Boycotting Amazon (opens in new tab)

What recourse would a buyer have if they pay, and then never receive an item? If your answer to that is, "smart contract wouldn't release funds until they verify they've received item", then what recourse would a seller have if they send product, but the user never completes the transaction and verifies that they received the product?

This isn't a pithy response, I'm genuinely curious how this kind of thing could be worked around. Independent third party mediator that can contact both parties to figure out what happened (perhaps incentivized with a % of the smart contract's value?)

This is similar to what Jet's original vision was. Since the shipping cost is baked into the price of items sold online, Jet would have you buy from local retailers who could bundle the items they sold you, allowing the consumer to save money since the shipping costs were cheaper.

Great idea in theory, not sure how it's working out in practice. I think Jet had trouble establishing a brand - it was acquired in September 2016 by Wal-Mart.

Sounds like OpenBazaar https://www.openbazaar.org

Isn't that a little like ebay or aliexpress?

Large part of this experience comes from having central management that forces all parts to follow same standards, and from investing money into many things that are not essential for smaller stores, but overall contribute to the experience. I believe some sort of shopping platform could be created, but most likely independent stores would need to feel even more pressure to subject itself to stricter rules and more importantly, to understand that better technology equals more sales (or any at all) and that they have to cooperate to continue to exist.

It took decades for technology mature enough to make it truly easy for even a mom & pop shop, an individual creator, or a service provider to set up shop, accept payments, fulfill and deliver orders on the web.

A lot of the new technology that could potentially become the backbone of the proverbial New Internet is still in its infancy. I will be probably evolve quicker than the first few waves but at the moment it still feels like nerdy tools built by nerds for other nerds.

Not when >80% of independent shops sell same Chinese crap.

What does blockchain add to this?

Sounds like the days when you bought your firewood from firefuel.com, your bicycle from speedbybikes.com and your coats from warmjackets.com

It turns out people didn't trust a large number of separate sellers without a central organisation to set rules, offer refunds and make a consistent shopping experience.

So, basically eBay with buzzwords?

By the way, similar tech could be used for the gig economy, e.g. ride-sharing services and food-delivery services.

What you describe sounds like Open Bazaar.

Wont/cant are indistinguishable when you really don't want to do something.

I'm no moral crusader, but I very rarely use Amazon. In the last 12 months I've ordered 2 things, a jeweler kit and a charger. If I were trying to affect a boycott I could have last year easily!

I'm intrigued by the idea of someone who has tethered their life to an online shopping experience. Maybe THAT is who buy Amazon Echos.

> How would that work with Amazon? Their product isn't only the stuff you buy. It's the ease of the process and the quickness of delivery. What can you substitute for that?

Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death!

You can choose to boycott these companies and potentially suffer certain inconveniences that, ultimately, are not much of a big deal.

I've stopped buying from Amazon because of counterfeit goods being commingled with legitimate inventory.

Their process used to be uniquely easy and fast, but that's no longer the case. Buying from nearly any large online retailer is just as easy and fast these days.

Believe it or not, my life did not collapse when I stopped buying from Amazon.

Most of the time you can just buy the same thing in another place. Maybe it's different in the US but here in Europe I don't find Amazon better or faster than any random e-commerce website, so it's pretty trivial to boycott them.

In fact, I do avoid buying from them as I don't like the way they treat their employees.

The thing that worked for me was to not renew my Prime membership. It then became much easier to force myself to use something like eBay. It's really difficult to wait those 5 extra days for shipping but makes me feel a little better nonetheless. For cloud I use Azure.

> Their product isn't only the stuff you buy. It's the ease of the process and the quickness of delivery.

I find Amazon to be very bad on ease of the process/quickness of delivery/price: Their dark patterns to sell prime subscription. Their hiding the delivery cost. Their asking and storing credit card before telling you the final price. Their 8 (yes eight) screens buying process!

Any other web-merchant is better than Amazon if you are not already an Amazon client.

>While I acknowledge it's not a totally fair comparison, I find it interesting that you could replace "55" with "90+" and "Amazon blue collar workers" with "Lower level financiers and consultants on Wall Street" and get probably the same statistics. Maybe even true for some spaces in tech/entrepreneurship.

I believe the difference is, the wall street guys are in it voluntarily (they could probably take up a lower paying white collar job and still survive), and have a massive reward to look forward to after spending a few years there. While the warehouse workers are picking between unemployment\hunger and working in Amazon warehouses.

