A Year Without Amazon

Saying “No” to the big online retailer.

Joe Douglas
3 min readOct 28, 2020
Elena Lacey: Getty Images, borrowed from Wired.com

One of our New Year’s resolutions for 2020 my wife and I decided on was to no longer shop at Amazon. You’d think that as a collector Amazon would be the ultimate retailer for me. Well, if I didn’t have a conscience, it probably would be.

Constant stories about how Amazon doesn’t pay its staff correctly, doesn’t allow them toilet breaks, is killing off bookstores only to then have the cheek to donate £250,000 to “save” them, selling books below cost to undermine other competitors, trying to smear those ex-employees who dare speak ill of the company and more makes one wonder how anyone could support such a business. Further to this, people we know very well who are in the publishing industry have spoken to us about unscrupulous practices that Amazon has forced upon them.

Amazon actually charges publishers to investigate bootleg copies of their books that are being sold on the Amazon marketplace!

With lockdown, it turns out that while many people are losing their jobs, Jeff Bezos’ earnings actually went up. As always, the rich are making money off the suffering of the poor, and Amazon is one of the biggest recipients. Now, this would be fine if Bezos funnelled those profits back into…

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Joe Douglas

Collector. Writer. Artist. Geek. I write mostly about the hobby of collecting. Check out my full portfolio at JMDWorks.org.