All I needed was to have my eyes drawn to the @ DrDeez to know exactly where this was going. He’s a moron. Nobody takes anything he says seriously.
Dunno about measurable results, but i know a lot more people avoiding Amazon than most other retailers.
There’s us a lot of truth in that. I guess we all need to decide where to draw our personal lines.
I remember a particular bag mill that serviced a large regional area. When the local Piggly Wiggly’s started the plastic bag thing, Charging you if you desired paper, folks were up in arms.
And the 3 local Pigs stores stopped the plastic bag use for longer than was feasible.
The Pigs stores sold out and the Bag mill went down
Not exactly a symbiotic relationship but it was due to other factors, I suppose.
Anyway. All gone now.
The big outfit like Amazon will not be distressed two minutes if I don’t shop them
If there’s a big protest movement I would happily put my money where my mouth is, along with many others.
You go first.
Aah, the Perfect Solution fallacy.
No. No more evil than Apple, Alphabet/Google, Meta/Facebook, or other huge multinationals. It’s called pragmatism, a necessary quality when you’re the face of a large and prominent business. I’d no more fault Jeff Bezos for being chummy with Trump than I’d fault Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, for doing the same. It comes with the territory.
What they say and think in private is a different matter. Rex Tillerson, the former chairman and CEO of Exxon, who Trump appointed as Secretary of State in his first administration, is reported to have said of Trump, “what a fucking moron!”. I’m sure he’s far from the only one.
If you want to see true evil look no further than Elon Musk, or of course Trump himself or any of his permanently attached sycophants.
From my standpoint, Amazon carries a very wide variety of merchandise that is as described, sells it at a fair price, ships it fast and usually free, and accepts returns without question or cost to the customer and issues refunds promptly. That’s all I ask of any retailer. I’m not aware of any ethical transgressions beyond the normal practices of capitalism, such as underpaying their warehouse workers and limiting their numbers by introducing massive amounts of automation.
That’s not “No”, that’s “Yes, definitely”. You’re not disproving Amazon’s overall evil nature just by listing all the other evil fuckers at the inauguration’s companies.
I’m sure that’s the same excuse Hugo Boss, Ford and other Nazi collaborators used, too…
You probably shouldn’t feel too sure of that. Hugo Boss was an eager participant in the Nazi regime from within Germany, and Henry Ford was a virulent anti-semite. Their ties to Nazi Germany were motivated at least as much by ideology as by business considerations.
An example of pragmatism at the time would have been William Dodd, US ambassador to Germany in the mid-1930s. While maintaining cordial relations with the Nazi regime, he tried but ultimately failed to persuade US authorities of the threat that Hitler posed, while no doubt also attending diplomatic events of the Nazi regime.
I said excuse, not actual reason.
That, and you have no idea whether the current crop of facist oligarchs are motivated purely out of pragmatism.
Musk is the most open about all his isms, nobody disputes that. But you really think Bezos is secretly just going along to get along?
Let’s revisit this when it comes to light that Bezos has been secretly funding an anti-ICE Underground Railroad using Amazon logistics all along. \s
I actually suspect that Trump personally threatened Bezos in some way. He made a very sudden pivot.
But Amazon, like Walmart, is so large that any bad thing it does gets magnified. And they certainly do some bad things. They are a bad employer, and they’ve driven a lot of other companies out of business, sometimes using predatory pricing to do so. Just as two examples. If you believe all capitalism is evil, they certainly personify the evils of capitalism.
Maybe I’ll live long enough to do that revisiting. I’m not sure what we’ll find.
He made it before Trump was actually in a position to threaten him. Even before he personally nixed the WP endorsement of Harris, he was talking to and advising Trump.
He made it after it was pretty clear Trump would win the election. I was certainly planning my life assuming Trump would win at that point.
I don’t think it was 'pretty clear" in July of that year. At least that’s not how i remember it.
Walmart, a “department” store, certainly undercut Hometown USA’s prices till they drove them out of business. I reckon K-mart got there first, and I’m almost sure they’re gone. Not so yet, Target.
I’m sure there a plenty of “Towns” that still have “towns”, or real hardware stores, perhaps a clothing place, a music shop? A non-big box place to get a TV? “Next stop, Willoughby!”
This little town in Dorset has four supermarkets (Aldi, Waitrose, Asda, Lidl). Asda used to share some ownership with Walmart. Two pizza places plus a similar cheese-topped food place called Domino’s. Four straight-up haircutters with various Nail Salon’s, five kebab joints, a Pharmacy, two Pubs almost like there once were in USA towns (except Domino’s). Also an Ironmonger (I mean real hardware store)
My first visit to Long Island last summer in 11 years looked mostly like a different place (the roads were the same because no flying cars). The Car Wash had nearly the biggest flag I’ve seen on a 15-yard pole, but just down the block, they had a much bigger flag on a 20-yard pole in front of the Funeral home.
Don’t see too many flags here outside bunting and such for holidays. I did my part on VE Day (now known as the USA Did Everything in WWII day). Three flags on puny 3-yard bamboo sticks: Union Jack (properly oriented - Trump must know there’s a subtle difference, always hangs them the wrong way), USA flag hung upside down as in Maritime Distress, and the Hammer & Sickle Soviet flag for my dead in-laws in Leningrad. It’s been co-opted by skinheads and other racial groups, along with skinheads with hair, who are some related movement (called presumably something else)
Yet to me it still means workers and peasants, and maybe we’ll bring the fight to the rich someday.
I don’t hold any particular moral judgement against Apple for participating in Trump’s inauguration. Helping Trump throw himself a fancier party after he’s won the election doesn’t help him advance any part of his agenda, it’s just sucking up to a vain asshole in the hopes he leaves you alone. It doesn’t doesn’t let Trump drop more bombs on Venezuela, or expel more immigrants, or strip LGBT people of more rights. I think there’s a sharp distinction between that, and Bezos’ shitting on the WaPo’s journalistic integrity to help Trump get elected, or literally everything Mark Zuckerberg has done with Facebook since he invented it in college as a way to sexually dehumanize women.
Now, pulling that app that let you track ICE movements from their store was pretty scummy. But on the whole, a lot less scummy than the whole “profits driven by child slavery” thing they’ve already got going on.
And here I thought I was the only one! Shaving brush changed my life, and good ones are hard to find these days
I finally got a good one from Wilkinson via Amazon for only €5. Synthetic, but smooth and soft bristles. Most other choices had badger’s bristles, but I’m horrified by the thought of lathering my face with the hair of a rare wild animal.
Badgers? Rare?
In Germany, yes.
Well, yes, probably also rare in antarctica, but I’d assume that badger-bristle brushes are sourcing their badger-bristles from non-endangered populations, of which there are plenty.