I'd like to see some statistics comparing Amazon to other retail jobs. Low-skilled retail jobs are often physically exhausting and not fulfilling. Many amazon workers might feel depressed, but would they feel better if they worked at Walmart instead?

it's true of many doctors as well. the difference is both doctors and bankers do it for a few years at the beginning of their careers, and in exchange are promised a path to a real reward -- they get promoted, and their pay increases in a job where they can work more reasonable hours.

these Amazon warehouse jobs don't lead to being a millionaire. they don't even lead to a decent career. i doubt you could even get promoted to Amazon low-level management out of one of these jobs. it is pure exploitation.

Are the lower level financiers and consultants on Wall Street working for roughly 1.8x Amazon warehouse pay?

It's a "paid by the hour" problem.

If, as a company, you pay someone by the hour to complete a task, it's in your best interests to employ only people that do the most work per hour, and then to treat them in a way which gets more work done (to an acceptable quality) per hour.

If instead workers were paid for getting the work done to an acceptable quality, then the workers could decide for themselves what quality of life vs income they wanted.

Salaried work with performance based bonuses are somewhere in between, and perhaps strike a good balance.

You've got to be kidding me. THATS what you take out of it? Are wall street bankers being forced to pee in bottles to avoid getting fired?

Both are also self medicating up or down.

Two high pressure jobs. One voluntary, one not so much.

> How about putting pressure on your reps to draw up some regulations?

I think the idea is to convince the company directly rather than relying on politicians.

> Because it obviously doesn’t work with these corporations.

There are some pretty glaring examples where it has worked. Nike sweatshops probably being the most visible. Boycotts and lawsuits hit the bottom line, which is what they ultimately care about.

Amazon wouldn't shut down if successfully botcotted: they'd mucg more likely fix their employment practices.

Generally, the goal of a boycott isn't to force a company to shut down, it's to force them to change their ways to end the boycott.

> For a boycott to have any meaningful impact against Amazon, it would have to include a hit against that revenue [AWS]

I disagree, for two reasons:

1. By that logic, Amazon would shut down or sell off their consumer sales business because it's not worth bothering with.

2. Even if (hypothetically) the shareholders and top-level managers of Amazon didn't care about consumer sales, there is a lower-level (but still fairly high) manager whose sole responsibility is consumer sales. If a boycott substantially hurts those sales, their personal career prospects are hurt, so you can bet they would care enough to change how their part of the business operates.

Of course, this is academic because I agree with this:

> So long as we can save a few pennies and a few minutes by utilizing Amazon, there will be no boycott of any meaningful size.

> AWS is Amazon's primary source of revenue these days

Source on that please? I'm highly dubious.

Amazon already charges tax on all 1p purchases, changes in that law wouldn't hurt them much.

Or perhaps the playing field will be tilted even further in Amazon's favor. Collecting taxes is difficult. There are hundreds of thousands of variables depending on where you are currently standing and what you are buying. Consider, for instance, that you pay different sales taxes in different parts of Disney World.

There's a space for a service that manages that burden for you. The service might already exist and is probably called 'Amazon Fulfillment'.

We have a legal system that contains far too many greys areas. It is not clear if Amazon is using legal loopholes or deserve fines. I see the legal system as something always getting more bloated and more complex. Evidence of its malfunction is that the outcome of a trial is often unpredictable (see Oracle vs Google). I think the legal system should try to become more like a deterministic algorithm.

I mean if you are in the top 90th percentile nationally for taking sick days, then working you into the schedule would probably be a nightmare for managers. By reducing your hours, they are reducing the scheduling work that managers need to do. Also, It's likely expected that every employee has some points, but taking way more than everyone else is what this type of system is likely designed to catch.

TNW is a well respected and well established tech news site with a large team [0]. The author likely doesn't have direct control over the sharing buttons.

I take your point, but on the other hand it is probably quite difficult to be aware of all sites that use AWS, especially if they sit behind a CDN. I didn't know Reddit use AWS.

[0] https://thenextweb.com/team/

I guess not the whole team at thenextweb.com shares this author's opinion.

They seem to have an union at least here in Spain, and maybe in other countries as well. Last month, workers at a local Amazon ware house in Madrid did a 2-day strike, which was pushed by a national workers union as a complain on the working conditions [1]. I've been out of the loop on news so I don't know how things are going since then.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-spain/spains-a...

Boycotts are, among other things, tactics to get media (and thereby public) attention. Saying a result. wasn't produced by a boycott because it required media attention which was in significant part drawn by the boycott, which had drawing such attention as a goal, is, well, missing the point of active protest entirely.