishes and then there are 5 more listings under different names. See also the lead paint on toys scandal and poison pet food/treat scandals.
This is true for the extreme minority of products that ARE produced locally.
If you buy a screwdriver from the privately-owned DYI shop around the corner it will have been produced in the same Chinese factory and shipped by the same boats and trucks as the one you'll buy from Amazon.
You're not at all supporting local sustainability, you're just paying more to add one more middleman.
It allows whoever is willing to understand the peoples of the world share way more than what makes them different. Globalization, specially through the internet, but trade as whole, is my personal bet on what could "end all wars". In fact it is the first necessary step for the philosophical parts of the communist manifesto that are salvageable, the parts about the global coalition of common peoples working on shared goals and with similar baseline prosperity.
Regarding human-supremacist view, I hadn't seen that expression before but if I interpret it correctly, I would say that describes a great big majority of the world population and I believe anyone would have a really hard time making this case to anyone on the street. I respect the moral purity in a way, but I think it's wildly impractical to call people around you human-supremacists, when like I said we are still not totally in agreement that things like wars should not happen. We say we do but there's never not been wars in our history. I don't know man, I feel like you're too deep in this rabbithole of morality to be able to have a normal discussion about getting a lightbulb at the local store when you start calling other people human-supremacists. But I do enjoy the banter!
My goal is not to get most people to like me, or agree with my views. I fully acknowledge that I am a fundamentalist in the sense that I have a few axioms (all life is equal and technology must be regressed) and I have a zero compromise policy on that. Of course, unfortunately, to make a living I must participate in some of our atrocities.
I don't think it's necessary either, that I conform and discuss as others. There is no shortage of conformists. Either our destructive ways will stop, in which case I am working to bring them down through my writing, or I will fail. It's something I believe in and nothing will change that.
You have probably never in your whole life been to a forest that's more than a few hundred years old. Even the Amazon was largely managed by humans with fire prior to about the 15th-16th century.
> technology must be regressed
This is a morally deranged axiom. The life-giving benefits of so many technologies can't be overstated.
Your plastic example is a reasonable example, but I could also counter that if plastic is the problem then locally isn't necessarily more sustainable. Local farmers can also wrap their products in plastic. In the end, the plastic is there to increase the shelf life. Even most local products will need to have a shelf life of a few weeks. It's unreasonable to demand farmers stop batching their produce and instead demand they carry a few apples to the market each day.
Also accountability is the same there, shops just buy their material regardless of working conditions and whatsoever. At least companies can be regulated based off of that.
The error is too systematic to say "just produce local".
Those financial institutions hire local people. Other local businesses use the same financial institutions.
It's not about "simple economics". This isn't a supply and demand curve. It's about what a higher cash flow/economic output can mean for the subjective quality of life in a community:
- More jobs - Higher wages - Improved public services (schools, roads, healthcare) - Increased property values
Tons of people in these comments talking about the shitty rural experience while seeming to miss the irony in "big cities are so much better" -- big cities started as small cities.
Buying from local stores pays the salaries of local salesmen, that is a benefit for the community. But wouldn't the community benefit better if they did a job that was needed instead?
Yup. If you go to a souvenir store in a remote town (say Kiruna, Sweden), you will typically find local themed products manufactured in China.
local production happens in China though. if you live anywhere else, most of the stuff you can buy off Amazon was made in China. the local shops will ultimately buy it from China too.
Global trade is one of the best things to happen to the world, it has improved the lives of many. All your advocating for is going back to a time which you did not live it but you romanticize. I suspect it was not as romantic as you make it out to be.
When you buy from a non local business, that money leaves your towns microeconomy.
It’s part of why dollar stores destroy low income areas.
Amazon is a big employer in a lot of local communities.
When you shop at locally-owned stores the money goes to a local small business owner, truly staying local.
Look up how walmart used to destroy small town economies by bankrupting all the local businesses and converting all those previously middle-class shop owners into minimum wage jobs at walmart.
Incorrect. Bezos only owns 8.8% of Amazon.
Most of the profit is distributed to a wide variety of shareholders in the form of rising share prices, reflected in things like retirement accounts. In other words, a lot of that profit goes to grandmas across the country with their money in a Vanguard retirement fund. Including grandmas in your local community.
