CAN’T SAY NO TO AMAZON
Boycott won’t work: experts
A New York Times exposé of working conditions at Amazon.com Inc. was the last straw for Stuart Heritage, who penned a column for The Guardian arguing it’s time to boycott the web retail behemoth.
As Heritage notes, people have been boycotting Amazon for one reason or another throughout the two decades it’s been in business. It’s been boycotted by everyone from major bookstore chains upset about Amazon’s hardball negotiating tactics with publishers to animal rights activists upset about books on dog fighting.
Until now, none of that convinced Heritage to join in — “because the convenience of buying stuff in my pants on a laptop on my sofa slightly outweighs my sense of moral discomfort, and also because parcels make me feel special,” he wrote. Learning that Amazon had allegedly told an employee who had just had a miscarriage to consider whether the company was the right place for someone trying to start a family, however, pushed him over the edge.
The column was widely shared by similarly outraged people on social media pledging to boycott the company as well. But in a delicious piece of irony that demonstrates just how hard it is to effectively boycott a company like Amazon, they were breaking their own pledges by reading the article and breaking them again by clicking “tweet.”
The Guardian’s digital team uses Amazon’s cloud computing service, as do a long list of other major corporations from Pfizer Inc. to Netflix Inc. Then there are all the websites hosting advertisements through Amazon’s Affiliate program, the third-party sellers using Amazon as an e-commerce platform and the company’s video and music streaming services.
The company’s stock has soared more than 1,100 per cent over the last 10 years, making it the world’s largest retailer by market capitalization, now at more than US$240 billion. It’s thoroughly embedded in the fabric of the Internet. And Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos didn’t get there by handing out cookies.
If the Times’ description of how the company allegedly treats its sick and pregnant white-collar workers is making you mad, remember that in 2011 Amazon paid ambulances to wait outside a sweltering Pennsylvania warehouse to treat workers who collapsed from the heat. The company improved air conditioning at the warehouses after local newspaper The Morning Call published an investigation.
But before you cancel your Amazon Prime subscription, consider that swearing off the company is more complicated than it seems.
“What would you even boycott?” said Sucharita Mulpuru-Kodali, an analyst at Forrester Research who covers Amazon. “How can you clean yourself from Amazon unless you take yourself off the grid entirely?”
Larry Chavis, a business professor at the University of North Carolina, said it is possible for consumer boycotts to be effective in certain circumstances. Chavis studied the effect of a U.S. boycott of French wine in response to the country’s opposition to the 2003 Iraq war and found sales dropped 26 per cent in the U.S. at the peak of the action.
It’s quite another thing, however, to be so upset that you’re willing to cancel your prepaid Amazon Prime account, pay more and wait longer for the wide range of consumer goods Amazon offers, Chavis said.
“Changing that involves changing a whole lot of habits and may mean, for some families, a significant change in their buying power and what they can afford.”
This is the basic contradiction inherent in the vote-with-your-wallet style of consumer activism. It’s all well and good for people whose wallets are fat enough to choose the local farmers market over the likes of Amazon and Wal-Mart, but those living outside urban centres on lower incomes can’t make the switch so easily.
With US$23.2 billion in revenue in the second quarter, one would think Amazon would be able to afford to cut new parents and sick employees some slack. Amazon operates on very thin profit margins, however, posting US$92 million in operating income that quarter. Analysts were surprised it posted a profit at all.
If you really want to hit Amazon where it hurts, Mulpuru-Kodali suggested an anti-boycott. Amazon often sells certain products, like diapers and toilet paper, at costs so low the company actually loses money on them — especially if it has to deliver them directly to Amazon Prime customers’ doors in two days or less.