How to Boycott Amazon

Amazon is incredibly convenient. You can get nearly anything imaginable delivered to your house, and often do so the very next day. Yes, they make life much easier. But they are also shady as hell and don’t deserve your money. And because of that we need to boycott Amazon.

Why are they shady? Because unregulated capitalism is an exploitive system that only benefits the ruling class. Oh, you meant HOW is Amazon shady! Well Im’ glad you asked. Here are just a few reasons:

– Amazon exploits its workers and is anti-union. Just ask John Oliver.

– Amazon paid $0 in federal taxes last year even though it’s a multibillion dollar company where the CEO is the richest man who has ever lived.

– CEO Jeff Bezos is not only an incredible douchebag, he’s also monumentally greedy.

– When Seattle passed a measure to fight homelessness by putting a very small tax on the city’s biggest companies, like Starbucks and Amazon, they fought against it and won. Remember, they already paid no federal taxes.

– While Amazon now pays a $15 minimum wage, they dropped workers’ stock plans and bonuses when they raised wages.

– Amazon is selling facial recognition technology to police and ICE

Those are just some of the reasons why Amazon is a garbage company that doesn’t deserve your money. You can find a bunch more reasons to boycott Amazon right here. Feel free to leave more reasons in the comments. But the idea of not using Amazon feels daunting when you consider how big they are and how much easier they make life. For a boycott to be successful, we need alternatives to the thing we are boycotting.

Image: thisisbossi via Flickr

So I decided to make a list of awesome alternatives to Amazon, and asked my friends on Facebook for their suggestions. They came up with some good answers. The biggest one of course being “Shop locally”. For real, we all gotta do this. We can’t complain about places we like closing if we don’t patronize them.

Then my friend Kendra posted this really helpful resource that already did all the work for me! Threshold’s Cancel Prime campaign is all about using collective action to hurt Amazon’s bottom line and get them to start behaving responsibly. A big part of the campaign is their list of Amazon Alternatives.

As Threshold puts it:

“Our goal is to offer the most lovingly curated selection of Amazon and Prime alternatives anywhere, to make giving up Amazon easier and to encourage more people to spend their money with businesses that have higher ethical standards.”

Their list has alternatives for everything from clothes to automobiles to books to appliances to well….pretty much everything Amazon offers.

So stop giving your money to a greedy company who is actively making the world worse. You can fight the good fight while still ordering weird shit when you’re drunk!