amazon run a ‘prime day’ promotion on 15 / 16 July. this is a great opportunity to show solidarity with workers in a simple and practical way by avoiding amazon and it’s associated sites.
as per last year’s strike, please try to keep in mind the following services are also amazon-owned, and so should be avoided on 15 / 16 July:
Whole Foods
any Fire gadgets
Alexa
Audible
ComiXology
Zappos
Goodreads
IMDB
obviously, as discussed in the previous year’s thread, Amazon Web Services are so widely used they’re damn near impossible to avoid, but try your best if you can.
here’s a great article aggregating reasons to avoid Amazon and to support solidarity actions:
keep in mind that the pledge to pay $15/hour was directly linked to the strike and solidarity actions last year, so every little helps.
i’m not seeing a lot of Amazon strike actions elsewhere, but if you find any, post them up here!
Yeah, Twitch is really the only Amazon-owned thing that I actually use [other than probably the service which hosts my website probably runs on AWS, but I’m not sure about that], so I guess I’m going to have to do this just by boycotting it for 2 days…
I probably wont be online much that day. I know it doesn’t mean much, but I figured to do as much as I can I just won’t go online. That’s the only real way I can think of to avoid using any Amazon services.
For a while I kept getting this twitter ad that said something like “without Amazon 60% of the internet would be offline.” I dunno, destroying Amazon sounds like a win-win to me!
Practically speaking, it’s almost impossible to avoid AWS. Almost 1 in 3 cloud computing customers use AWS. If you want to strike on that, stay off the internet those days…based on the source code, looks like that includes this forum…
the washington post might not be popular around here anyway, but heads up: it’s owned by bezos too (not part of amazon, but part of bezos’ nash holdings)
So I was looking in my news reader thing and there’s a verge article titled something like “all the deals and drama for prime day” and it’s jus tlike. . .what are doing? Trivializing workers’ struggles as drama is rude, and burying it in an article full of links about deals seems disingenuous at best. And the only ‘drama’ they talk about is one very small non committal article. It was quite frustrating.
I’m assuming this is algorithmically driven, rather than intentional
(At the bottom of the Prime Monopoly article on Motherboard), but, uh, way to undercut your writers
Oof… I was going to just sit out buying anything or using any of their services for these two days, but I think it might be time to drop them completely…
Speaking of, are there any good alternatives to Audible? That’s the one Amazon thing I really love, and it would suck to take that out of my commute.
Not sure it’s an exact replacement, but my local library system has some partnership that lets you ‘checkout’ audiobooks. Haven’t tried it, yet, though and suspect selection could vary based on your system.