And you really think the local shopowner kept all the profit in their community? E.g. they didn't send their kids to college in another state? Or build a house with materials sourced from all over the country?
It's a whole lot more complicated than you seem to think.
Imagine spending money and having that money allow people in your local community to afford college.
Then imagine thinking that’s a bad thing.
Obviously it’s complicated, but the gist is longer money stays in a local area, the better off that area is going to be.
It’s better for money to leave my town so that my neighbor’s kid could go to college than it is for me to get two day shipping on a new game console.
A pathological case could be made that every dollar that you keep in town is a dollar someone spends outside of the town. That’s a valid argument in theory, but in reality that doesn’t happen.
People go to local businesses and spend money. Local bars, specialty markets, farmers markets, etc.
That said, I do mostly agree with you. Where we might differ is that I don't accept paying significant markup to shop local. If an item I want is available locally and is close to the same price as online, I will go local every time for exactly the reasons you mention: to help the local economy. But I have a low tolerance for The outrageous markup that most Small shops insist on applying. In my opinion, those shops probably should go out of business by being non-competitive. That would open up some room for a less greedy retailer to come and be more of a service to the local community.
While arguably not ideal I would also argue that is still better than the same profits being captured by an increasingly centralized corporation many states or countries away.
Local millionaires using a bank will incentivize that bank keeping branches open in town, which can help other locals more easily maintain savings accounts. I personally make a point to use at least one locally incorporated bank for similar reasons.
Even something frivolous like a local millionaire buying a powerboat stimulates the economy because the infrastructure that is required to maintain that keeps a demand for other jobs open and keeps money flowing.
Now I’m not saying powerboats are intrinsically good. All I’m saying is that if someone is going to buy one with the profit captured from running a business selling eg home goods, it’s better for a local economy for a local to do it vs a Bay Area Bezos a thousand miles away.
You seem to have missed my point entirely. I'm not saying that's a bad thing -- but I'm saying that by your logic, you seem to think it is.
You're looking at money like it's some kind of zero-sum thing that ought to be hoarded by every local community. You say:
> but the gist is longer money stays in a local area, the better off that area is going to be
That is contrary to all standard economic theories of free trade. The entire engine of economic growth is that when communities trade between each other, everyone's standard of living goes up.
The economy theory you seem to be promoting is what is known as mercantilism [1], which has been thoroughly discredited.
Circulating money broadly is a good thing. You don't need to worry about it leaving your local area, because it comes back according to whatever goods and services you produce! You don't need to hoard it locally.
> it comes back according to whatever goods and services you produce
Extractive industry like Amazon kill the local producers and siphon the money out of smaller areas and concentrate it in richer areas. When there are no local producers or wealth left, what is there to circulate or trade?
Amazon is an Internet-myelinated version of the Wal-Mart effect, with more packaging waste.
If that were true, then sure it would be a problem. But I don't know of many communities in the US where there are literally no jobs, nothing being produced at all. Where economic activity is zero.
Some jobs go away and new ones arise. And remote work makes it easier than ever for jobs to move from cities to smaller areas.
Can you really show that Amazon has had a net effect of shifting wealth "out of smaller areas" and into richer ones? Especially when you consider the amount of money it saves people in smaller areas, which makes them more wealthy than they would be otherwise?
I’m saying that as a single pragmatic person in the current world we live in, it’s better to spend your money locally.
We don’t live in a world where any community is self sufficient, money comes and goes, but for many towns, it just goes.
As you said, this stuff is complicated.
An individual choosing to spend money at local businesses is not what makes a mercantile economic system.
A few reasons:
- market diversity matters, and we have a more functional market with many smaller actors
- similarly, a smaller local actor is more accountable for their behavior
- efficiency comes mostly from cutting things, some of which mattered (eg, individual buyers at companies do more due diligence on the product than Amazon)
- it’s better that every community have a local moderately rich person than one super rich person nationally, eg, in terms of charity to your community
- politics remains local and hence tractable
- smaller organizations have less of a “frozen middle”, which creates numerous problems with national scale organizations
There’s probably more reasons if I really stopped to think about it.
For some value of "more efficiently". I mean if the most efficient way to work is to have delivery drivers pee in a bottle and warehouse workers develop RSIs, who am I to complain? Someone else's dignity is a small price to pay in order to get a 3% rebate on some commodity.
