Review: How to Resist Amazon and Why: The Fight for Local Economies, Data Privacy, Fair Labor, Independent Bookstores, and a People-Powered Future! Danny Caine (author and narrator)
Pear Press, ISBN 9781732380394, April 2021
Review by Lis Carey: Danny Caine runs an independent, employee-owned bookstore, Raven Book Store, in Lawrence, Kansas. He’s also an active small business advocate, and makes an excellent case that Amazon is destructive of small businesses, local economies, and fair business regulation and practices.
Some of the stories in here are funny and delightful; others are horrifying.
Caine examines the ways that Amazon, as the owner of the platform many small businesses sell on, as well as a direct competitor to those business, and able to set the rules that everyone on the platform competes under, exploits information businesses wouldn’t share with any other competitor, and can rig the rules. Once a business comes to depend on Amazon sales, getting banned by Amazon can be a death sentence, and there’s really no appeal process. Amazon, in such instances, is judge, jury, and executioner.
There’s also the matter of worker safety, and worker pay. Amazon brags about its $15 an hour minimum starting pay, but that’s for actual Amazon employees. Same with safety practices. The actual Amazon warehouses tend to have a pretty good record overall. But many people who appear to be in every way Amazon employees are in fact third party contractors, and they don’t get the guaranteed minimum $15 an hour. Amazon also sets performance standards that are essentially unmeetable, and that creates pressure to value speed over safety.
Many of the “Amazon delivery vans” that we see daily are in fact owned by third party companies, small companies founded to meet the Amazon demand for delivery trucks and personnel, and aren’t covered by Amazon’s corporate minimum wage, or any other Amazon policies covering employees. And these are the majority of the people delivering your Amazon packages, in trucks marked with the Amazon logo, and wearing Amazon shirts and hats. If there’s an accident, and someone is injured or killed (this has happened, and hit the news sometimes), you’re not going to be suing a huge company with very deep pockets, who can afford to pay large damages. You’re far more likely to be suing a tiny local company that is more likely to go bankrupt.
Since most of these companies exist only to deliver Amazon packages, this seems like a cheat.
Caine has a lot more to say. What he isn’t saying, and I’m not saying (and not doing, either), is to boycott Amazon. Generally, it’s difficult to impossible. If I need something heavy, such as the new air conditioner I recently bought, or the rollator I’m considering now after my knee recently gave way under me, I’m going to need it delivered, and often Amazon is the only retailer that will deliver. It provides the backbone of many other commercial websites–including Danny Caine’s own Raven Book Store. I do my best to get as many as possible of my audiobooks from sources other than (Amazon-owned) Audible, such as Libro.fm, which lets you support your preferred local bookstore with your audiobook purchases, or
Audiobooks.com, which at least isn’t Amazon. For print books, there’s Bookshop.org, which also lets you support your local bookstore, when you want something they don’t have on the shelf. (Although I have a bit of conceptual problem with this one. If I want a print book, and it has to be ordered anyway, I’m going to order it directly from my favorite bookstore, Gibson’s Bookstore.) There are alternatives for ebooks, too, though sadly I’ve found nothing that’s really a substitute for Amazon there.
But my point is, without committing to a full boycott of Amazon, which can be very hard, you can start shifting some of your business elsewhere, and supporting your local businesses, which keeps the money circulating locally and supporting the local economy–and businesses bound by regulations that Amazon often avoids being subject to. You don’t have to be a purist on this to start doing a little bit of local good.
Caine has a lot more to say, and he tells it more interestingly than I do.
It won’t surprise you to know that this book isn’t available on Amazon. I got the audiobook on Libro.fm, and it’s available in print at Bookshop.org.
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I can appreciate that some having to use Amazon for delivery reasons, but they have been accused of not paying their fair share of tax, workers rights, unfair publisher contracts (first nation clause), unfairly compitng with bricks and mortar bookshops (who have to pay high town centre local government rates in UK, etc
See below links here http://www.concatenation.org/news/news4~23.html#amazon-magazine
Amazon to lay off 10,000 jobs (Spring 2023)
Amazon’s worker monitoring criticised by UK all-party Select Committee
Cory Doctorow explains that he will not let his books appear on Amazon Audible
Alleged intimidation by Amazon causes a second vote on whether workers in Alabama can have a trade union
Authors removed from Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing
Pirated copy of the Hugo-winning Blindsight is finally taken down from the Amazon website.
