Do you want to feel really good this Christmas? Boycott Amazon
Jeff Bezos, says the TUC, earns as much in a second as one of his warehouse workers would earn in five weeks. It makes his performative philanthropy – such as his Bezos Day One charity, which helps families in lowincome areas – slightly nauseating. If he hadn’t set Amazon up to maximise his power and overvalue his contribution, he wouldn’t have helped to create the disempowerment and exploitation he claims to want to overcome.
Serf-like conditions for Amazon warehouse staff, the atmosphere of hyper-surveillance in which every motion is monitored to check that it’s fast enough, are piled on top of the low wages to ram home to each employee how dispensable they are. But then, think of the free delivery.
In mainland Europe, Amazon has opened fulfilment centres in Poland where, reports say, it pays lower wages than in Germany. In four US states,
Amazon is in the top of 20 employers whose workers rely on food stamps. Elsewhere, across the world, Amazon employees have peed in old water bottles because they can’t take toilet breaks. But obviously, it’s handy to get stuff a nanosecond after you realised you wanted it.
The best reason to boycott is the retail scorched-earth policy: Bezos intends to get us all to a place where we rely so heavily on Amazon that no other retailer, or retail model, exists. This would leave everyone, in every country, at any point in the consumer experience supply chain, being treated as badly as the worst-off Amazon worker.
It is always better and more pleasant, to get books from a real bookshop. But if that isn’t possible, hive.co.uk is good. For everything that isn’t a book, Ethical Consumer is useful, and there are plenty of lists online of alternatives to Amazon if there really isn’t a physical shop. Do hurry, while your boycotting power lasts! If you wait until Amazon is the world’s only retailer, all the books about neoliberalism will be mysteriously out of stock and, anyway, you couldn’t afford them.