IBuy From Amazon

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If you want to order a book (or something else), don't buy it from Amazon. Amazon harms its customers, as well as workers, the national treasury, and many others that it affects.

Here's a good (though long) overview of why Amazon's overall activity is harmful to society overall.

This page lists alternatives to Amazon for buying various kinds of products. Some of these sites may share some of Amazon's unethical practices. I am pretty sure that any site selling MP3 files on the internet imposes an EULA — an inexcusable wrong. Streaming sites, too. And all of them identify the purchaser. It is better to buy from a store, and pay cash. Or else get a copy through sharing.

What Should I Buy From Amazon

For a book, order it directly from the publisher or through a local book store. If you want to use a URL to refer to a book, please don't use an Amazon page.

Here are specific reasons — plenty of them.

Size

Amazon is so close to being a monopoly for internet sales by most companies that it can gouge them. It drives many of them into bankruptcy.
If you do internet purchases, making a point of not buying through Amazon is a way you can personally push back.
*Amazon, Google parent Alphabet and Microsoft are being sued over images used to train their facial recognition technologies.*
Amazon biases its searches to favor vendors that use Amazon for their shipping.
If this isn't illegal, it ought to be. We should not allow a store as big as Amazon to have anything to do with order fulfillment, for its own sales or anyone else's.
Amazon has so much power over the US retail economy that it imposes its power over all participants.
If it is going to be a monopoly, it should be regulated like other monopolies. Or perhaps more.
Amazon has so much market share that its sheer size distorts the market.
We should not allow a company to have a share over around 10% of any market. If in a certain field a single dominant company is beneficial for society, that means it is a natural monopoly, and should be served by a regulated utility.

Sabotaging Customers

Amazon offered a '30-day free trial', and started paid subscriptions automatically at the end of it.
This is clearly an attempt to trick customers — wrong in all cases no matter how many companies do it.
Amazon's persistent blindness to certain fraudulent sales schemes makes it easy for fraudsters to invalidate Amazon's guarantee to purchasers.
Amazon closes the accounts of customers that send back a substantial fraction of products they buy. It has the additional effect of stealing any credit balance.
Amazon appears to have cooperated with the US government to intercept a Thinkpad keyboard purchased by a Tor developer. To install a spy device, presumably.
Amazon delays order processing for customers that have not paid a subscription fee for 'prime' delivery.

Limiting the use of Cash

Amazon's new grocery stores do not accept cash. They impose the same surveillance as ordering online from Amazon.
In addition, success of this would mean the loss of thousands of jobs.

Restricting and Shafting Customers

Amazon distributes ebooks in a way that strips users of many freedoms (PDF or html).
Amazon's on-line music 'sales' have some of the same problems as the ebooks: users are required to identify themselves and sign a contract that denies them the freedoms they would have with a CD.
The Amazon Swindle has a back door that can erase books. We found out about this when Amazon remotely erased thousands of copies of 1984. In response to criticism, Amazon promised it would never do this again unless ordered to by the state, which I find not very comforting.
Amazon did not keep that promise. In 2012 it wiped a user's Kindle and deleted her account, then offered her kafkaesque 'explanations'.
The Swindle has a universal back door through which that Amazon can forcibly change the software. This is called 'auto-update'. It puts the user helplessly at Amazon's mercy.
Amazon's book recommendations are not based honestly on algorithms that try to figure out what users might like. Publishers pay to have their books promoted this way.
Amazon rents textbooks to students with a requirement not to take them across state lines.
Amazon turns servile US public libraries into retail agents.Users have to register with Amazon and give their own email addresses.Then they get mail like this.
Amazon 'sold' someone Disney Christmas videos (via remote access, not a local copy); subsequently Amazon, at Disney's command, cut off access for Christmas. This demonstrates why we should not trust remote hosting for copies of published works. Insist on having your own copy which is yours.
Amazon's service, that offers you an MP3 for CDs you bought there, respects your rights less than ripping the CDs yourself.
Amazon's complex financial arrangements bypass UK credit card consumer protection.
Amazon closes customers' accounts, which implies confiscating their money, if they return too many defective products.
The company refuses even to discuss why.
Amazon threatens to cut off customers if they return things more than occasionally. Amazon's customers nominally have the right to return merchandise — unless they exercise that right.
The strange irony of the article is that it is totally defeatist. It shows why we need to defeat Amazon, but assumes that that is impossible. It shows becoming dependent on Amazon is dangerous and then refuses to believe people could ever refuse.
You can't win by being defeatist. You can win by telling Amazon to drop dead.
I have never bought anything from Amazon. And I never will. Amazon knows my name because a friend, believing this was helpful, decided to get something for me and told Amazon to send it to my address, an act which made me feel violated. I hope nothing like that will ever happen again.

