in light of the Amazon strike, I wanted to offer some alternative online stores you can use INSTEAD OF Amazon for the upcoming months until the employees at Amazon are granted some basic common decency 🙂
rakuten.com – has nearly everything Amazon has
ebay.com – just be careful for scams!
newegg.com – for electronics/technology
emusic.com – music for as little as $1!! They also have a membership program where you can get music for even less!!
barnesandnoble.com – they have collectible items and childrens toys too!
This is great!
indiebound.org – books, and they make it easy to locate and purchase from local independent bookstores near you who Amazon would otherwise be putting out of businessÂ
The latest addition to the post is especially awesome. I love me some e-commerce but I really wish it didn’t have the knock-on effect of killing smaller/local businesses.
Tag: amazon
this is so sad alexa unionize your workplace
tumblr is massively wrong about the Amazon strike and there are a few key people trying to get the right information out and y’all are too focused on sticking it to Amazon to bother getting it right. @brainstatic started noticing yesterday that the dates people were posting were funky and @janothar started posting that even the Spanish strike isn’t starting on the 10th and yet y’all are still spreading this like it’s fact. I honestly have not seen a damn thing about the strike literally ANYWHERE but tumbr so I decided to use our good friend google and here’s what I’ve found.
On July 10, 2018, Reuters reported that the Spanish workers will participate in a 3 day strike starting on July 16. NOT July 10. The strike is also, according to this article, NOT across all of Spain or all of the EU but only at ONE location – the San Fernando warehouse. It is already the second walk out this warehouse is doing this year, but y’all weren’t even aware of the first one and now are misrepresenting this one. EuroWeekly News stated the same thing as Reuters.
As of this morning (July 11, 2018)), the Independent is reporting that activists are asking consumers not to participate in Prime Day sales to support striking workers. Not asking for a week-long boycott, just a boycott of Prime Day. The Independent also confirms Reuters’ reports that the strike is ONLY 1000 Spanish workers – it does not start on the 10th and it is not an international strike.Â
There are a handful of other sites reporting that the strike started on the 10th and that other EU countries are participating; however, as @brainstatic pointed out already, these all link back to the same .info site that is not reliable and is not backed by reliable news sources (unlike Reuters, which is a reliable news source). The Observer article that links to the .info site above also literally uses tumblr’s “the boycott starts on the 10th” as a source for the boycott starting on the 10th… meaning that TUMBLR started those rumors, not the Observer article, and there is no reliable source for the boycott starting on the 10th other than the fact that y’all made that shit up and some online news source picked it up and ran with it. You can’t use an article that sites you as the source as a source for your bullshit. Got it?
If you want to support the striking workers, know when they are striking and what they want from you. Know what the actual activists involved are calling for. Know when and where the strike is taking place. As of right now, the strike is ONLY in Spain, it is 3 days long starting on the 16th, and it is ONLY focused around Prime Day. It did not start yesterday on the 10th. It is primarily about raising wages and other similar issues in Spanish factories, which are unionized already. It is not about people dying in American Amazon factories. Having half-assed, half-researched boycotts here and there that do not correspond to the strikes and are not well coordinated is not going to make a point. Having an organized, well-informed, large movement is what gets your point across. So stop what you’ve been doing and do this right. Boycott Prime Day and stop spreading misinformation.
just bc i’ve seen this sentiment expressed by a lot of ppl who want to support the amazon worker’s strike but don’t know how:
buying from amazon during the period of the strike does nothing to benefit the striking workers. the purpose of the strike is not to “show amazon how crucial its workers are,” and placing more orders is not going to somehow “overwhelm” amazon’s warehouses. the purpose of the strike is to inhibit amazon’s ability to draw in profit. the workers are striking so that the facilities in which they work will no longer be able to function. this is part of a strategy of disrupting amazon’s logistics so that ultimately their profit margins fall and amazon execs will be forced to acknowledge the workers’ complaints and negotiate with them.
if you purchase from amazon during the strike, your money is still going into the same pockets as it would any other time. if you purchase during the strike, the labor necessary to handle your order is going to be passed onto someone else regardless—whether it’s a facility in another region, workers who aren’t striking, or workers who were brought in to replace the strikers. if you purchase during the strike, you are actively funding amazon’s strikebreaking ability. yes, maybe they won’t be able to ship your package on time, or it will never be shipped, and you’ll be refunded (or not!), but that in no way constitutes as a win for the strikers. purchasing something from amazon, regardless of the circumstances, serves only to benefit the corporation, not the workers who fulfill the orders from start to finish—that’s the point of why they’re striking in the first place.
on the other hand, by boycotting amazon in solidarity with the striking workers, you will be limiting amazon’s ability to draw a profit during a large sale event—companies like amazon rely on business tactics such as sales to extract as much profit as they can from their workers. boycotting prevents them from being able to do so.Â
if you’re interested in following the events of this strike, as well as other resistance efforts against amazon: https://amazonenlucha.wordpress.com/ is the website run by the organizers of the strike.
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