I live in a small city pretty far from any major centres so I make use of Amazon from time to time. Does anyone know of any good Canadian alternatives?
Sadly I don’t think there is anything Canadian-owned that’s a true alternative. Don’t mind the other disingenuous commenter on here questioning your motive, they evidently think that Walmart is just as good for your community as local mom and pop shops, since they all ‘‘employ canadians’’. I think your alternative would be to simply order directly from whatever Canadian business you can find online selling whatever you’re looking for. Almost all of them still take orders from their own sites and ship Fedex/DHL/CanadaPost etc to almost anywhere. Amazon really is just a convenient middle-man and they’re not purely necessary. Basically a streamlined search function and ordering tool and they’re completely avoidable, it just takes a bit more effort. I think people should absolutely be making efforts to avoid them, because of their ridiculous market share and their precedent of working conditions and wages, if nothing else.
I have done this from time to time. I wonder if Canada Post could profitably offer some kind of service like the shipping portion of Amazon Prime where you could pay a monthly/yearly fee and then ship through them with no extra cost at point of sale if you’re shipping from a Canadian owned business.