At least in the USA we have some semblance of a Labor Department etc...
I mitigated it by having my first smartphone last 12 years, and I am now using the company-provided one in order to avoid a second buy. Not ideal, I’ll admit. I hope that, by the time I need a change, I can use a pinephone and convince my company that I only need a rsa otp or a yubikey.
But is that really related to the thread?
> At least in the USA we have some semblance of a Labor Department etc...
Any local alternative to amazon will also have it, and less execs/lawyers whose only job is to make them irrelevant.
This is more important for businesses that produce and capture a larger amount of value, like locally owned restaurants vs corporate owned chains, but any little bit helps at least a little.
(Of course if you're a rootless corporate mercenary who goes wherever work takes you, with no long-term stake in the place you live, then it doesn't matter at all.)
It's likely that a mega retailer like Walmart generates this margin in their supply chain, bulk land/space and pays out, in total more via wages and benefits (particular possible with the scale of healthcare costs and benefits programs like scholarships)
That money comes from many communities and is distributed to a handful; and I think it would be interesting to quantify the loss of economic activity from Amazon moving money out of a community.
Money sent off to Detroit or Japan for your car is as good as lost to your community, but as I said even a small amount of money spent locally will help your local community a small amount, which is more than none. Even eating at a locally owned McDonald's franchise is slightly better than eating at a corporate owned store. That difference is probably too small to be worth looking up who owns a McDonalds, but if the choice is between McDonalds or some local diner then it doesn't require any time spent looking it up.
I think you'd be surprised to realize how much that's not actually the case.
If you google the "Preston model", you'll find a lot of material waxing lyrical about the government of a lone city in England that actually dared to follow that principle in their procurement strategies. They are doing well, but the fact that it feels revolutionary for mainstream sensibilities shows that those principles are still very unknown to most.
(I should add: the principle of locality is not always a good thing, because there are scoundrels everywhere. Again in England, the regeneration of massive swaths of land previously used for steelmaking is being done through well-connected local businessmen and corrupted politicians, and it is a shameful rip-off for the taxpayer. If a national government had done that, the relevant minister would have faced the sack; but it's ”old boys” from the area, the national press is not interested, and so it's just business as usual.)
Although I should stress I like the idea of buying local. If the money goes off to some exotic foreign place it is less likely that I will get my hands on it later on. Better to live in a wealthy community than a poor one, etc. Local capital is local prosperity.
It takes knowing what market segment you are selling to to know what to stock.
It takes business connections to but the stock.
* Inefficiency
* Lack of options
* Stupid business practices uncritically continued
See https://asteriskmag.com/issues/07/want-growth-kill-small-bus...
On the globalist/efficient extreme in the USA, for example, you have the problems of:
* Economic dependence on large, national players that can leave at any time
* Business proprietors feel no social responsibility to your community because they do not live there and interact with locals
* Little power in deciding what products businesses offer
* Profits enriching another place rather than your own place
I don't want either of these.
Yes. That generates sales taxes. That generates property taxes. That pays for insurance. That pays for upkeep which is hopefully provided by a local contractor. Where this cycle repeats.
> and getting "too" rich? ie dislike of big corporations?
Yes. The money actually doesn't bother me, it's the access to unrestrained political influence it buys you, and big corporations monopolize labor pools and result in worse outcomes for working conditions and wages. Where this story starts.
What you want to support are:
- local retailers offer better jobs, and often better benefits. The work you do stocking at Menards is much better than sorting boxes at Amazon
- support local repair vs repurchasing. This cuts down on the upstream demand and does wonders for local small-business economies. And again, provides better jobs than sorting boxes.
- Efficiency is great! But what is Amazon efficient at? They have maximized the speed and convenience of delivery. Once stated that way it's obvious there must be tradeoffs. One of those tradeoffs is the shit work. In one dist center, a guys entire job was to wheel odd shaped boxes from one side of a warehouse to another. Whenever you order a big or weirdly shaped box, that guy moved it. Even he hates that job. It's meaningless, non social, provides no transferrable skills.
- ultimately what your parents were talking about is how one chooses to shape their local economy and jobs market. I want to buy from companies that I would want my friends and family to work for.
But yeah, I buy from Amazon all the time too.
