To ask how you can live with yourself if you use Amazon

[paperbeatsrock]

Just kidding! All those political threads asking how people can possibly vote for X or Y must be getting to me.

I use Amazon. (While I’m frequently ordering from a vendor rather than Amazon themselves, Bezos still gets his cut.) Yet, the more I read about them, the more I realise I’m part of the problem. So I guess my question is, do you have stern words with yourself for using them, but keep doing it anyway?

Why is everyone suggesting it's either Amazon or the local shops? You can buy from another website!

I buy my books online... from abebooks or betterworldbooks. All second hand, very cheap, better for the environment.

Amazon are no worse than anyone else

At what? Their employment practices are worse than most other companies tbf. That's reason enough not to support them.

They don't sell anything that you can't get anywhere else because it's just a convenient delivery service.

Not true - my local high street is now at least 50% charity shops and coffee shops - and yes, I am part of the problem, but the simple fact is I cannot buy most of what I get on Amazon in my high street - and rarely could. A few things that I have looked at recently (but not necessarily bought) were craft stuff, and although there is an independent craft shop in our town it stocks almost exclusively wool, very little else, so I would have to travel 25 miles to my nearest Hobbycraft... I do feel guilty though. Especially as I put in two orders recently with Amazon and expected them to be delivered together - or at least in the same van, but they came via two completely separate deliveries. They need to get their ordering system streamlined.

@theEnglishInPatient they are paying for the usage of platform Amazon provides not making money for Amazon

Not true - my local high street is now at least 50% charity shops and coffee shops - and yes, I am part of the problem, but the simple fact is I cannot buy most of what I get on Amazon in my high street - and rarely could

There are other websites!!!!

Because it's so easy in comparison to the alternative of going to the shops. Let me give you an example of how going Christmas shopping to the actual nearest shops to us looks like in our semi-rural town with 2 kids:

There's crap public transport (no train station) so you have to walk 15 minutes to get to the bus stop (and you guarantee it's raining and you are going to get wet), and then spend 45 minutes on the bus going the 'scenic route' through all the villages, and pay £5 per person for the privilege. Alternatively you can drive and wrestle all the kids in and out of their car seats, but the car park is a nightmare to park in this time of year, and charge by the hour so it's expensive if you want to do a big shop. Then you trek from shop to shop with 2 small children who are usually whining and running off and demanding they need the toilet / a snack / some toy or other every 2 minutes. Then they run off and you end up chasing them round the shop. You eventually find the item you require and queue for bloody ages. Checking out takes ages as check-out staff try to persuade you to sign up to various membership / loyalty schemes, or try and persuade you to give them all of your e-mail details so they can e-mail you a receipt and spam my e-mail account for eternity. You finally purchase your item and then continue treking around the shops with whining, bored kids until you have purchased all of your items. As you continue shopping you get more burdened with stuff to carry whilst also trying to contain said two small children, and struggle to carry everything and end up with aching arms and general all-round grumpiness. Eventually you go back to the car / bus and wrestle everyone back into their seats for the journey home.

Or I order online and the Amazon man brings it to my door the next day.

Don't get me wrong I don't want the high street to die, but at the moment it's just so difficult to actually visit the shops. And I don't think the high street is doing a lot to be more 'shopper friendly'. And whilst I don't agree with Amazon's tax evasion, really it's a failure of government policy to tighten up the tax loopholes.

I think Amazon are fantastic from a customer perspective and I've used them since 1999. For my own mental health I decided not to worry about this stuff. All big companies are unethical and saving the world is not on my to do list.

Because it's so easy in comparison to the alternative of going to the shops. Let me give you an example of how going Christmas shopping to the actual nearest shops to us looks like in our semi-rural town with 2 kids

There are other websites!!!

OMG this is just bizarre.

It wasn't that long ago that Waterstones and HMV were villified as being the cause of the death of independent book and record shops. Same for the out of town shopping centres killing the local high street. Now, online retailing is where it's at - you need to adapt to survive.

I have family who adamantly stated that they would boycott Amazon, Asda, Starbucks, Nestle over the years. Not one has kept to their pledge. There are loads of champagne socialists amongst us. What's the point of hand wringing unless you put your money where your mouth is?

Because nothing I ever want is available in the shops so I have to drag my arse to the high street for them to order it online, which I can do myself anyway.

If Amazon pay less tax, the government need to close the loopholes which allow it. They are doing nothing illegal.

How many of you can honestly say you would not take advantage of a rule that lets you pay less tax?

What killed the high street was shitty, drab, reductive, chain store shopping with a poor customer experience, not Amazon. Shopping was bloody awful in the 80s and 90s, wandering around all day to find the specific thing you had in mind. I embraced online shopping completely from the start.

Because nothing I ever want is available in the shops so I have to drag my arse to the high street for them to order it online, which I can do myself anyway

There are other websites!!!

I think I'm just going to post this every time somebody says they use Amazon because the only other alternative is going to the shops. Just to highlight how absurd it is.

I do use Amazon a lot but I always do a price comparison and if I can get a product for the same price elsewhere I will. It is the pure convenience of the next day delivery of many products that I like.

