Most everything I buy, other than food, comes from Amazon. The local supermarket stopped selling laundry powder detergent, so now I push a button on my computer and Amazon drops off a box of Tide the next day. And it's cheaper than what the supermarket used to sell it for, too.
Even better - the AMZN stock I bought pays for it!
I was looking for an unusual art print the other day. Found one on Ebay for $40. A frame is just a few bucks from Amazon (though I did try to find one at the thrift store first, cuz I'm cheap.) I even ordered the wall hooks from Amazon.
I grew up in a small town in Kansas long ago. In between tornadoes, as a Boy Scout project, I was trying to build an electric motor. My mom spent hours driving around to shop after shop looking for the right kind of wire. She finally found it in some ramshackle garage on the edge of town. Today, it would be 5 minutes on Amazon.
Even in the UK, I know people on zero-hour contracts (no security) who are working unhealthy hours and in unhealthy environments who will be replaced by robots soon enough. But there are few local jobs, partly because Amazon drains wealth from local communities, local businesses close and wealth is siphoned out to rich shareholders elsewhere, as oppose to circulating in the same community.
Amazon product quality is shit. Fakes are prevalent, half of reviews are fake these days, sellers use blatant fraud such as swapping one item listing for something completely different while retaining the existing collection of 5-star reviews etc.
But meanwhile Amazon's sheer size and monopolistic practices (https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/09/...) mean that alternative choices are often simply not available.
And then that market dominance is itself built on large-scale abuse of its workforce. Which is to say, people who are my neighbors.
Ironically, I used to be a hardcore right libertarian; ancap, even. I just couldn't do it anymore because none of it was possible to reconcile with day-to-day observations. I still believe that free markets are good for the people overall. I just don't see any free markets when I look at capitalism. For a market to be truly free and competitive, there must be a balance of power between the players. We don't have anything even remotely like that - not between capital and labor, and not between large and small capital.
