the unstoppable local-biz-swallowing pseudo-monopoly that is AMAZON

gross.

last June, Seattle city council passed a head tax on businesses to fund solutions for the homeless crisis (caused in large part by economic imbalance from the city's third extended tech boom) [nb: WA has no income tax]

the newly-elected corporate-boosting mayor reacted to pressure from Amazon threatening to dump a downtown office space lease, by illegally colluding with councillors to cancel the tax days later

today: Amazon dumped that lease without ever moving in

https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/836421/managing-editor-news

"The Managing Editor, News will work on an exciting new opportunity within Ring to manage a team of news editors who deliver breaking crime news alerts to our neighbors."

in my ongoing effort to disentangle myself from Big Data i have resolved not to buy anything from Amazon and it's.... really easy? this is how i do it:

- look it up on amazon, skim the reviews, follow the algorithm, everything
- when it comes time to buy it go to the actual manufacturer/source whatever

it is often cheaper! for instance Winstanley, the 1975 film about the proto-communist Digger. available new on Amazon for £14.97. i ordered it direct from BFI for £9.99. thanks for the tech, Jeff!

F Amazon

I canceled prime finally; my reason for avoiding buying from Amazon at this point is less out of civic duty and more because the noise about counterfeit goods and fraudulent sellers got to be loud enough that I decided I would cease rolling the dice. Books I've been buying almost exclusively from my local bookstore for years, it turns out I get paid enough I don't need a discount on books.

Prime is such a scam. “Pay to shop!”

The counterfeit goods problem is getting real. I bought my kid some jeans on Amazon and supposedly the same jeans earlier on Jet. The ones from Amazon we’re shoddily constructed and seemed awfully likely to be fake.

i got fake dry shampoo from there a year and change ago and it was the worst

I never, ever complain in restaurants or stores or write bad reviews etc. but I make amazon refund or reimburse me for every mistake they make.

me too

I do the same thing - the other day I got an email saying a delivery was attempted and I know the driver didn't even ring the doorbell because I was sitting directly overhead, with the window open, and heard nothing. I called customer service instantly. It was delivered the next day plus I got a $10 credit.

Yeah they always mess up their delivery promises. I've had them reimburse me fully for stuff that came days late (that they said to just keep).

What's pissing me off lately is if I order something delivered to my house, it comes 2-3 days earlier than if I ask them to send it to my PO box, even using Prime. Why the fuck do they think I have a PO box? So shit won't come to my house where someone can steal it!

i'm guessing it takes longer because it has to be routed through the post office (or wherever your po box is).

I wish I could think of a better thread for this as this isn't just about Amazon by any means, but this article about people who drive around the country buying stuff from big-box stores to sell for profit on Amazon is incredible: https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/10/20687434/amazon-sellers-nomad-merchants-products-malls-walmart

Anderson is an Amazon nomad, part of a small group of merchants who travel the backroads of America searching clearance aisles and dying chains for goods to sell on Amazon. Some live out of RVs and vans, moving from town to town, only stopping long enough to pick the stores clean and ship their wares to Amazon’s fulfillment centers.

When you spend weeks on end traveling the strip malls and big-box stores of America, you start to appreciate small differences in what can seem like archipelagos of sameness: the way the Targets get cleaner as you approach corporate headquarters in Minneapolis; the novelty of an unusually small Walmart in Indiana; the McDonald’s in Pomeroy, Ohio, that served pizza, the remainder of an abandoned experiment in the ‘80s.

How was the McPizza?

“Bad!” Anderson says exuberantly. “But that’s not the point.”

Discontinued nail polish, Pop-Tarts, hair curling products: Anderson has chased them all when the scanner has shown them fetching multiples of their normal price. He once hunted a particular brand of discontinued dental floss across the Big Lots of America, buying six-packs for 99 cents and selling them on Amazon for over $100 apiece.

He has no idea why someone would pay so much for such things, but the scanner tells him people do. His best guesses are melancholy ones. Discontinued cat food is a big seller, which he didn’t understand until his mom’s cat grew old and senile and refused to eat any of the new flavors. He once saw a post from a parent whose son was autistic and drank from the same plastic cup every day for 20 years. The cup eventually disintegrated, and he didn’t want to drink from any other vessel.

“I’ve always wondered if it’s something like that,” Anderson says. “But it can’t be that common. Plus, I don’t see how you get that attached to it. I can see a cup, but I don’t get a dryer bar.” In any case, demand exists. Someone bought a $300 dryer bar last month.

this is my shit.

great article

I think one reason this hit me so hard is that I just finished reading Anna Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World the other day, and this struck me as a weird, grimmer companion piece to that book.

Great article!

Also,

Often, sellers will invent destinations to give their travels a direction. Anderson likes to follow bands. He recently followed The Mountain Goats across four states and is planning to do the same this summer when Tool goes on tour.

Maybe he's an ILXor?

I want a 70’s-era Wim Wenders movie of this article.

Kings of the Resell.

Anderson In The Closing Toys R Us.

Big Lots In The Cities

Paris, Texas

lol

Two sides to every story: an Amazon sortation center associate provided their perspective about the recent coverage of our working conditions on @Quillette. https://t.co/e1L6ODOAbs

— Amazon News (@amazonnews) July 24, 2019

Hello fellow proles

Ok now that I read the full piece, I am wondering if that’s possibly extremely dry satire

fucking quillette lol

alas, tweet deleted

lol what is happening (scroll up for full thread)

i feel like im talking to the borg

— Diana Wilde (@rulesObeyer) August 15, 2019

Amazing.

absolutely nightmarish

just a horde of glassy-eyed zealots queuing up to bleat platitudes about their entirely unsinister corporate masters

wow

at the same time though, they do seem to have some good amazon experiences and just want to make sure the good stories are also heard!!!

And at up to $17 as a Tier 1 entry-level stower, it's not that hard to save up for college, is all I'm saying!!

What’s even going on here? I have my doubts about this Rafael character.

It must be that one I agree, but these overtimes are voluntarily taken on our day offs. Impromptu ones happen during holiday and peak which is also nice for extra cash in our pockets. 💸

— Rafael - Amazon FC Ambassador 📦 (@AmazonFCRafael) August 14, 2019

(needs to be seen in context)

From what I remember from my Amazon internment, "ambassadors" are basically mouthpieces for the company. They tend to be the kind of people who have stayed there long enough to advance beyond warehouse drone status. Lunatics, in other words.

The idea of actually making one of thosr places your long term career is mind-boggling to me in retrospect.

Andy Partridge of XTC: And I've got one, two, three, four, five, senses working overtime, trying to taste the difference between lemon and lime

Brandy - Amazon FC Ambassador #: And the entire voluntary overtime offered by Amazon is helping to pay for me to take my daughter on vacation to Florida

entirely

Love carol’s little anti-union riposte there yikes

Poor Rafael, when he started at Amazon he was a white woman named Michelle, had grandkids that called him Nana. Now he's a young filipino.

there's your replacement theory proof

I don't understand why they must recycle twitter accounts like that.

We are happy to work at the glory hole of capitalism.

— Žižek - Amazon FC Ambassador 📦 (@SvetaPinto) August 15, 2019

Is the FC First Class or Football Club?

It's what they call their warehouses, "fulfilment centres".