Amazon’s now-legendary “Prime Day” is July 8-11. Much like Black Friday or Cyber Monday, this means sales on lots of items on Amazon’s vast marketplace, and as such many people flock to the giant’s website to get sweet deals on everything from computers to small kitchen appliances and more. While many of us are feeling the financial crunch more than ever, I urge you, dear reader, to resist the allure. I don’t typically have strong opinions about where people chose to shop or how they decide to spend their heard-earned money, but in this post I hope to lay out a convincing case for why Amazon is full-stop evil, no caveats, and is undeserving of your money on a moral and ethical level no matter what your values are. Amazon needs to be stopped, and legislation will not do so. Only its loyal consumers – who keep the beast alive – can do that by taking their money elsewhere. No matter your political or personal beliefs, I'm certain Amazon violates them in one way or another, and you should vote with your dollar by buying from other places whenever possible. Here’s why.
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Amazon Is An Enemy of Civil Rights
Do you believe that black lives matter? Do you think police have too much funding, too little oversight, are a tool of an oppressive regime, and/or are a private police force for the rich to keep the poor and minorities in line? Well guess what: up until 2020 Amazon proudly sold their facial recognition software (called “Rekognition”) to law enforcement agencies all cross the country. Like every other facial recognition software out there, this system was notoriously bad at accurately identifying minorities, mainly people of color and women (if you have Netflix, there's a whole movie about this called Coded Bias, which I highly recommend). Amazon only stopped for PR reasons at the start of the George Floyd protests, and even then they only issued a “one-year moratorium.” This has since been extended indefinitely, but frankly that doesn’t matter. It’s still just PR. Why do I say that? Because for one, that ban only applies to the US. Amazon is still free to sell their faulty facial recognition services to other countries and industries. Second, Amazon still gives police across the nation unfettered access to Ring doorbells, allowing police to have vast real-time surveillance networks paid for by private citizens who may not even know law enforcement has this sort of access. Amazon is actively helping police spy on and identify – poorly – everyone, even peaceful protesters.
Amazon Is An Enemy of Small Businesses
“Well I think all lives matter,” you may say to yourself, “and I support our law enforcement officers.” That’s cool. If you’re more right-leaning, you probably believe in the free market and you’ll likely be furious to know that Amazon actively crushes small businesses. To be clear, I'm not talking about the free market where they simply provide a better product/service and win over customers from the other guys. Amazon has been repeatedly proven to use data gathered from small merchants who use their marketplace to create competing products, avoiding the financial hit of the mistakes that those smaller businesses may have already made in marketing, pricing, or production. (I believe this is the exact sort of data that would be covered by nearly every standard non-disclosure agreement that nearly every company uses these days, by the way.) Not that it matters, because Amazon can also just use their massive empire to undercut the competition, selling products at a massive loss until the competitor is eventually driven out of business, then bouncing prices back up to profit-making levels once there’s no alternatives to compete with. The use of this data in the first place isn’t just free market sorting itself out, it’s straight up corporate espionage. Amazon leverages their highly-invasive platform (which is so ubiquitous that to NOT sell on Amazon is practically a death sentence, thus forcing sellers and small business owners to submit to their monopoly or face extinction, and thereby dismantling the classic disingenuous “just go somewhere else” argument) to harvest sensitive business data and then use their resources to take the hit until the smaller guys can’t anymore and fold. In any other scenario, this would be corporate spying and illegal monopolizing. Even if it wasn’t illegal, I’d have a hard time believing any free-market enthusiast actually has no problem with this.
Amazon Is An Enemy of Human Rights and Workers
Maybe you’re an apolitical person (there’s really no such thing and that’s actually a very “privileged” stance to take, but I digress). In this situation, you can probably agree that we’re all human beings. We all deserve to be treated with respect, no matter what. Well, Amazon is unbelievably hostile to worker’s rights. For years, Amazon Prime delivery drivers have been reporting unrealistic expectations like being expected to deliver over 250 packages per shift, missing pay, intimidation, favoritism, and buggy AI tracking their “performance” (even off the clock). Many of them have reported having to pee in bottles to try to stay on schedule. One reported a hospital-worthy injury where he was advised to finish his deliveries (several hours’ worth) before seeking medical treatment. Some claim they’re instructed to “drive recklessly” to meet targets. Warehouse workers report timed bathroom breaks and not being allowed sit down for a few minutes outside of breaks. I’m all about hard work ethic, but you’ve seriously never had a day where you just needed five minutes to gather yourself?
Amazon took it one step further with patented wearables in the workplace to spy on employees and make them work even harder. (For the record, there’s no evidence they plan to roll this out yet but the fact that they expressed an interest in controlling the rights to this technology is unsettling.) When workers expressed an interest in unionizing so they could force more humane working conditions (aren’t there already supposed to be labor laws in the first place?) Amazon used their powerful surveillance network to spy on and infiltrate those groups and even attempted to put cameras over the ballot boxes during a union vote to “ensure integrity.” Amazon doesn’t give a crap about their employees, it’s all about the bottom line and quite frankly I’m surprised they haven’t just moved overseas to sweat shops.
Amazon Is An Enemy of Democracy
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