Historically, in the US, these shops and restaurants often depended on underpaid (often children of the owner) labor, offered no benefits, and had no safety net in case of owner or business failure.
On average, today, starting wages at McDonalds, Walmart, or your "local" Amazon warehouse are 25-50% higher than local restaurants and retailers for rural America (which more typically pay minimum wage). And benefits, a local mom and pop is less likely to account for paid sick/vacation days, retirement savings, healthcare coverage, and workplace insurance (in some cases, a disability or workplace injury would make the business unprofitable + less oversight).
But you're right I suppose, if your choice is employee number 3 at a tiny thrift store for half the pay, I'd choose Amazon too. But I'd probably want my kids to work at Target stocking shelves rather than Amazon hauling boxes.
Is this backed by empirical evidence? I've also heard that small local companies have worse labor conditions, because they're small and fly under the radar compared to multinationals. One incident of an Amazon delivery driver peeing in bottles (even if they're technically working for a local subcontractor) is enough to show up on the New York Times. The same isn't going to be true for some local firm. Moreover, it's possible that "local retailers" targets a more upmarket segment compared to national chains. When I think "local retailers", I think small boutique shops in gentrifying neighborhoods. Obviously those stores will have better working conditions than Amazon, but it's not as if we got rid of Amazon, it'll get replaced by boutique shops, or that most people would be better served by them.
I had in my head things like Target, Best Buy, or more social, occasional-customer-interaction-based work. It's just those mega corps are local. Also the large retailers like Home Depot, Menards, etc. At least those aren't as soulless and monotonous. By "local" I meant "brick and mortar" etc.
But I'm out of the edit window so, best to ignore it.
The local store pays their taxes — local and national taxes. Amazon is big enough to evade these, or where possible, pay small amounts only in Luxembourg, Delaware etc.
That is exactly the kind of creative accounting unavailable to a small business.
I have to say though I have evolved a bit in this perspective as I've come to realize that these small business owners can be every bit as greedy or even more. Especially there are a lot who are just fundamentally incompetent at business and try to make up the difference by extracting it from their employees, willfully ignoring labor laws in ways a large company would not dare. A large company is a big target surrounded by people who want a piece of the action and often must tread carefully as a result.
I've personally never worked in such a position, but I have heard absolutely crazy stories from people who have, things like demanding that commission only sales people come in hours early to do unpaid work like cleaning unrelated to their job title, "fining" people $75 for checking their phone while "on the clock" (again in a commission only job), constantly helping themselves to their employees paycheck finding things to "charge" them for, and just generally being a menace and treating employees like they personally owned them. Their ego and sense of entitlement go completely wild. The owners I have known personally will brag about cheating on their taxes while railing against the government, running an atrociously inefficient business that they talk about as if it's some sort of charity. In many cities there's a whole good old boy network type system in place that's no less corrupt and ugly than whatever you want to say about companies like Amazon.
That’s such an odd way to paint it.
When people live in a system with millions of quettallionaires and the bilion left are mere millionaires where 1 unit of currency is enough to buy the best meal in town with all towns in the world equally provided in services, the system won’t see much strikes happening soon.
When people live in a system where a small cake is growing at a slow rate and a few hundreds people are cornering always more of it at an accelerating rate, all the more when the extraction rate of the cake is known to exceed the cake regeneration rate, the system is well on its road for repeated strikes or even bloody social movements.
Ok, these allegories are two possible points in a spectrum. Which scenario is most likely to be closest to the world as its perceived by most people out there?
People don’t love or hate big corporations and riches out of the blue. If there are given room out of the vivid feeling that their life is a day to day struggle to survive, most people can perfectly demonstrate nuances in their judgment.
It sure seems to me as if there were a few additional downsides in those communist countries that I don't see to anywhere near the same degree in the US.
You're correct that monopoly leads to a degradation of products and services, but that's a flaw in capitalism (specifically the myth of the self-regulating free market ideal that eschews proper regulation in favor of the "invisible hand.")
The overheads of physical retail stores makes it all but impossible for them to compete with online shopping. I’d love to “support local” but I don’t have the expendable income to spend double/more on everything.
What we ideally need is more “local online businesses”, but that seems to be very rare outside of niche hobby/craft type stuff.
Xyltech is also in Houston, and they don't have a typical retail operation, but you can place an order and pick it up.
