Amazon is a River
In June 2019 I stopped using Amazon (the company) and have not had a delivery from them in over a year. I canceled my Prime membership. It has not been hard. People have gotten so used to frictionless Amazon purchases that even people who don't like Amazon won't stop using them. Amazon does not have ethical leadership and I can't support them. I buy things locally, if I buy something online I usually see if the maker sells it directly. Etsy has been a great place to buy stuff, I appreciate that they buy carbon offsets for their shipping. You can stop using Amazon and it really won't hurt your lifestyle.
There are many examples to cite about why to stop using them, from the way they treat their workers, their impact on the environment, their impact on local retail, and so on. Bezos really lost me when he shared about his ambitions for space travel that he would do with his financial “winnings” “we can have a trillion humans in the solar system, which means we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins. This would be an incredible civilization.” He and I share a mutual love for Star Trek but I he forgot about the post-scarcity humanist vision and just focused on the sci-fi. I want us to be in space and exploring the universe. We don't need to go to space to have a thousands Mozarts. How many brilliant people are working in his warehouses and they never got to explore their talent because they grew up disadvantaged? How many would be investing in their own lives and talents if they were not ruining their health trying to keep up with quotas and were paid a livable wage?
