It’s Time to Break Up with Amazon. Here’s How.

  • Oct 31, 2024
  • Kennedy Smith
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  • Article
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    When the Washington Post, at Jeff Bezos’s command, declined to endorse a presidential candidate, people instantly reacted by cancelling their Post subscriptions en masse. But soon the mood shifted as people wondered whether the best way to protest Bezos’s decision was not by punishing a newspaper, but by cancelling their Amazon Prime subscriptions. As consumers mulled this decision, many wondered, “How do I shop, if I don’t shop on Amazon?” ILSR’s Kennedy Smith is here with answers.

    Read the article below.

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    The internet exploded when the Washington Post announced in October that it would not endorse a presidential candidate this year. The implication was obvious: Amazon, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, bought the Post in 2013, has billions of dollars in federal contracts, and he doesn’t want to risk losing them by angering Donald Trump. Within a day, more than 200,000 readers canceled their Washington Post subscriptions. Twenty-one Post columnists signed a letter protesting the decision, and one-third of the newspaper’s editorial board members stepped down.

    But, by the next day, the mood shifted from canceling Washington Post subscriptions to canceling Amazon Prime memberships instead. “Don’t Cancel The Washington Post. Cancel Amazon Prime,” a headline in The Atlantic recommended. “Why should I punish the newspaper?,” one Facebook user mused. “Shouldn’t I be punishing Bezos?” Bezos owns about nine percent of Amazon’s stock, worth an estimated $178 billion on the day of the Post’s announcement.

    Almost immediately, people began asking, “How do I shop, if I don’t shop on Amazon?”

    Deep in our heart of hearts, we all know it’s better to buy from local businesses than to buy from Amazon. Even though Amazon claims that roughly 60 percent of its sales are made by small businesses that sell products on its marketplace platform, it competes against them and charges them such exorbitant fees that some of them actually go broke. Given how little profit small businesses eke out on Amazon’s platform, buying from one of them there is practically akin to breaking into its store and looting the cash register.

    There are many, many ways that shopping locally is better than shopping on Amazon:

    • Local businesses tailor their products and services to the specific needs and preferences of their customers.
    • The environmental footprint of shopping locally is much better than shopping on Amazon, what with Amazon’s packaging, its data centers, and its massive logistics network of planes, trucks, and warehouses.
    • Amazon has taken workplace hazards to a new low, and most small businesses offer safer working conditions.
    • Local businesses invest back into their communities. Local businesses pay rent locally and, if they own their buildings, they pay property taxes that support essential municipal services.
    • Local businesses do business with other local businesses, from banks to window washers, helping build a thriving local economic ecosystem.
    • Local businesses pay federal and state income taxes; Amazon tries to avoid them.
    • Local businesses hire more workers than Amazon, which in 2021 hired only half as many people as the small businesses it killed that year.
    • The owners and staff of local businesses know their products and services inside-out and can give you expert advice on choosing and using the ones that best meet your needs; on Amazon, user reviews are the only things providing guidance — and they’re often fake.
    • It’s healthier shopping in local businesses, both physically and psychologically.
    • And, as alluring as the idea of Amazon’s free shipping for Prime members might be, it isn’t really free.

    “There are many, many ways that shopping locally is better than shopping on Amazon.”

    Kennedy Smith

    Enough is enough! It’s finally time to break up with Amazon.

    If going cold turkey feels like too much of a challenge, you can ease into it. Pause your Prime membership for a month or two and see how it goes. Take the Shop 1 In 5 pledge to make one of every five of your purchases from a local business. Start with the easiest categories, like books and groceries. If you find a product you like on Amazon and it’s sold there by a third-party vendor, search for the vendor’s own website and buy it directly from them. If a product is sold by Amazon itself, search for the product online to find another vendor from whom to buy it. Most web browsers let users filter for local and small businesses. Shop.app, aggregates products from businesses with Shopify ecommerce sites — many of which are small businesses — and even includes an AI assistant to help you narrow your search.

    Once you are ready to take the next step, there are plenty of organizations that can help you overcome your Amazon addiction. If your community has a Local First organization or a Main Street program, check with them to learn more about what’s available locally. Trade associations for independent retailers, like the Workplace Solutions Association (for office and janitorial supply stores), North American Hardware and Paint Association, and the American Specialty Toy Retailing Association, can point you towards businesses in your community or region. A growing number of states also have organizations that support and promote local, independent businesses, such as Local First Arizona, People First Economy (Michigan), and Sustainable Connections (Washington State).

    There are other online marketplaces, too. Bonanza, for example, is a marketplace platform that consists almost entirely of small businesses (roughly 50,000 of them). Unlike Amazon, which charges its third-party sellers as much as 45 percent, Bonanza charges its sellers only a 3.5 percent fee, with an option for including Google shopping ads for an additional 5.5 percent — and sellers don’t pay anything until an item sells. If you work for a local or state government or a school district, check out GLASS Commerce, a platform that caters to government buyers and that features independent sellers – and, like Bonanza, charges only a fraction of Amazon’s fees.