Censorship

Amazon and Google have cut off domain-fronting, a feature used to enable people in tyrannical countries to reach communication systems that are banned there.
Amazon has joined with the MPAA to campaign for repression of sharing on the net.
Amazon cut off service to Wikileaks, claiming that whistleblowing violates its terms of service. It had no need to go to court to prove this, because if you rent a server from Amazon, you have no enforcible legal right to use it.
Amazon stopped distribution of an ebook that exposed how ebook bestseller lists can be manipulated (and are therefore meaningless).

Snooping

Amazon offers several new surveillance microphone products, meant to be carried around by people during daily life. That will enable them to listen to whoever the device's 'owner' comes near.
But don't worry — Amazon is learning how to talk the talk about privacy in a way that more people would find comforting.
A voice command system that is safe for its owner would be one that runs only free software, and does the whole job locally, communicating with other sites only when asked to. With the software inside free, the owner of this device would truly own it.
But even that would not respect the privacy of other people nearby. How to deal with that issue is not obvious.
The Amazon Echo seems to have a universal back door, which means that Amazon could convert it into full-time listening device at any time.
Since Amazon requires customers to identify themselves, it knows what each one has bought. That in itself is unacceptable, especially for books. I pay for books with cash only, and do not identify myself to any bookseller that takes note of which books I bought.
The Kindle Swindle informs Amazon when the user reads books that didn't come from Amazon. It also tells Amazon which pages each user reads.
The Amazon 'Smart' TV is watching and listening all the time.
Emo Phillips once made this joke: The other day a woman came up to me and said, 'Didn't I see you on television?' I said, 'I don't know. You can't see out the other way.' Evidently Amazon has made that joke obsolete.
The Amazon Echo Dot is designed to accustom children to surveillance-based marketing from a young age.
Amazon is in such a position of surveillance that it can exert substantial control over people's activities.
This is dangerous, and we should not allow Amazon to continue to track people as it does.
Facebook made a secret deal with Amazon to give Amazon access to Facebook's data about users. A plague on both of those companies!
Amazon and Google want 'smart' gadgets to report all activity to them.
In other words, if you have a 'smart' (read 'spy') lightbulb with that proposed feature, and tell an Amazon or Google listening device about it, thenceforth any time you switched it on or off no matter how, it would send a report to Amazon or Google.
Even today, the only way to make 'smart' products safe is to ensure they cannot connect to anyone else's systems.
Amazon keeps Alexa recordings and transcripts indefinitely.
*Amazon’s Ring Planned Neighborhood 'Watch Lists' Built on Facial Recognition.*
Amazon gets access to video from Ring devices.
This was highlighted by the fact that some Ring employees who were authorized to look at the videos used that access for personal motives and were fired. There will always be employees who do this, and with Ring the uniformed thugs often can do it too, which is far more dangerous.
Amazon is considering adding face recognition and license plate recognition to Ring surveillance cameras.
Setting up a system capable of systematic recognition of faces — or license plates — should be illegal, outside of very narrow circumstances.
*Amazon to Delivery Drivers: Agree to Be Spied On Biometrically or You're Fired.*

