Reasons to buy from Amazon:
* Cheap
* Consistent
* Fast shipping
* Good product availability
* Good return policies
* Vendor and item ratings
* Cheap
* Consistent
* Fast shipping
* Good product availability
* Good return policies
* Vendor and item ratings
Shifting commerce to digital and personal, just-in-time shipping, and customer-centric are good. Ugly business practices, creepy data mining, and DRM are bad. If you want to wave your hand at "conveniences", why wouldn't I wave my hand at "philosophical quibbles"?
Amazon is a mixed bag. For me, it's more good than bad. Putting your blinders on to the good for the sake of argument is not convincing.
My take on this is that it's early in the conversation to downplay these wins as small (after all, why do people die of starvation today? Not shortages or money: distribution, which is a keystone problem for Amazon).
I also hope we will think of improving commerce as a moral issue. Assuming that it boils down to worthless materialism or Mammon is not a fair picture.
Not sure about the sweatshop story, but at least with ebooks the workers have to sweat only once, when they ship the kindle.