Polymaker has a Houston warehouse, and while you can't pick it up, a number of SKUs actually ship from there.
Often I buy bulk purchases of Sunlu from Aliexpress. Usually takes about 8 days to get to me, but at around $11/KG for PLA+, it's a great price.
I do not patronize Amazon. But f I did, I would pick a margin - let's say 20% - and resolve to buy locally when the price is at least that close to the online price.
Focusing on the price is a complete misunderstanding. Just looking at my recent amazon purchases. I have bought 3mm and 2mm thick brass sheets, 0.8mm endmills, a set of dwarven miner minis, and a highlander cow shaped slipper. I have no clue which shop would even hope to have these things. I could get on my bike and go to all the hardware shops around me in the hopes that maybe they have endmills, or all the department stores and walk up and down to see if they have the slippers I'm thinking about. And I would be still without brass sheets and dwarven miners.
Or I can from the comfort of wherever I am browse a wild selection of things and get them for reasonable price. I bought the miner minis while physically situated in a coffee shop waiting for my friend to return from the washroom. Just because I happened to have a minute to think about what I need for our next DnD session. That is insanely convenient.
Not many people will choose that.
Businesses that should be able to sustain themselves are things that have additional experiences and services. Food, coffee, sports shops with fittings or lessons, bike shops with repair rooms, art galleries that are fun to browse, clothing stores that you can touch and try on, stuff crafted locally that is tangibly better than something mass produced, etc.
Your list is good, but how many are vulnerable to competition from online ?
As a purely-theoretical thought experiment, this may be true.
As a blanket statement about prices in the real world, this is not correct.
There are many stores around me here in San Francisco who absolutely do have prices that are close to (and sometimes lower than) "e-tailer" prices. If stores in SF can meet or beat "e-tailer" prices, I find it hard to believe that stores in Bum-fuck Nowhere, USA can't ever do the same.
Every local business should be a "local online business" as you suggest. But most business owners don't give a fuck and are happy to see Amazon crush them. Why?
I used to try to support local business, but frankly it's such a waste of time to go looking for products that they never have in stock, ward off annoying salesmen who never have a clue if you actually need help, and dealing with bad return policies. The price difference is but icing on the cake.
You have a a large fleet of 18 wheelers, delivery vans and forklifts. Then the warehouses that go into making the supply chain work.
The only way it works out is if people buy much less, which given prices would be much higher, they likely would.
Your one person is a truck delivering to 100 homes ignores the fact that at least 80% of the people in those homes have a car that they use everyday, often passing a grocery store and most other local shops.
I have a longer reply talking about the Carbon usage below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42463832
Right, but if you want something in 2-3 days (which amazon provides), you need to make a dedicated trip. Even if timing wasn't a factor, at best doing a consolidated errand run allows you to visit a handful of stores, whereas an amazon delivery van delivers to dozens of houses in your neighborhood in one trip.
In order to get that amazing fast delivery time, Amazon had to create their own system. The creation of that system, created a large amount of Carbon emissions at it's onset just with the requisite vehicles require to make it happen. It also set off an arms race between logistics enterprises to try and deliver the same performance, leading to further emissions.
>The primary function of Amazon Air is to transport Amazon packages from distant fulfillment centers that are outside of Amazon's local ground linehaul network for a specific area.
They have their own air cargo service for shipping packages between Distribution centers. They wouldn't invest in that unless they had enough volume to make it profitable.
I get that it is easy and convenient but please don't try to claim that it is ecological.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Air
https://www.businesstechweekly.com/online-sales-and-growth/s...
https://www.warehousingandfulfillment.com/warehousing-and-fu...
I feel like they are riding on old momentum by now. The experience shopping there is terrible.
You do realize that an electric Amazon van delivering hundreds of packages to your neighborhood pollutes a lot less than you taking your G-wagon to the local store, right?
> but also the message it sends to local stores
"You're obsolete", which is true? Local stores are usually more expensive, carry less inventory, require you to go there or charge delivery fees, have inexistent or predatory return policies, etc. It's simply a worse experience in every way.
There was a time where this was compensated by the vendors having wide knowledge about the subject that they were selling items for, but it's not the case anymore, so really, what's left to local stores?
I don't know why people have this tendency to romanticize outdated and objectively worse in every way things just for the sake of "tradition".