Exploiting workers mercilessly

Amazon's drivers don't have access to toilets while they work, so they have to pee in bottles in the truck. Amazon claimed this is not so, but an internal memo shows it was lying.
Remote work has led to a great jump in remote surveillance of workers. They can be monitored far more than they were in the office.
Amazon is putting cameras in delivery vans to monitor drivers. I hope the drivers go on a camera strike, all covering the cameras on the same day.
*Amazon Hired Koch-Backed Anti-Union Consultant to Fight Alabama Warehouse Organizing.*
Leaked 2019 documents detail how Amazon spies on environmentalists and workers' organizing.
This includes using predictive policing to inflitrate possible union hot-spots and smear or harass employees who are liable to speak up about those issues.
Amazon's warehouse robots impose a high pace of work on the humans that still work there. Apparently Amazon has cut their numbers too far.
Revealed: Amazon Employees Are Left to Suffer After Workplace Injuries.
Amazon warehouse workers say they are forced to speed up and ignore safety rules.
Amazon seems to organize some of its warehouse workers to say good things about their work. Remarkably similar good things.
Is Amazon paying them? Threatening them?
Hello, Alexa, were you made in a Chinese sweatshop?
Working in an Amazon warehouse is like being in prison with a sentence of hard and hurried labor.
The workers don't have breaks even enough to go to the toilet.
The workers in Amazon's warehouses are so remote-controlled that they are effectively robots human brains inside.
Amazon Workers Sleep in Tents Near Firm's Scottish Depot to Avoid Travel Costs.
Amazon works its warehouse staff to the point of sicknessand even death.
When workers at Amazon are injured, Amazon shafts them.
Amazon's shipping in the US is done in a sweatshop with paramedics standing by for workers who pass out from the heat.
Workers in an Amazon warehouse and shipping center walk all day under the orders of a computer, and are forbidden even to speak to each other.
A stress expert, looking at an undercover report about an Amazon warehouse, says these conditions make physical and mental illness more likely.
Working for Amazon makes staff physically and mentally ill.
Amazon pressures its 'self-employed' delivery drivers to drive without seat belts; they aren't given time to go to the toilet so they have to piss and defacate in the car.
This is perhaps not as bad for the individual as being unemployed, which is what they will become when Amazon gets driverless delivery vans. But that does not make it acceptable.
Amazon pays Mechanical Turk workers as little as 2 dollars an hour, making the excuse that they are 'independent contractors'.
More on the horrible treatment of its workers.
When James Bloodworth investigated the Amazon warehouse by working in it, he found that no workers lasted the 9 months required to become regular employees.
It's not enough for the workers to do their jobs; they are also required to spout the ideology of devotion to the company.
As of 2018, 1/3 of Amazon employees in Arizona get food stamps, their pay is so low. In some other states, it's only 1/9 that get food stamps.
Amazon's office workers are better paid but they have to work 80 hours a week. That's even more time than I spend volunteering!
Only a union could stop Amazon's persistent mistreatment of its workers.
Someone with very little will-power has decided to resist Amazon because of how it underpays workers.
US Postal Service workers deliver lots of packages for Amazon, especially on Sundays. You can imagine how they are mistreated: some 'part time' workers have to go weeks without a day off. The speedup is so intense that following the official safety procedures is not feasible.
Amazon doesn't take responsibility for those problems.
*'Amazon Putting Lives of Workers at Risk': Omar and Sanders Press Bezos on Alarming Lack of Coronavirus Protections.*
Amazon fired the worker who organized Amazon warehouse workers to go on strike demanding equipment to avoid transmitting Covid-19, as well as decent pay.
Amazon advertised for staff to interfere with union organizing.
Amazon later said that ad was posted 'in error', which probably means the hiring was supposed to be done quietly. Amazon has long made a practice of monitoring staff's discussions about unionization.
'Tips' to Doordash and Amazon food delivery workers go to the company rather than to the worker, they cancel out the whole of the worker's base pay.
The article seems to err in equating this to tipping of waiters. They are not the same system. Yes, the waiter's base pay is below minimum wage — but the restaurant does not claw back that base pay when the waiter gets a tip, as Doordash and Amazon do.
If you are thinking of buying a holiday present from Amazon, look at the crushing treatment of workers that you'd be supporting.