We have Prime so have the TV service and also have subscriptions to Audible (love listening to audio books when walking the dog on my Echo when doing the ironing) and Amazon music.

I don't drive and by the time I've added return bus fare to get into the nearest city financially it saves me money and a significant amount of time. It is also handy for ordering bulky items, last week I needed a new mop and bucket so it was much easier for me to order one of them and have it delivered to my front door the next morning. I also order stuff for my elderly parents and have it delivered direct to them.

How many of you can honestly say you would not take advantage of a rule that lets you pay less tax?

Especially when company law says they have to.

I worked in retail before online shopping was available - employees were not treated well at all and there were always stories of other companies that shouldn’t be touched with a barge pole because they were so bad to work for. To sum up I don’t think there are many retailers that employees would champion whether they deliver for the likes of Amazon or work in a high street store, just as a lot of customers wouldn’t think ethical issues are a top concern of most retailers either. Might be wrong of course but i would like to see statistics on each individual practice
implemented by each retailer to convince me that Amazon is “bad” and all others are “good”.

“There are other websites!!!!”

Of course there are other websites, but it depends what the items are whether you can get hold of things at all, or pay loads for delivery... or as happened to me this week, order items two weeks before you need it and the supplier just kept bumping the delivery date until they weren’t going to arrive in time.

So you end up back on amazon.

I felt bad a couple of years ago when they aired the undercover programme showing the working conditions at amazon, where staff were on timed lighting in the warehouse and if they didnt get to the product within so many seconds the lights went out and they’d have to try and find it in the dark. I think conditions probably have improved though as amazon now offer tours round their warehouses now apparently according to dp.

It’s so much easier getting something from amazon, I live semi rurally and my town has a certain vibe, which means nearly all the shops sell very similar things, things that are not relevant to normal everyday life! I couldn’t go into my town and buy a pair of socks for example!

I feel bad for small retailers but times are changing and sadly a lot of town centres will cease to exist in a few years imo. It’s not helped by rich out of town city investors who charge exhorberant rents for retail units meaning a lot of small businesses can’t afford to have a actual shop and when they can, they’re there for a short time before the rents are put up again and they’re forced to close down.

It’s the governments responsibilty to close tax loopholes, not mine and if buying from amazon saves me time and money on travel Andy parking then it wins every time.

a classic case of middle class virtue signalling
completely agree!

There are other websites!!!

Sometimes, yes. But many of them are shit on a stick compared with Amazon, particularly in terms of delivery.

Having read yesterday about their treatment of their workers, I'm not willing to use them any more

Having watched the documentary claiming the same, I was not swayed one bit. Especially as they actually said they have spoken to others who really enjoy working for the company.

There are 38k employee reviews on glassdoor. 75% would recommend to a friend. 3.8% out of 5 scoring with 86% approving of the CEO.

Doesn't sound like a bad place to work.

I make an effort not to buy too much full stop but amazon do sell things that I cant get anywhere else / cant find cheaper anywhere else.

Examples: pyjama pants (aged 4-7 and 8-12). I have never found them in brick and mortar and to get a similar price to amazon I had to buy enough for 8 months at a time....

English books for children. Very hard to get here in France and my suitcases are already full when I come back from the UK.

Replacement oven shelf.

A non ceramic toothbrush holder.

Each time I tried many shops and websites but came back to Amazon.

There are other website but often there is a delivery charge which I pay for in my Amazon Prime, I also buy stuff from Next for the same reason as I have the delivery saver as the charges can mount up

The convenience of it certainly is hard to beat... For example this week I've ordered a staple gun - sure, I could have ordered from another website but it's hard to know which ones are really trustworthy... or I could have gone to the local shops but my anxiety makes it very hard to do that at the moment and I don't actually know which shop nearby would definitely stock them.

Last week I ordered supplements for my cat because Ocado was out of stock and Amazon guaranteed free next day delivery with my Prime subscription. I could order from another online pet store but it would most likely take longer (by the time I knew they weren't coming in our Ocado order it was past the cut off time for most online retailers).

Ideally I would only buy from ethical, smaller businesses though and do, as much as possible.

I do feel guilty though. Especially as I put in two orders recently with Amazon and expected them to be delivered together - or at least in the same van, but they came via two completely separate deliveries. They need to get their ordering system streamlined.

That'll be because they've come from different warehouses. They can't have the same stock in all their warehouses - just the most popular items, so it's inevitable some items will come from a warehouse further away.

There are other websites!!!

I can't think of any other shopping website that is as convenient as Amazon - where I can buy dog treats, vacuum cleaner bags, socks and perfume all at the same time, with free delivery, within minutes.

I live rurally and our nearest big shopping area is 45 minutes away. I also work full-time so can only get there on my days off. On the other hand I can order off Amazon on Monday lunchtime and have the items delivered, for free, to my workplace the next day.

I can't shop in my local shops unless I'm off because I'm at work and they all shut at 5pm.

Yes I get that there are other websites Apex. But because I have Prime membership everything I've ordered for Christmas has had no upfront delivery charges, and I bet I would have paid a small fortune in delivery charges if I had ordered each individual item I've ordered for Christmas from different websites. Also I can order everything I want from one website, and get it delivered at the same time so I only have to wait in for one delivery.