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Amazon blackout, March 7th through March 14th.
I'm personally making that my cut off point for using Amazon at all. And if it wasn't for their return policy I would have stopped quite a while ago.
this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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It's been an amazon blackout since Bezos was front seat at the inauguration.
For many of us, every day is Amazon blackout day. It really isn't that much of an inconvenience to shop elsewhere. You can do it too! I believe in you!
Costco has a better return policy and still supports DEI. Though I’m not convinced Costco can replace some of the more niche items I order from Amazon.
Yeah, that's the boat I'm in. Or was. I now have the expensive niche items I needed that return policy on, but got sucked back in due to convenience.
Cheap student prime account is expiring soon anyway, so I thought Marc 7th would be a good quit date.
A boycott will be more effective if we laser-focus our efforts:
- Focus on Amazon, Tesla (anything Musky), & Meta
- Make the boycott permanent
As for me, I’ve done my part. I will never shop Amazon again, or purchase from any online store that uses Amazon for shipping, and all my Meta accounts have been permanently deleted. Done.
Why restrict it to a few days or a week “blackout” or whatever? That’s weak sauce. Everything you can find on Amazon, you can find elsewhere. Stop giving them money.
i deleted my Twitch account. I felt bad because Im my friend’s only paid subscriber but I cannot support Amazon
You can help your friend in better ways, for both of you.
That’s what I figured
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Remember that you still buy the same stuff you normally do, you just don't get them from Amazon and bezos. Specialty items can be bought directly from the manufacturer. Give them the full value for their products, don't make them give Amazon a share just because you are too lazy to log into a non Amazon site.
I often do do that. And prefer to order from the manufacturer when possible.
However, there are expensive niche items that are very difficult to find other places and that are prone to damage in shipping due to their bulk, and the other places you can find them have shit return policies or extremely high markups. Because they are manufactured in China, shipped here and then relabeled.
Don't assume other people are lazy because you don't see their point of view.
I used it when I needed it, I got sucked into the convenience and I use it more than I like, I was planning on stopping anyway as my account is about to expire. March 7th gives me a good excuse to do it.
Please be civil, don't tell people they're lazy. I get we're all outraged but let's not target each other.
Spreading defeatist comments and pessimism, saying that this won't accomplish anything anyway and undermining the power of the collective is exactly what killed this movement in Croatia.
The movement started with a general spending boycott on fridays (so no money transactions - no stores, bars, gas stations, bank transactions etc), and a week long boycott of three supermarket chains that had the most egregious prices compared to other countries (those chains operate all over Europe, and their prices in other countries are far cheaper for the exact same products - despite lower operational costs in Croatia). After that, we switched to boycotting one chain every week.
The boycott was very effective. On the first friday of the boycott, the state financial department reported a 43% decrease in sales volume in the country. Just think about that for a second. And no - there has not been an increase in spending in the days before or after the boycott. In fact, they were still lower compared to the weeks before and the sales volume decreased in the following week by about 10%.
But like I said, unfortunately it died out over the next 4-5 weeks, with each boycott achieving lower decreases. And it died out exactly because of trolls that spread this defeatist attitude thinking they're so smart for seeing the "real" picture. Laughable.
Of course, the astroturfing has been insane, they really went berserk after the first friday. There's been an insane amount of bots posting comments that this doesn't work, that we should be protesting the government instead (as if holding signs in front of government buildings hurts them more than 50% less money flowing into the state piggy bank), that this hurts the citizens more than the conglomerates, that this will cause them to increase the prices to cover the losses etc etc. Just ridiculous claims all over social media.
And yeah, people got deflated and the movement died out.
Thanks idiots.
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I'm planning on participating, but it's not going to work. And it won't work because it's not popular, and it's not popular because it won't work.
The better solution is targeted rolling medium-ter. boycots of specific companies/products that we won't realistically drop entirely.
Roll between boycots of Amazon, Walmart, etc for month each to impact their quarterly reports and fuck up their stocks.
That's the plan afaik.
It won't work because people are just going to stock up the day before and binge the day after. No one is going to feel anything.
^^ Lame comment.
Do you think everybody just has to go out and buy stuff everyday? I certainly don't, and there are probably days in every one of my weeks where I buy nothing.
Economic protests are effective, so we should all encourage participation instead of making wet blanket comments to discourage participation.
I think you're missing the point of this criticism.
People buy stuff, and then they use it. If they don't use less, they won't buy less, even if there's a specific day where they choose not to buy anything. That day's avoided purchases just get moved to another day, and the seller doesn't feel any effect.
A real boycott takes money that would've been spent on a specific seller and takes it away forever. It's a shift in purchase behavior to a competitor, or a shift in consumption behavior to not need to purchase that thing anymore.
As an extreme example, someone who boycotts Tesla every day for 5 years but still buys a Tesla once every 5 years is not effectively boycotting Tesla, even if that boycott covers 1825 days in a row.
Same with people who normally grocery shop on Friday, who shift their purchases to Saturday.
I would advocate for boycotting specific companies instead, and steering that money you would've spent to someone else (even a charity, so as to reduce one's own consumption). The boycotts need to shift recipients of the money, not dates of when that money changes hands.
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