Shafting others in the publishing world

Can I Buy From Amazon As A Guest

Amazon squeezes small publishers. For instance, Amazon cut off Swindle sales for an independent book distributor in order to press for bigger discounts. (The article ends by promoting ebooks for another platform, the Shnook from Barnes and Noble. While that company is not as nasty to small publishers, its ebooks do violate your freedom in most of the same ways.)
Amazon doesn't just compete with independent book stores, it arrogantly seeks to destroy them. Independent book stores urge people not to buy from Amazon.
Amazon appears to treat self-published authors well, but it can unilaterally cut the price of their books. And when it does, the authors are the ones who lose.
Amazon is lowering the pay for short self-published works by changing to pay per page read (sometimes as low as $0.006 per page).
Amazon is bad for books and writing.
Amazon is demonstrating its dangerous power by punishing one publisher with all sorts of unofficial discouragements to buy.
We should not allow any bookstore to be as big as Amazon.
Amazon's hardball tactics against a publisher show its dangerous power.
Not that Hachette deserves any sympathy. The point is that we need to break Amazon's power.

Dodging taxes

At least 10% of Amazon's success is due to avoiding the taxes that physical book stores pay.
Amazon's tax avoidance means it sucks money out of your country's economy.
Amazon charges publishers for 20% sales tax in the UK even though the tax it pays is 3%.
UK independent bookstores condemn Amazon for not paying taxes as they do.
Amazon reorganized its EU structure in 2015 so it will pay a little tax on its sales to EU countries, but not much.
Amazon bullied Seattle into retracting a tax increase by threatening to abandon expansion plans there. Seattle caved in, but Amazon has cancelled the plans anyway.
Amazon is not merely an snooping abusive monopolist. It is a cheating snooping abusive monopolist.

Vendors

*Amazon bullies partners and vendors, says antitrust subcommittee.*
Amazon sometimes chooses an expensive vendor by default — when the vendor pays for this preference.

Other reasons

*Amazon's apparent embrace of plastic packaging is hindering its commitment to help the fight against [climate disaster].*
Amazon has a special store for selling 'eco-friendly products'.
This is sadly ironic, because buying them via Amazon is not eco-friendly.
Amazon is creating subsidiaries that act like 'third-party' sellers, to compete with the real third-party sellers.
This is one more example of how Amazon cooperates with various other parties so as to get more power, then betrays them. Amazon has done wrong to readers, authors, bookstores, as well as its workers. And now to the companies that accepted it as a nearly-monopolistic market.
Amazon has been caught cheating against companies that sell through Amazon, by using data about their sales to compete with them.
Due to a paywall, I cannot access the article that reported on this, and even if I saw a copy I would not post a reference to it. But I am confident that it would not have reported this without convincing evidence.
Amazon supports Breitbart, the right-wing extremist site, by advertising there.
Amazon in Germany hired 'security' guards from a company of Nazi sympathizers to repress foreign workers. Reporters came to cover this, and the guards tried to arrest them and take their cameras.
After a bug in software Amazon's servers used caused Amazon to sell many products for one penny, Amazon takes no responsibility and dumped the loss on the sellers.
Amazon was a member of ALEC. ALEC is the right-wing lobbying group that promotes voter-suppression laws and 'shoot first' laws, as well as attacks against wages and working conditions in the US.
Amazon quit ALEC after public pressure in May 2012, but I am sure it still supports the same nasty policies and is waiting for a new tool to achieve them.
A study found that people who read novels on the Amazon Swindle remember less of the the events in the novel.
I think issues like this are less important than the injustice of the Swindle.

Amazon heavily promotes medical quackery.

When people return products to Amazon, in many cases Amazon doesn't bother to unpack them and put them on the shelf. It puts them in the trash.
Amazon has made it painfully difficult to terminate membership in Amazon Prime.

Copyright (c) 2011-2019 Richard Stallman
Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire page are permitted provided this notice is preserved.

We’ve written a lot about Amazon at Grist, from the company’s high-tech campus a couple miles from our own office to brogrammers taking over Seattle’s gayborhood to the real cost of your Prime account. When you live in Seattle, as both Grist and Amazon do, it just comes up. The company is an ever-growing presence in our city — one often blamed for the population boom, the traffic problem, and the rising cost of living. Most of us know people who work there, and while we may hear our neighbors bitching about the long hours and the few perks (you’ll find no laundry service or free lunches at Amazon HQ), the rest of the world got a rare inside look at what life is like for Amazon’s white-collar workers this weekend, thanks to The New York Times.