Amazon fined by European Union
Amazon pays a little more tax as sales rise by 50%
Amazon destroys millions of items of unsold stock
Audible – the audiobook sales outlet for Amazon’s company ACX – seems to be ripping off publishers and authors
Concerns as to Amazon’s staff work conditions and rights
Amazon workers launch protests on Prime Day
Staff at Amazon’s Swansea warehouse ‘treated like robots’
Amazon warehouse accidents total 440
Amazon workers praising conditions are accused of lying
Amazon breaks embargo on Atwood’s The Testaments
Amazon’s UK tax paid substantially down despite a great profit increase
Amazon must pay its tax, says European Commission
Amazon tax wrong says UK Booksellers Association
110,000 submit Amazon tax petition to Downing Street
Amazon and Google lambasted by Chair of House of Commons Accounts Committee
Amazon UK avoiding substantial tax says report in The Bookseller.
I personally do not use Amazon on principle…
It would have, moderately, except that I see it on Amazon.com all right: Kindle, paperback (from their own stock, not to count many third-party sellers), audiobook (“Free with your Audible trial”). Won’t link as it might not be a Good Thing but really, it is hard to miss in… an unnamed search engine.
@Jonathan C–Yup. Being able to mostly avoid Amazon is to some degree a privileged position, but doing so to the extent that you can is valuable.
But what we really need is effective regulation that stops Amazon from offloading so much of its costs and responsibilities onto tiny local companies that exist only to service Amazon, and from competing unfairly on the platform it has sole control of.
Taking your business elsewhere will probably not hurt Amazon, but it will help the places you do buy from. And for what it’s worth, Caine’s book is available through Barnes & Noble, in paperback and as an ebook.
Monopsonies and monopolies are both dangerous, and Amazon manages to combine elements of both. It’s entirely typical that you have to pay for the free two-day shipping.
I am working in an independent bookstore in Milwaukee even as I type this. But if I have to get something that neither we nor our competitors have in stock, I go to through the ILWU Local 5 (Powell’s union workers’) link, and know that a portion of my purchase goes directly to the workers at Powell’s.
https://www.powells.com/?partnerID=35751
@JanVan?k jr.–
It wasn’t available from Amazon or Audible several weeks ago, when I got it. They had also dropped Caine’s newsletter. Now, I see they’re not only carrying this book, but his new book, coming out September 19.
I guess they decided they didn’t want to leave money laying on the table.
I never buy books from Amazon. I use local independent bookstores. Likewise, usually, for other products.
If you want local shops to stay in business, you have to spend money at local shops. Sometimes, even often, this means a far more limited selection.
It’s a balancing act.
My local shop does special orders by email and it’s just as convenient as Amazon, if maybe a few days slower and a little pricier. (And it’s on the route we walk the dog, so that’s convenient too)
@Teresa Peschel–My favorite indy bookstore is happy to order any book I want, if they don’t have it in stock.
Other goods, yes, it can be harder to buy locally.
As a former bookseller and editor (in the UK) , when Amazon first appeared I perceived its unfair advantages over, and drawbacks compared to, bricks-and-mortar bookshops, and resolved never to use it. Amazon’s subsequent expansion into other retail areas, and emerging evidence of its (legal, but in my view unethical) tax avoidance strengthened this resolve, and I never have.
As others have observed upthread, avoiding the use of Amazon and similar entities is often inconvenient, and for some people almost impossible, but if enough people do what they can manage, it may ameliorate the decline of local businesses and the slow death of town centres and communities (for which, to be sure, out-of-town hypermarkets also share the blame).
My only regularly delivered purchases are those that come via the Post Office, such as subscribed magazines, and items too large for me to transport from the retailer in my car (the last being a flat-pack garden shed). I appreciate I’m lucky to be able to maintain this stance.