    It only takes a quick search online to find great locally owned businesses in your region. But if your community or region is lacking some types of businesses, here are ways to find some of them, plus a few indie businesses with good online storefronts and nationwide shipping:

  • Crutchfield, launched in 1974 and still owned by its founder, went online in 1988. It not only sells A/V equipment for homes, businesses, and automobiles, but it also provides customized installation instructions and a dedicated hotline to help customers install their products. That’s the kind of service and attention to detail that characterizes independent businesses, whose owners and staff are experts in the products and services they sell. By contrast, Amazon actively restricts contact between shoppers and third-party sellers on its platform, making it almost impossible for buyers to tap into that valuable knowledge and experience.

  • The retail bicycle industry experienced some economic whiplash during the COVID-19 pandemic. Demand spiked dramatically for bicycles early in the pandemic — but then supply chain challenges choked off new inventory, triggering some consolidation in the industry as companies like Trek and Performance Bike snapped up smaller dealerships. But there are still several thousand independent bicycle shops in the US. The National Bicycle Dealers Association can provide links to shops near you.

  • After being clobbered by Amazon in its early days, independent bookstores are making a comeback. There are now more than 2,100 indie bookstores throughout the nation, and the number is slowly growing. You can find a directory of American Booksellers Association member stores on the ABA’s website. It’s even easy to buy books online and support independent bookstores at the same time. Bookshop.org, a Certified B Corporation, offers almost every book available from Ingram Content Group, the world’s largest wholesale book distributor. Shoppers can designate a specific indie bookstore from which to buy the book. If they don’t, profits from the book’s sale will be divvied up among the bookstores on the platform. There are also plenty of independent bookstores with robust online storefronts and global shipping, like Books & Books (Coral Gables), Changing Hands Bookstore (Phoenix and Tempe), Politics and Prose (Washington, DC), Powell’s (Portland, Oregon), and Raven Book Store (Lawrence, Kansas). For audiobooks, there’s Libro.fm. It works a lot like Amazon’s Audible.com, but it supports independent bookstores.

  • Although digital photography has largely replaced film and smartphones have taken the place of cameras for many people, contributing to the demise of many local camera stores, there are still some great independently owned camera shops around, and most of them have robust and informative online storefronts. For example, check out Abe’s of Maine, District Camera (Washington, DC), Jack’s Camera Shop (Indiana), and National Camera Exchange (Colorado). Many indie camera stores also rent cameras, lenses, and lighting gear, if you just need equipment for a short period of time. KEH sells high-quality used cameras and camera equipment — or you can rent from LensRentals.com

  • Etsy and Uncommon Goods are big platforms for indie businesses in this retail category. But there are more than 10,000 independently owned gift stores in the US, and many of them have online storefronts. Before you default to Amazon for a gift, do an online search to find stores near you.

  • This one’s a no-brainer: There are over 62,000 grocery stores in the US, and one-third of them are independently owned, which means they are more likely to customize their products to meet local needs and offer special services. You can find the ones closest to you on the National Grocers Association’s website. There are also a number of specialty grocery stores that ship nationally, like Thrive Market, which specializes in organic groceries, cosmetics, and cleaning products. It’s a membership-based business; for each paid membership, it gives a free membership to first responders, nurses, students, teachers, and veterans, and to families that cannot afford a membership. It’s also a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), which means that, unlike Amazon, it operates primarily for the benefit of its customers and workers, not for its shareholders.

  • Jewelry can be a big investment, and shoppers understandably want to be sure they are investing wisely. Amazon’s lax standards for evaluating third-party sellers mean that shoppers don’t really know what they’re getting — and there have been numerous reports of counterfeit jewelry and jewelry with dangerous levels of lead being sold on Amazon’s platform. Independent jewelers not only offer authenticity, but they also offer services that Amazon can’t, like jewelry repairs, appraisals, and custom designs. They are part of their community fabric, with their reputations built largely on the trust they have built over the years. So, it’s no surprise that independent jewelers have remarkable staying power. Many of them have been around for a century or more, like Bixler’s (1785–Allentown, Pennsylvania), Bromberg’s (1836–Mountain Brook, Alabama), and Kuhn’s Jewelers (1853–Salisbury, Maryland). The Independent Jewelers Association’s website has a searchable directory.

  • Even though consolidation in the pharmacy industry has shuttered many independent pharmacies in recent years, there are still over 18,000 community pharmacies in operation — and there is simply no comparison between the personalized care that independent pharmacies offer and Amazon Pharmacy’s total lack of personalized care. You can find an interactive directory of independent pharmacies on the National Community Pharmacists Association’s website.

  • Most musical instruments require some adjustments before being used, like ensuring that a guitar’s truss rod’s tension is properly set or a violin’s fine tuners are installed correctly. These are services that independent musical instrument dealers routinely offer — but Amazon doesn’t. Like many other specialty trade associations, the Alliance of Independent Music Merchants offers a searchable directory of its member stores on its website. Some, like Elderly Instruments (Lansing) and Mike’s Music (Cincinnati) specialize in used instruments and equipment. Some even function like marketplace platforms for people selling their used instruments. Reverb, for example, charges a modest 3.5 sales commission and a 2.7 percent transaction fee — versus Amazon’s fees, which can reach 45 percent.

  • Amazon has been slammed by regulators and news media repeatedly for selling dangerous toys on its platform — dangers like choking hazards, high levels of toxic chemicals, and magnets that can puncture a child’s intestines if swallowed. Independent toy stores are a safer option. There is a searchable directory of the American Specialty Toy Retail Association’s member stores on its website.

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