7 points

I’ve been avoiding Amazon since 2010. No regrets. They crave your time, money, and attention, and they deserve none of those. (Same with Meta.)

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1 point

It’s easy to avoid giving them your money directly, but preventing your money from trickling up to Bezos via websites that use AWS is a hell of a lot more difficult!

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52 points

I don’t buy on Amazon anymore. Not only to they treat their employees like crap, but also it’s harder and harder to find quality stuff on their platform. Fake reviews are a huge problem.

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12 points

Completely agree. Don’t use them for numerous reasons now, one (of many) being the amount of cheap junk cluttering up the search results with fake reviews.

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33 points

Amazon is the new AliExpress with higher prices.

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18 points

enshitification

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12 points

I feel like 2023 will be remembered as the year of enshitification.

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4 points

Is there an actual alternative general online store that treats its employees well and has good prices on decent products? I’m all for supporting a different online retailer over Amazon.

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6 points

Similarly, I’ve been trying to purchase less on Amazon, but the brick and mortar stores around me are also giants (namely Walmart). I haven’t been doing a good job of it, but I feel like part of the process of getting away from Amazon is also accepting some inconvenience and seeking things out from local shops.

Things though like detergent, toilet paper, etc, I really don’t know who sells them other than big box stores.

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3 points

Things though like detergent, toilet paper, etc, I really don’t know who sells them other than big box stores.

I buy some of that stuff locally from a well-known & supposedly-“eco-friendly” brand. Just now I checked their website to see if they sell direct-to-consumer. Some do but this brand doesn’t. So I took a look at their “Where to buy” list. Most of the listed online sellers were the obvious big-box or affiliated. But there was one apparently independent and environmentally-focused alternative retailer listed, with reasonable retail and shipping prices. I’m reading up now (Wikipedia and reviews) to decide whether that retailer will interest me or not.

So, my suggestion is to visit the websites of some brands that you like. Perhaps some may sell direct; and if not, check their “Where to buy” listings to see if any interesting options might be found there.

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3 points

Depends where you’re from but I don’t know any who’s global like Amazon is.

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1 point

Why do you need a general online store? I’ll just buy from specialized retailers most of the time. It’s not really any extra effort.

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6 points

Specialized stores sometimes cost more money (sometimes they don’t). Also, the return policy and customer service is different from store-to-store. There’s a lot of convenience in having an “everything” store.

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2 points

I’ll just buy from specialized retailers most of the time. It’s not really any extra effort.

Tried that a few times, and just felt like I was getting ripped off paying MORE for the product AND paying $20-30 shipping on top of that. Amazon is often cheaper and you get free shipping.

I’ve love to know of a better company that can compete, because I really can’t afford to spend more just to spend more.

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0 points

While there’s definitely a lot of crap on there I’ve gotten pretty good at picking out stuff that’s good for the price. I got this magnetic phone case and wallet combo and was actually baffled it was comparable to something I’d buy at say Macy’s or something. Nothing fancy but well made and cheap. And it didn’t explode. But I see most people have trouble with it including my SO. He will buy stuff sometimes and it’s just trash. The Amazon brand stuff though is surprisingly good and we had swarn not to buy anything that said Amazon on it lol. Oh well.

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7 points

Scamazon.

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-5 points

no water—no piss.

why can’t you woke tankies understand this is what it takes to disrupt and innovate the marketplace? why do you hate progress?

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9 points

I don’t think you will find many people here on Lemmy who will disagree on this. Remember that Lemmy is heavily left leaning. Most of us just aren’t far left. No one is gonna call you a tankie for saying people should have access to water at work. People are gonna call you a tankie when you start denying gulags, claim that Stalin was a good person or that spying on everyone for the greater good is a great idea.

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-3 points

That was obviously a sarcasm…

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1 point
*

I agree, but this is the internet. You have to /s that shit or someone is going to take you seriously. It seems to be better here than it was on Reddit, but still…

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2 points

That’s your interpretation, for sure.

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4 points
*

There are a lot of layers to why this comment is dumb.

Hexbear, but that’s low hanging fruit.

Troll, again low hanging.

They were without water for an hour.

So here you are trolling about something, with the implication that it’s actually an issue as if you have some kind of high ground here: when really all you’ve done is show you didn’t actually read what happened.

3 layers of dumb. Impressive, if it wasn’t standard hexbear dribble.

Edit: I realized it’s actually 4. Amazon is a shit company, so behaving like this is a real issue when Amazon has done some other actually fucked up things completely trivializes the problem.

Just like with trans people, hexbears best feet forward often ends up setting them back. Crazy.

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12 points

This is normal in the United States and has been for a long time. When i was a homeless LGBT teenager trying to survive, i went to a temp agency trying to make a living some other way than SW. They sent me to this warehouse where a bunch of felons and ESL people were working in some of the most inhumane conditions i had ever seen before. 12 hour days in a 110 degree warehouse working with toxic industrial chemicals that we had no information on, with a bare minimum of PPE, intense physical labor moving large stacks of equipment, and one break at the 6 hour mark to drink water. Most of the people there had been there a while. They just had this quiet resignation and determination to survive.

