Comment by nunez
2 days ago
The way I look at it is that boycotting Amazon is similar to boycotting petroleum. Petroleum is in the supply chain of everything that we use, but energy companies would definitely feel the impacts of everyone getting EVs.
AWS is everywhere, but Amazon Retail is a separate entity and would definitely feel the crunch of even 30% of its users deciding to shop elsewhere or cancelling Prime.
(I cancelled my Prime membership a year and a half ago and do almost all of my shopping directly from manufacturers or from smaller stores. I spent thousands of dollars per year with them.
I used Walmart Lists to replace my Amazon subscribe and save purchases for a year but was finally able to, mostly, move off of that earlier this year. As it happens, HEB, a grocery chain in Texas, has just about everything I need!
I resisted doing this earlier because I thought I needed one/two-day delivery; I wrote posts on here defending this "need." It turns out that, no, I can wait a few days, and, yes, UPS, USPS, and FedEx are significantly more reliable than Amazon Flex.)
Not disagreeing, but I see a gap between the reason and the means of the boycott.
On petroleum, my main beef is not the chemical but how most behemoths managing the market are screwing with our health and the planet. There is an alternate world where BP is not a bunch of psychopaths and we have stronger environmental regulations.
In that respect, getting electricty from BP instead of oil from BP isn't that much of a difference in my book, I don't believe they manage their solar farm better than their oil tankers.
That's the lens I see for Amazon: if we're pissed at them because they killed their App store, does keeping AWS customers afloat really help on the moral standpoint ?
I know we can't stick on principle on everything, I just see the very point of the boycott to be very blurry and not reaching it's target.