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Comment by noitamroftuo | Hacker News Reader

> When she heard that Jeff Bezos was getting married in Venice this June, Heather Jane Johnson felt worse than she had in her entire life. Twenty-five years ago, she ceased trading as a bookseller in Boston, Massachusetts. “I lost a lot because of Bezos and the complicity of Americans in the making of Amazon,” the 53-year-old says. “A big reason I moved to Italy is because I felt betrayed by my countrypeople.”

I like how she blames the "complicity of Americans in the making of Amazon", which I believe gets overlooked a lot. Isn't one way of eliminating billionaires to stop using their products?

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Amazon is Walmart 2.0. For over a decade shopping at Walmart was frowned upon by many in the US, criticized for enabling the corporate destruction of mom-and-pop retail. It had little effect beyond virtue signaling to your peers.

All the while those same people had Amazon boxes cluttering their homes.

And if you look at the Fortune 500 list, the succession is nearly complete; Amazon is #2 just behind Walmart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_500#Overview

The consolidation cycle continues relentlessly - the interesting question is what does Walmart 3.0 look like? Aliexpress?

Is there actually a viable alternative to Amazon that ever-increasingly-overworked people can use? Not tech workers like (I assume) you and me, but say, a single dad janitor or mechanic?

Many of these same things happened with Wal-Mart in the 90s in rural America, destroying thousands of small businesses.

I’m all for individual responsibility, but at the same time, we have to acknowledge all the government-mandated economic forces that let Amazons and Wal-Marts establish these types of monopolies.

Individuals need a way to organize to prevent this. That’s historically what our democratically-elected government did, but since Nixon or so, it’s not really been democratically-elected at all.

> Is there actually a viable alternative to Amazon that ever-increasingly-overworked people can use?

Of course there is. For a minor amount of extra effort, for most things, you can get them at a local store, order them directly from the manufacturer's website, go to eBay, etc.

The idea that people are so overworked now that they can't do these things is ludicrous, historically speaking. What's happened is that people have prioritized convenience and often view even slight reductions of convenience as disastrous. But it's not, really.

Yeah, the idea that you have to buy anything from Amazon is puzzling to me. I sometimes look things up on Amazon to see the reviews, but then I buy from Ebay, if I'm not able to shop for it locally. But I know people who act like they wouldn't have toilet paper if Amazon stopped working.

I've tried my absolute best to not buy from Amazon and it's incredibly difficult.

A lot of manufacturers just point to their Amazon page to buy. The few you think isn't, will just ship from Amazon based on the boxes that gets sent and quite a few times I ended up paying more for this pleasure. A lot of stuff just isn't anywhere else either.

If manufacturers really care about getting out of Amazon's vice, they should first start to do their part of the heavy lifting.

yes, agreed. the answer to "how can we help overworked/over-leveraged people" probably should not be "let a few people become unfathomably wealthy".

Lots of “billionaire hating” Americans who still pay their monthly dues to Amazon…

exactly

No, it is not. That ship has sailed. The reason why they are as powerful as they are is because their companies became structural and feudalistic in nature. We, non billionaires, are a new form of consumer that is more akin to indentured servitude than free-will choosers of products. If you think that’s still all it is, well you’re drinking a very late-stage-American-capitalism brand of kool aid.

No offense but if you truly believe that and it’s not sarcastic, you have been brainwashed. It’s not particularly difficult at all to only buy local or through local intermediaries.

Amusingly the internet brought us both the scourge of ultra large distant foreign corporations and easy access to local supply chains because it made discovering suppliers close to you easy.

Where you do your shopping is actually extremely significant and meaningful. You can support your community and its prosperity very easily with your wallet this way. I think a significant part of why this is not put forwards more is actually because of how impactful it is and how contrary to the interest of the few it goes.

That’s not true. In many ways and many places monopolies like Amazon or the mega restaurant chains effectively killed any viable alternative for low-income people

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