The US suburbs don't really have what I would call "local stores," just big, well known corporate stores. So, when making the choice of where to buy Product X, my options are giving my money to Best Buy, Walmart, Ikea, Kroger, etc...or Jeff Bezos, whose online empire offers slightly more convenience than the others because I don't have to drive if I can wait a day or two.
There's no family-owned businesses to hurt here because they were all chased out by the Big Box stores years ago. Heck, I remember when they filled in the pond I learned to fish in as a kid just to put up that Walmart. Sure, Amazon can be held up as contributing toward the death of the small business, but those wheels were spinning long before Bezos was selling books out of a garage or whatever mythology we want to accept.
I don't like Amazon. I don't like the idea of one entity having that much influence and control over my consumer habits. I don't like that the business model is just drop-shipping in a trenchcoat of digital services. I don't like that their workers are basically treated as third-world labor.
But I do have to admit that they have won the game and as a result, I have to use them. I wish it were otherwise, but we're past the point of no return, on that. We all gave them permission for this to happen by patronizing it for years, even down to the mistreated workers who keep applying for those jobs knowing full well Amazon's employment reputation. Amazon did not kill small business. Consumers did, ever suckered by savings and convenience.
Like I'm at a point where I order like 5-10 products a year from amazon, mostly cause I can't get them elsewhere for reasonable prices. Everything else I buy in other online stores or physically.
Amazon does more than most of those to let you buy from small producers, which also feature in their catalog. The volume SMBs ship on Amazon was in the double digit billions per year when I worked there — and is probably higher now.
Now, back to my regular Amazon criticism!
At one point in time, Wal-mart's big thing was they sold Made in America. Then they pivoted to cheap junk, their pivot occurred as jobs moved from the US to Mexico and China.
That was the point when it became unfashionable to shop at Wal-mart; as recorded by the finest news network : https://theonion.com/hostages-trapped-inside-walmart-insisti...
Consumers weren't completely suckered by savings and convenience; although that was some of it, they were trying to make their ever smaller budgets stretch further.
I live in the center of London and out of the 200 non-household goods orders I have on Amazon this year I don't think I would have been able to find even 20% of them in local stores.
Actually even when I do go in a store and find an item I need, I scan the barcode on the Amazon app and saw that it's usually a LOT cheaper on Amazon (like, 30% cheaper for the exact same tool).
Add to that what I mention in my previous comment about return policies, travel time, etc. and there's absolutely no reason not to order on Amazon, even if you're in the ideal place to go to local stores.
I have ordered from online retailers in Denmark, and I've made 2 orders from AliExpress, and a few more from eBay.
Can you give five items you can't buy in central London, but can buy from Amazon?
Of those, I probably have a good portion which is household goods as I mentioned, like soap in bulk, soda cans in bulk, etc. which is cheaper than any other option (especially because I don't have a car in London).
Then I have around 170 orders which are items I got for free through the Vine program (https://www.amazon.co.uk/vine/about). And probably around 30 orders that are free books (https://www.amazon.co.uk/firstreads).
If I ignore all of those, and take only recent orders that I paid for, here are 5 items that I can't buy, or at least wouldn't know where to even begin looking for, in central London:
- A luggage and suitcase scale
- A monitor arm
- A good shower filter for hard water (not the crap that doesn't actually filter anything which you can easily find anywhere)
- A label printer
- A moth repellent for wardrobes
But anyway, shops selling luggage are common. They probably sell scales too. Argos, Tesco and Ryman have them.
Electronics shops like Currys have monitor arms, as well as office supply shops.
I won't guess what a good shower filter is.
Office supply and electronics shops also have label printers.
Moth repellent is available from large supermarkets, DIY stores and hardware shops.
All of these are also available online from British companies that pay their fair share of taxes.
What is it that you buy online or offline? I just can't imagine making a purchase every other day, especially if you aren't including groceries...
I just don't buy anything in brick and mortar shops, except food and drinks. Just out of convenience and price, not for ideological reasons or anything.
The number of orders is also inflated by things I listed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42463417 and by the fact that one project can be many orders. I built a NAS, and it was split over 10 orders, basically one per component when the price was right.
Try ordering direct from the manufacturer's website. A surprising-to-me number of companies have set this up, and it's what I often do if I know what I want and Newegg isn't selling it for a reasonable price (or at all).
