The key is 100% boycotting all services provided by a company. Wikipedia’s list of Amazon product/services as reference (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amazon_products_and_services).
Incidentally, I know entire neighborhoods that don’t have other grocery stores besides Target/Whole Foods, not to mention that AWS is the cloud computing industry standard… As a personal example, my vet-prescribed cat foods are manufactured by Purina, a subsidary of Nestlé (needless to say, a separate but also extremely evil large corporation)
Considering how much of the Internet is now backed by AWS… yeah good luck with a full, 100% boycott, unless you’re willing to install a plug-in to let you know which parts of the web are on AWS and specifically avoid them.
That being said, a 100% boycott is borderline puritanical. It’s very easy to order nothing from Amazon, and if enough of us do it will make a noticeable dent in their profits.
I’ve spent years now trying not to consume products from companies I consider immoral. There are a lot of them and, realistically, you won’t make a big dent or bring the company down. The average person is, by definition, average, so a boycott based on people doing the good thing at the expense of some personal discomfort will always fail.
But that doesn’t mean it’s pointless. Companies like Amazon are almost impossible to compete with because of their size. The most important impact you can have as a consumer is not that the lack of your personal revenue is going to keep the likes of Jeff Bezos up at night. It’s that you’re providing revenue and a user base to alternative businesses that are struggling to exist in a world where most people just use Amazon.
You can make a real difference this way! Focus on growing competitors rather than hoping the bad company will go away because of your abstention. Kind of like using Lemmy instead of Reddit.
“The most important impact you can have as a consumer is not that the lack of your personal revenue is going to keep the likes of Jeff Bezos up at night. It’s that you’re providing revenue and a user base to alternative businesses that are struggling to exist in a world where most people just use Amazon.”
I agree! I think we should frame boycotts this way, I can’t stand companies abusing their chokehold on the market. It’s also a more feasible and tangible goal.
There is never a perfect solution. Just boycotting them in any way you reasonably can will go a long way.
Yeah, I don’t struggle with boycotting Amazon. The only times I’ve really used Amazon in the past have been for PC parts, audio headphones, and a random thing or two. I do my absolute best not to buy needless things as it is, and I know that there are plenty of other websites to use if I really need to get something online. (I knew this was gonna come in handy one day ha.) Here’s a website called amazonalts.org. It’s curated websites/online stores for the ethical consumer in mind. The categories are Food, Home, Clothes, Beauty, Books, Electronics, and Miscellaneous.
Right? Like it didn’t even take the whole Orange galah thing to bring it about. You make your workers piss in bottles to meet KPIs then I have 0 interest in buying your shit.
It’s very effective when a lot of people agree and follow suit, these companies panic and now REALLY quickly when they no longer have a functioning business model. You have to have consumers willing to buy from you.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
When a “good” solution ultimately defangs or sedates workers with otherwise radical potential, then no, a “good” solution is inadequate and should be thrown out. Why is everyone bleating this empty aphorism all around lemmy? The simple fact is that the only way we are going to steer ourselves out of this devolution into fascism is with a hail mary: some sort of labor movement, a geopolitical shock, a massive strike, etc… And this (almost religious) faith in “good solutions” or half measures is not worth anything. It’s copium. It’s toxic positivity in the form of blind, religious hope.
What this expression refers to is a pervasive false equivalence: the idea that anything that isn’t perfect isn’t worth bothering with, or that doing something small somehow hampers a greater task (even if when it actually contributes to that greater task). It is a statement against apathy and binary thinking.
This comes up in politics and activism all the fucking time. Like “Why should I care about car emissions when freight ships produce more emissions than all the cars in the world?” The answer is simple: because you can. Do what you can, even if it’s small. That doesn’t mean forgetting about the big polluters.
some sort of labor movement, a geopolitical shock, a massive strike, etc
If anybody is avoiding Amazon as an alternative to those things, then I agree that they need a kick in the pants. But I doubt there’s anyone out there thinking to themselves “I don’t need to take part in the revolution because I bought my cat food at CVS instead of Amazon”.
Alternatively, the best action is the one that gets done.
Cannot agree more. I have done a lot to transition all my purchasing power to Canadian companies but I haven’t gotten there 100%. Every bit matters, every lost sale will add up.
All efforts, great and small.
If you want to read the story of someone’s experience trying to block all the big tech companies from their life back in 2019. Their first week was trying to block Amazon.
Edit: A big challenge would be if you wanted to avoid connecting to sites that run off of or have content served by AmazonWebServices. To do that for example, you’d have to click these archive links for Gizmodo instead of the direct links I did above.
No modern boycotts have been shown to be effective.
The last genuinely effective “boycott” was the bds movement focused on SA, which created real pressure.
BDS movements have been effective because they go well above and beyond boycotts, and in some ways, its easier to target “all” of a national economy than it is to single out singular companies. That action also took place in a world of reduced globalization.
More broadly we should all be considering the relevance of individual versus collective action. There was a real propaganda effort to drive peoples thinking to be focused on individual action as a means for creating social change. Be the change, recycling, changing your habits, etc. It shifted the focus from the responsibility being on those creating the damage to consumers, and it had a range of outcomes.
One of the most important is that individual action, while basically meaningless, acts as an analgesic towards further action. Its a way to create a sense of relief that something has been “done” while nothing meaningful has changed. If this psychological pain reliever prevents the escalation to the use of force or more extreme actions, its done its job to protect the system. There are very good reasons why the system accepts individual actions, are supported almost exclusively over collective or more extreme behavior.
If one wanted to learn more about the propaganda efforts you mentioned, what would be some good resources for that?
I would fucking live to prepare that for you, but I’m utterly fucked in terms of my time right now. I took on a second job (technically a third, because I already had two full time commitments) to prepare to leave the country.
I’ll book mark this and do my best to get something together for you.
Its only vialble if there’s a organized critical mass of people doing it.
0% chance
The most plausible way is a short-term boycott for like 2 weeks at the end of their fiscal reporting period. You want the rebound not to be reflected in the quarterly report so it fucks with the share prices.
100% is unattainable, but tbh even 10% would hurt them
I cancelled my account. It was easy and I don’t miss it. I had that account since 2009. I shop local or not at all (mostly). It feels good to just save money.
Even if all end users boycott Amazon, they’ll still make billions from AWS.
It’s more realistic when the boycotters have a specific demand, e.g. getting the company to divest from Israel.
Then the boycott just has to do them more damage than quitting Israel would.