I didn’t even last a single day. I started to feel heat stroke coming on around the 8 hour mark. Shivering, no more sweat, everything started to feel distant and confusing. I tried to go get water and they wouldn’t let me, so i threw all my equipment on the ground and stumbled outside to find water, and never went back. I’m white, trans, and feminine enough to survive other ways, but most of those people didn’t have any other options.

Fuck this monstrous place. I’ve been radicalized ever since seeing things like that.

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4 points
*

feminine enough to survive other ways

Is this supposed to imply prostitution?

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1 point

I think it’s supposed to imply none of your business…

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3 points

Not implying, just saying it. What do you think SW means?

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6 points

That makes sense. I didn’t attempt to decipher what sw meant because it didn’t seem relevant to the story.

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4 points

It might be somewhat normal in the US, but it’s frightening to see in the UK, a country that supposedly actually has employee rights.

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0 points
*

There are, but apparently Amazon chose to ignore them because they see their employees as subhuman.

Hopefully this particular warehouse gets its arse handed to it but I very much doubt it will unfortunately.

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13 points

one of the most fucked things about america is that it seems like whenever you have a shitty work environment, it’s actually fine because

a) it builds character. complaining is weakness.

b) the company has to make a profit

like zero cognizance of human rights or quality of life. just, it is what it is, deal with it or you’re a sNoWFlAkE.

from grade school to now peers have looked at me weird for simply complaining when something is shitty, which i’ve never understood. like oh we can’t use headphones while we work 8 hrs washing dishes? you just take that? ok i’m going to stare at a wall because a guy said so? wtf?

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11 points

That’s the thing that has always driven me crazy about our way of speaking about these things. Politicians say “we created x jobs” like it’s something to optimize for. People fear automation because it takes away their livelihoods. But, automating work and eliminating jobs should make people’s lives… better? Why doesn’t it actually? Where did the wires get crossed?

Why did we incentivize making humans suffer, at a grand societal level? Are we insane?

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2 points

That’s why I’m fully pro-automation. Automation makes everyone’s lives easier, it removes the burdens from the backs of people. For every job that someone doesn’t have to toil at we have the chance for them to find something they actually enjoy and excel at it, maybe even push the boundaries in some way.

People think they fear automation, but that’s not the enemy. The enemy is the politicians who are so far behind the times, and in many cases corrupt to the point they’re actively working against the people they were elected to serve, that our system simply will not adapt to these boons we’ve developed. There’s just no reason we can’t feed every mouth in America if the will was there in the people pulling the strings, but that doesn’t line their pockets personally and the people in positions of power don’t give a rat’s ass about you or your family.

Honestly it feels like all the pieces are there to build something wonderful, but it wont happen unless we’re willing to knock down the shitty “it’s what we’ve got” house of cards narrative.

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5 points

But, automating work and eliminating jobs should make people’s lives… better?

Sure, but not yours or mine, it seems.

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-1 points

Honestly I call bullshit that they would not let you drink water. Or maybe more correct, some individual for maybe unfair reasons, took a dislike to you and made your situation so unbearable you would quit.

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-2 points

You have no idea what you’re talking about. It’s easy to say “things could never possibly be that bad” when you haven’t experienced it. I hope you never do. I’m guessing you’re a white man between 20-40, and while life hasn’t always been easy, the social contract has mostly held for you.

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0 points

I worked jobs from pounding in by hand railway secondary lines to installing solar panels. If I couldn’t get along on the crew, I left. I seen many people get more or less ran off a crew but coworkers because they were being shits. That is the reality of working with people and getting along with those you work for.

This applies to Western countries. Three is definately a greater level of desperation in developing nations where there is far less functional businesses to create jobs. Then yes you can be treated pretty bad.

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-1 points

Clearly you have never suffered real difficulty or studied any history in your life if you can’t imagine workers being treated inhumanly. It is the norm without oversight, laws and reguations. You must live in a protected bubble.

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0 points

Sure have. Worked some shit jobs. Moved on. What do you know of my life?

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2 points

You in 1911: “I call bullshit that a factory would lock it’s fire exits, the workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory are to blame!”

You in 1919: “I call bullshit that a distillery would not employ engineers to maintain its molasses storage at a reasonable temperature, the Boston Purity Distilling Company did nothing wrong!”

You in 1936: “Theres no way the people who oversaw the building of the Hoover Dam would let their workers just suffocate to death underground due to lack of ventilation! They probably just forgot to breathe!”

You in 1991: “I call bullshit that a factory would lock it’s fire exits, the workers at the Imperial Foods Chicken Factory workers are to blame!”

You in 2005: “It is impossible that BP would simply ignore safety procedures and not repair broken safety equipment at their gas plant in Texas, those people probably set themselves on fire!”

You in 2021: “There is no chance in hell that the Foundation Food Group of GA USA would not train employees, get permits, provide PPE, or install safety devices when working with liquid nitrogen, those workers probably were probably enjoying autoerotic asphyxiation on company time!”

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1 point

You found 6 instances in the last 120 years and maybe 3 in your lifetime. While I would love there to be zero workplace fatalities, do you honestly think that will ever be possible? People will take shortcuts and sometimes they will simply make a mistake.

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