MacGougan at Large
Notes on My Ineffectual Boycotts - 4
Amazon
This is, at best, a semi-boycott. I continue to buy a lot of stuff on Amazon, watch shows on Amazon Prime, and offer a couple of self-published books through Kindle Direct Publishing. Oh, and we get some of our groceries from Whole Foods. So maybe it’s a hemi-semi-demi-boycott. I’m trying to cut down. Do less business with Amazon than I otherwise would. Call it an Amazon Diet.
I don’t like how Amazon treats its warehouse workers and don’t like what Jeff Bezos has done to the Washington Post. So I’m teaching them a big, fat, painful lesson by sometimes buying things from other sources. You can tell they’re feeling the pinch just by looking at the austerity measures taken at the recent Bezos-Sanchez wedding - a modest, little affair that only closed down one, medium-sized Italian city for a single day.
Still, however much buying power you or I may feel we have, it’s hard to exert financial influence over a billionaire. I have yet to bring Elon Musk to heel, and I’ve spent my entire adult life not buying Teslas.
[A quick note here to say that I’ll be away for the next two weeks - hard at work collecting data for a “Notes on Norway” series. Instead of giving you all a break, I’ve decided to pre-loaded postings, so “MacGougan at Large” will continue to appear on its normal Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule. Please forgive me if some flippant comment in a pre-loaded column appears tone-deaf or insensitive in light of a tragedy that happens between now and then. I didn’t know!]
I’m guessing that, like a lot of people, you’re unhappy with Bezos “reorienting” the Washington Post (I believe he told the Post’s opinion section to focus on “personal liberties and free markets”).
“Personal liberties and free markets” seem like something a newspaper ought to espouse. But it must be code for something on the Right because it seems that lots of Left leaning journalists and subscribers have deserted the Post as a result. Sounds like a question of whose ox is gored.