We do not spend money on frivolous items, however, as much as I despise Amazon I will admit that we have ordered necessary items on occasion mainly because some things are just not available in local retail stores - or, if they are, one may spend a whole day driving around Albuquerque or Santa Fe trying to find what it is one needs. Amazon is an insidious business model that has driven affordable retail stores (KMart, Big Lots, etc) out of business.
It's very discouraging that big corporations like this are allowed by the government to get away with such abuse of its workforce.
ReplyDeleteA trenchant commentary from Robert Reich, thanks for posting that.
ReplyDeleteIn the last few years, we have become big customers of Amazon. I gave up driving a long time ago, and M.P. finds it harder and harder to get around to all the different stores. Our county has grown in the last two decades from half a million to one million, and the traffic is atrocious.
M.P. subscribes to Amazon Prime, so we get free shipping on everything. We order most of our paper goods that way, and a lot of health & beauty (?) products too. Amazon has gotten so slick down here in the Metroplex (4th largest metro area in the country) that we often order something at night and it arrives next morning; or in the morning and it arrives that afternoon. Some localities actually get deliveries by flying drone, which is scary.
The doorstep delivery is a godsend to old people with mobility problems or lack of transportation. But that need not come at the prize of feeding the bloated billionaires. It's all so disgusting. There's a let-them-eat-cake attitude (falsely attributed to poor Marie Antoinette) that will sooner or later come back to gobble them up. But the revolution in France was not the end of their troubles and another one won't necessarily be the end of ours.
But please God I won't be around to see it.
Before we went on vacation I wanted to purchase a couple of gay themed novels to read on the beach (yeah right!). I went to some local bookshops with no luck including Barnes and Nobel. I could not believe that a huge bookstore like B&N did not have an LGBTQ section. I asked an employee and was told LGBTQ was mixed in. So unless you knew exactly what title you wanted, it was pretty impossible to find a gay themed novel. Amazon has an LGBTQ and Gay genre section and so I bit my lip and ordered a few books. Mea Culpa.
ReplyDeleteAre there any real bookstores left? I thought my newsfeed said they all disappeared some years ago. Well, as Abraham Lincoln said, "Don't believe everything you read on the Internet."
ReplyDeleteBut it brings to mind an interesting question: How many special-interest fiction sections *should* a bookstore have? And what groups make the cut? And what authors? And what genresThink about it . . . .
I understand that you live in a more population dispersed area so this is very different for you - but Amazon, like Walmart and Starbucks is built on exploitation ), so I'll browse genres, book titles, and reviews on Amazon and then order the books from Powell's (delivery by USPS) or my local bookshop for over the counter pick up.
ReplyDeleteYou do the best that you can. There is no moral purity code, (I'm typing this on a Chromebook)
Will Jay