Why #ResistAmazon?
Amazon makes it easy to find almost anything you might want to buy and can have it delivered to your door fast and "free".
However, this convenience comes at a high cost paid by pretty much everyone except Amazon.
Want to learn more about the high cost of convenience? Click each heading below.
If you want a deeper dive into reasons why Amazon should be resisted and recommendations of how to resist Amazon beyond an Amazon-free Christmas, pick up a copy of How to Resist Amazon and Why, and if you want to share with friends and family, order a few copies of the zine.”
Amazon doesn't really pay taxes and may even evade paying them.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos's net worth is over $150 billion. To understand how mind-blowingly large such a number is, play with this interactive visualization. The only thing Bezos can think of to do with this obscene wealth is to go to space.
Meanwhile, Amazon has an ever-growing list of questionable, unscrupulous business and employment practices attributed to it, and for which is never really held accountable, though this is a start.
Amazon fires people for raising concerns and suppresses union drives.
Amazon generally pays workers too little and straight-up shorts workers' paychecks.
Amazon burns through workers by employing technology to treat people like machines, and even intentionally limits upward mobility. Turnover is so high across all levels of employees that Amazon is losing money and it could run out of workers within a couple of years.
Amazon creates working conditions and productivity standards that make workers urinate in bottles (no joke) and are generally unsafe.
Amazon surveils drivers, sidesteps worker rights through the gig economy, and on top of that insult, withholds gig drivers' pay.
Amazon thinks sticking people in a box will compensate.
Amazon rigs search results to put its own brands first and may have lied to Congress about it.
Amazon copies popular items to sell for less, forcing small businesses to compete against their own products.
Amazon's fees – especially Fulfillment by Amazon, which is necessary to get the Prime badge and get into top search results – and other hidden costs are often cost-prohibitive for smaller businesses.
Amazon is making sellers pay for its anti-counterfeiting program.
Without piling additional problems on it, e-commerce has the potential for a smaller carbon footprint than individual trips to brick-and-mortar stores. Unfortunately, additional problems exist.
If everyone shopped online, it might be environmentally friendlier than shopping at brick-and-mortar stores. However, most people do both, which erases the benefit. Fast shipping means more trucks on the road and more planes in the skies, which means more emissions. People are more likely to return items bought online than those bought in a brick-and-mortar store, which means even more shipping, which means more emissions. It also means more waste.
Gig economy delivery, like with Amazon Flex, is basically just paying someone else to go get the thing and bring it to you rather than going to get it yourself. This means deliveries aren't consolidated and routes aren't optimized, like they would be with package delivery services, and it means traveling to a warehouse generally located farther away than a brick-and-mortar store. All that amounts to more emissions.
Big e-commerce shopping days like Prime Day and Cyber Monday compound the problems.
Ten years ago, Life Hacker did a general comparison of products. Sometimes it was cheaper on Amazon. Sometimes it wasn't. However, nowadays Amazon has a practice of punishing sellers whose products sell anywhere else for less. Because Amazon charges sellers fees that can add up to 50% of the product price paid to Amazon, sellers must raise prices in order to cover their own expenses. So, regardless of where we shop, if the product is on Amazon, we’re paying more than needed so Amazon can profit. Charging sellers, and consequently us, more is working out really well for Amazon. They raked in ~$9,900,000,000 in PROFITS in just ONE QUARTER (July-September 2023).
As former Amazon shoppers, we understand that perhaps the higher price could seem worth it because they make it fast and easy to “Buy now.” . We timed how long it took to find 20 popular Christmas gifts from a site outside of Amazon (or determine that it was only sold on Amazon) – we averaged just 35 seconds.
While Amazon is currently facing a lawsuit for inflating prices, it will be resolved long after the Christmas season. In the meantime, while we have to pay more for our online purchases regardless of what site we shop on, we might as well take 35 seconds to find the item elsewhere and give the extra we spend to the actual seller.
With all the additional costs exposed – costs to workers, small businesses, the environment, and our own pockets – join us in reimagining Christmas shopping and wishing with the Wishlist Challenge!