One hundred former and current employees spoke to the Times about their experiences at the monolithic company, and the atmosphere comes across as a bit like the Hunger Games for coders. Employees are encouraged to compete with each other and inform managers when their coworkers are underperforming, and there’s an annual purge where large numbers are fired. Some employees said they were punished for things like having cancer or — an even greater offense — children. One former employee described seeing his colleagues reduced to tears on a regular basis: “You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,” he said. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”

Despite the attention this piece has garnered in the media — I’ve read no less than a half dozen think pieces about Amazon’s employment practices this afternoon and prominent figures like author John Green have taken to Twitter to cancel their Prime accounts — I find it a little difficult to feel bad for Amazon’s white-collar office workers. Sure, they may not get the free massages, hair cuts, gourmet cafeterias, nap pods, or parental leave that Google workers get, but they still get paid well. Not as well as Facebook workers, maybe, but a hell of a lot more than me, and a hell of a lot more than say, teachers or nurses or firefighters — who, you know, save people. These people work at Amazon. They at some point made the conscious decision to join the company that is actively attempting to kill brick-and-mortar retailers. The bookstore wasn’t enough, so now it’s taking down clothing stores, grocery stores, and every other business it can possibly replace with drone delivery. (And it’s constantly dreaming up crafty new ways to get us to buy more trash that we don’t need.) You wanna work for that company? Sorry you don’t get nap pods.

Jeff Bezos responded to the New York Times article today in a widely circulated email to his 180,000 employees. It read, in part:

The NYT article prominently features anecdotes describing shockingly callous management practices, including people being treated without empathy while enduring family tragedies and serious health problems. The article doesn’t describe the Amazon I know or the caring Amazonians I work with every day. But if you know of any stories like those reported, I want you to escalate to HR. You can also email me directly at jeff@amazon.com. Even if it’s rare or isolated, our tolerance for any such lack of empathy needs to be zero.

But more shocking than Amazon’s alleged treatment of white-collar workers is its treatment of blue-collar ones. Bezos didn’t mention them in his email, but as Dylan Matthews writes at Vox:

Spencer Soper of the Morning Call, a daily paper in Allentown, Pennsylvania, described the local Amazon warehouse in 2011 as constantly overheated, with temperatures of more than 100 degrees during summer heat waves. After a federal investigation into conditions, the company started keeping an emergency vehicle with paramedics outside the warehouse to handle cases of heatstroke. An emergency room doctor who treated some of the warehouse’s workers reported Amazon for unsafe work conditions.

Apart from the heat, the warehouses paid little ($11 to $12 an hour) and imposed extremely strict discipline on employees. They used a point-based system wherein missed work, not working fast enough, or breaking safety rules earned a worker points, and employees with too many points were fired. Sick employees had to bring in doctor’s notes and request medical waivers if they didn’t want to get points. “When the heat index exceeded 110, they’d give you voluntary time off,” former worker Robert Rivas told Soper. “If you wanted to go home, they’d send you home. But if you didn’t have a doctor’s note saying you couldn’t work in the heat, you’d get points.”

Now that is fucked up. Tech workers always have the option to leave, to move to Google or Facebook or Microsoft or any number of corporations with better employment practices. Warehouse workers making $11 an hour don’t have this option. They’ll never be able to cash in their stock options and retire young. Conditions have been so bad that Amazon is currently under investigation after a worker died in a Carlisle, Penn., facility. It’s those Amazon employees we should be more concerned about.

Amazon bills itself as the Everything Store, and it doesn’t seem too far-fetched to imagine a time when literally everything that we purchase comes from this single company. This is terrifying, the kind of monopoly our government would break if our government still did that kind of thing. Unlike John Green, I don’t have an Amazon Prime account to cancel. But I am going to stop using my dad’s, and the next time I need a book or a shirt or an emergency flashlight, I will give my money to someone other than Jeff Bezos. We don’t have control over how Amazon treats it employees — be they white-collar or blue — but we can control where we shop.

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