If our family had a dollar for every time I said, “I’m not going to give Jeff Bezos my money!” we still wouldn’t threaten his title as one of the world’s richest individuals but our nest egg would get a nice boost. Suffice it to say I’ve long had a visceral reaction to Amazon. When I saw this book with concrete examples of how to fight for local economies, data privacy, fair labor practices, independent bookstores, and “a people-powered future” it leapt off the shelf into my hands. I had to buy it.

Prime Day is a good time to spread the word.

How to Resist Amazon and Why (2022) by Danny Caine makes the case for resisting what at times seems to be the takeover of the world by this corporate behemoth. Caine — who co-owns the Raven Book Store (with his employees) in Lawrence, Kansas — has provided a wealth of strongly sourced information about how “big tech monopolies, especially Amazon, are bad for communities, small businesses, the planet, consumers, and workers.”

In seven detailed chapters, Caine focuses on the “why,” giving example after example of Amazon’s devastating impact on the book industry, small business in general, the labor force and workers’ rights, competition, privacy, the environment, and every level of government. And the examples are not from crazed left-wing socialists: a number of the exposes come from such bastions of corporate power as The Wall Street Journal and from trusted sources like PBS.

Between each chapter, Caine inserts an interlude that points toward the “how” part of the equation. These are tales of resistance and personal essays. The penultimate chapter then describes ten specific ways to resist Amazon.

What is wrong with Amazon? This is a company with a 150% turnover rate whose workers face inhuman schedules and are literally dying on the job. Their business model relies on preying on local businesses and even their own vendors. Amazon’s founder and long-time CEO is one of the richest individuals in the world “while his workers make low wages with impossible quotas.” They use their considerable weight ruthlessly when others try to stop those destructive practices.

Among the issues:

• Amazon leads to the devaluation of products — By being able to offer items such as books on their site for impossibly low prices, Amazon’s business practices have led consumers to now expect outrageously low prices everywhere. A normal business cannot survive without making a profit.

• Amazon is both a platform and a competitor — Amazon’s business model, writes Caroline Jenkins, allows them to “skew profit unfairly in their favor. They have been known to directly duplicate products being sold on their virtual shelves and sell that same product at a lower price than the original.”

• Amazon is lying when it says it pays its employees $15 an hour — Many of Amazon’s “employees” are not actually their employees. Those people driving Amazon-branded trucks and wearing Amazon vests work for third-party contractors, who pay lower wages and don’t offer benefits. And those vans? Amazon makes their contractors buy a specific type of van that is conveniently just below the size that would require strict government regulation. When something bad happens to or with one of those vans/drivers, Amazon just throws up its hands. “Hey, they aren’t our employees.”

While the loss of personal connections and community-oriented support is at the heart of Amazon’s destruction of America, much of the fight requires government intervention to protect consumers from monopolies. We are seeing progress on that front from the Biden Administration. The Federal Trade Commission and 17 state attorneys general sued Amazon on September 26th, alleging that the company is a monopolist that uses a set of interlocking anticompetitive and unfair strategies to illegally maintain its monopoly power. That step has been long overdue, but the new FTC Chair Lina M. Khan wrote an article in 2017 that galvanized the moribund antitrust movement, and her recent appointment has already led to swift action.

Caine lists ten things you can do to resist Amazon, and they are pretty straightforward. Here are a few:

Shop local — Simple. Take the money you’d send to Amazon and spend it at your local grocery story, bookstore, drugstore, etc.

Cancel your Prime subscription (or better yet, your Amazon account) — That promise of “next day delivery” with Prime began exacerbating many of the problems and impacts of the company.

Avoid Amazon-affiliated brands — While I knew all about The Washington Post and Whole Foods, I was surprised to discover the names of some other brands affiliated with Amazon, including AbeBooks, Goodreads, and Ring. The Post is our local newspaper, but we’ve dropped home delivery and haven’t missed it. The amount we buy at Whole Foods continues to shrink, as we’ve shifted more-and-more purchases to our local farmer’s market, fish monger, and neighborhood grocery.

Unplug your house from Amazon’s privacy-invading security and surveillance network — Ring, which is being sold for Amazon by more than a thousand local police departments(!), is opening us up to Orwellian levels of privacy invasion and police surveillance. And you don’t want to know what Alexa knows about you (but perhaps you should).

Amazon is having a corrosive effect on our culture. The “value” of everything is compared against low consumer prices. There’s more to life than cheap underwear. Plus, Amazon’s next-day-delivery promise — which is literally built on the broken backs of its overtaxed workers — has helped exponentially increase impatience in our culture. You know what I mean: when the guy behind you honks his horn the second the light changes, or when a co-worker complains that you didn’t answer their email, which they sent all of 10 minutes earlier.

Read this book. Stop giving money to Jeff Bezos. Fight to keep your dollars in the local economy, to shield your data from ravenous online marketers, to enact fair labor practices and a living wage, and to keep your local independent bookstore alive and thriving.

More to come . . .

DJB

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UPDATE: This cartoon captures my sentiments exactly!

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The Weekly Reader links to the works of other writers I’ve enjoyed.

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Top image from Pixabay.