Yes, that pretty much sums it up, alright.
Ironically, Amazon got on my bad side before the millennium, when I worked as a Marketing Director for a book publishing / distribution company in Minneapolis. Although I handled accounts with major publishers such as Penguin, HarperCollins, et al, we generally catered toward local and independent authors. One of our best clients was a feminist bookstore called Amazon, who literally had to fight to keep their name, then when the shop changed hands, lost the rights to the name by Amazon dot com.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Bookstore_CooperativeThey weren't the only ones who had difficulties as the shadow of Amazon loomed larger every day. What Bigval described regarding indie records shops being squeezed out by larger conglomerates held true for many of my customers who owned mom + pop, niche book stores in Minneapolis and the surrounding regions. I lost a lot of business, due to a lot of those shops losing their own businesses. And it hasn't gotten better over the years, no matter what the product is, be it books, records, CDs, or pants.
Although it has been years now, I've in the past been sort of forced to buy certain electronics, etc, for my home studio through the Amazon marketplace, only because the manufacturers themselves set it up that way, and didn't deal directly with customers. Because of this, I have personally run into a number of situations where Amazon actually interfered with some of the sellers in the own marketplace, by claiming a seller was out of stock - *BUT* they added that I could get it directly from the Amazon warehouse for less and free shipping! Funny thing about that though, was that in a few instances like that, I contacted the manufacturer to confirm that they were no longer carrying the product I was trying to buy, and it turns out it wasn't true at all. All I can assume is that Amazon was directly trying to ace out their own sellers and pocket 100% of the profits.
So yeah, people can do whatever they want for all I care, sleep with the devil, vote for Trump, support businesses like Live Nation, etc, but if you think of your dollars as a vote, and your purchases as activism, you *might* make different choices. Or Not. Whatever. Sleep well tonight.
QUOTED FOR TRUTH:I think the whole Fuck Bezos thing comes from Amazon destroying the competition. Record stores can't compete with Amazon prices so the consumer 9 times out of 10 will go with the cheaper option, therefore further destroying record stores.
Before Napster and all that happened I remember in the late 90's here in Australia we had a big chain store start up and expand everywhere called JB Hi-Fi. Due to their behemoth like purchasing power they undercut all the local record stores by selling their CD's $10 cheaper than them. You could argue the record stores were already gouging us the consumer too much anyway $30 for CD's and $35-$40 for import CD's like John Zorn stuff.
But when JB Hi-Fi started up they didn't sell imports but all their standard CD's were $20 each and the record stores just couldn't compete with that and quickly started going out of business in my city Big Star Records, Verandah Music, Andromeda, Bank Street Records all these stores just disappeared almost overnight. Then only about a year or two after JB had cornered the CD market, Napster and downloads happened and destroyed it all anyway, which obviously would've happened regardless.
Now Amazon on a much bigger global scale has gobbled up not just the CD/Vinyl market but plenty of other markets too. My local JB Hi-Fi has not only stopped selling CD's/Vinyl but earlier this year got rid of all their DVD/Blu-ray/4K sections too and the local Sanity (much smaller version of JB) closed it's doors last month too. They couldn't compete with Amazon's prices either.
I don't get the whole Fuck Bezos thing. Sure no one likes Amazon or large corporations but if they stock what you want what's the problem?