It's quite an evil genius policy on the side of Amazon.
The laws of our economy are not there to serve a few large companies. They are there to serve us, people, most of all. Do you think that markets will collapse if we had more fair rules for big companies?
Not nonsense of course but if what Amazon is doing is breaking any of the antitrust laws we have in place there is a machinery for that already - the government can take this up if they feel like Amazon is breaking antitrust laws. The problem is - whatever "issue" someone has with something amazon is doing it inevitably ends up here on HN as "oh that should be illegal..." you start putting every little thing you don't like into some federal laws and pretty soon you are China... it is a fine line to walk on...
> The laws of our economy are not there to serve a few large companies. They are there to serve us, people, most of all.
In some theory maybe - not in any reality... this sounds more like the way China is organized, not United States :) I personally wish this was true...
> Do you think that markets will collapse if we had more fair rules for big companies?
This depends - who is making the rules?! This is always easier said than done - you think that whatever "rules" you put in place is what "everyone/majority/..." wants but of course you'd be wrong. And again - who is making the rules? The politicians who spent over 70% of their fundraising for their next election... and during those fundraisers the donors are ... well not me and you but Amazon, NRA... and they will get their way... The system is stacked against you and you can talk fantasy like "oh the economy should work for the little guy..." or reality...
And if you want to do business (at all) you have to abide by the local laws. In an ideal democratic world, those laws would be set by the people and for the people.
Can you make an argument outlining how Amazon's anti-competitive rules help the society, and why their behavior should be tolerated in an ideal democratic society?
which law is amazon breaking and if there isn't one (there isn't, otherwise there would be lawsuits we are all aware of) what's the law going to look like?
> Can you make an argument outlining how Amazon's anti-competitive rules help the society, and why their behavior should be tolerated in an ideal democratic society?
not sure what "democracy" has to do with anything? we don't really have a system in place where we go to a referendum and make decisions like this. whether or not amazon's anti-competitive rules help the society or not is on the society to decide. you have a choice whether to use amazon services and if you are so anti-amazon no one is forcing you to use their services. if amazon is doing something is illegal based on today's laws there is a machinery to bring lawsuits against (by the government itself or otherwise).
A law would be fairly simple — it would forbid a marketplace or retailer from influencing the price of goods sold outside their marketplace/shop.
There are already laws regulating pricing in some places, e.g. selling below the manufacturer's recommended retail price, or preventing selling products below cost to attract customers.
There's this from California: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32866055 (I haven't read it, I'm not that interested.)
I sure have
> A law would be fairly simple — it would forbid a marketplace or retailer from influencing the price of goods sold outside their marketplace/shop.
This type of law would make no sense, you are basically saying "I can price gouge the customers on your platform while providing the same product cheaper on mine." That is a F'ed up as it gets...
> e.g. selling below the manufacturer's recommended retail price
This is completely a different thing - if Amazon is actually telling retailers "hey, you want to sell this for $100 but you can't, you need to lower this price" that should 100% be illegal - Amazon should not be telling anyone what the price of their product should be. But that is 1000000% different from Amazon telling same companies "you cannot use our platform to price gouge people and sell your shit for more than you are selling elsewhere."
You're badly misrepresenting the situation, to the point that I have to wonder whether you're just being dishonest. Many (likely most, but I don't have the data) 3rd party sellers aren't price gouging customers on Amazon, they're simply trying to pass Amazon's significant fees onto the customers.
They're being prohibited from doing so which reduces price transparency and competition which as you surely know, are both required for a market to be efficient.
This is a move that I would expect to disgust free market capitalism maximalists on some level, regardless of what one may think about Amazon's "right" to do whatever it wants.
I asked you whether you believed that society would democratically support Amazon's actions to determine whether you're making those arguments because you genuinely believe this behavior makes average people's lives better, or whether you're just arguing some abstract extremist neoliberal talking points of freedom for the sake of freedom, no matter what it costs us.
It makes a ton of sense that it WOULD happen sometimes, but I've yet to see it.
I'm not sure how you imagine that ordering direct from a manufacturer works, but I'm certain that most of them have their goods in big warehouses and use major delivery services to get those goods to you, much like they would get those goods to an ordinary store.
Goods are going to be shipped, flown, and trucked around. Until we invent macro-scale teleportation, there's no reasonable way to stop doing that entirely.
You are correct, but I don't like this idiom. Your point would come across better if it wasn't delivered in a patronisation sandwich.
I almost never have to resort to Amazon any more.
And no, my post is not an "ad" *eyeroll*. There seem to be several competitors active in a maturing ecosystem. I don't have experience with them them to the level that I'd feel comfortable citing them, but I regret not mentioning them if it would have made the point more effectively. If PayPal, or Google Pay, or some other provider has served that role for you, I'm glad.
Rightly or wrongly, I worry less about the security implementations of hardware point-of-sale terminals than the security implementations of small websites.
I mostly prefer Apple Pay for in-person transactions because of anonymity — my understanding is that it makes it harder for companies (other than Apple) to track my purchases.
> Do those technologies prevent the merchant from getting raw CC info?
They do:
https://www.worldpay.com/en/insights/articles/how-does-a-chi...
> An enabled EMV terminal reads and verifies the card information contained in the embedded chip when inserted into the slot of the payment terminal. Like using the magnetic stripe, card data is then processed for payment authorization; the key difference is that the chip card generates a one-time code for each transaction while a traditional magnetic stripe card does not.
So, the merchant doesn't get the raw CC number; they get a transaction token.
This doesn't prevent someone from reading the CC account number off of the physical card, but unlike swiping a stripe, the act of purchasing via an EMV token means that the CC account number doesn't enter the system.
- for over a year part-time on weekends
- four-day full-time in-between jobs recently
https://www.reddit.com/r/EDC/comments/dmnuts/53mamazon_fulfi...
Once, when polled by HR, I noted that it should be more efficient for many different people in a given neighborhood to place orders, and for one delivery truck to run through it dropping off packages even if somewhat fuel-inefficient, than for that myriad of consumers to make separate trips even if using fuel-efficient vehicles.
Stores should not try to "out-Amazon" Amazon --- I buy my groceries from a store which is 1 mile away, and usually stop on the way home from work --- if I need something over the weekend or on a telework day which won't wait, I walk or ride my bike unless there is some other errand which needs to be made. Similarly, I prefer to shop the local hardware store (bike-distance) for hardware and tools (when suitable ones are available, if not, then it's Harry Epstein, or Jim Bode, or a trip to Woodcraft, or an on-line order).
Folks forget what life was like before Amazon --- there were occasions when I drove all around multiple towns looking for one connector because I didn't want a project to wait for a special order and 6--8 weeks delivery --- my kids were amazed when we came across my copy of the book: _U.S. Mail Order Shopper's Guide: A Subject Guide Listing 3,667 Unique Mail Order Catalogs_ by Susan Spitzer
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4313476-u-s-mail-order-s...
But for me it is an ideological thing - I absolutely loathe Amazon and it’s practices; I just have to visualise how I insert my money into Bezos gaping asshole and my desire to shop at Amazon is rapidly diminishing.
But I think ordering stuff when you are able bodied is immoral as well - not super immoral but you should always feel a little bit bad if you order stuff that you could’ve picked up yourself.
Also the distances in my country are tiny, if you live in the outback with 200km to the next neighbour it’s a different story
You buy it cheaper but you are generating a debt, it's like buying on credit: somewhere someone is being exploited or a natural resource is being overexploited, and you will pay for it in the future, with a poorer environment socially, economically and naturally.
Everything comes back. I once read that I don't know which tribe made decisions that were good for the next 7 generations, well, buying on amazon is a decision that is not good even for the current generation, you will probably see the consequences in your own or your children's life.
There is no such thing as "employee tax". Usually, what exists is a scheme for some of the employee's salary to be paid in the form of retirement schemes, health care, etc. It's not a tax to subsidize unrelated things. Likewise, the income tax is not there to pay for the company's use of collective amenities, it's there to pay for the citizen's use.
In the end, if your company doesn't pay all the stuff that other companies do, it's freeloading, and the society would most likely be better off with another company getting the business.
I didn't say it was to subsidize unrelated things; in fact it's more the other way round, where state pensions, and state employee pensions, public healthcare etc are just paid for, and the money comes from whence it comes.
The Amazon HQ is great for Seattle and Luxembourg, but money spent there is gone from my local (or even national) community.