I’ve spent years now trying not to consume products from companies I consider immoral. There are a lot of them and, realistically, you won’t make a big dent or bring the company down. The average person is, by definition, average, so a boycott based on people doing the good thing at the expense of some personal discomfort will always fail.

But that doesn’t mean it’s pointless. Companies like Amazon are almost impossible to compete with because of their size. The most important impact you can have as a consumer is not that the lack of your personal revenue is going to keep the likes of Jeff Bezos up at night. It’s that you’re providing revenue and a user base to alternative businesses that are struggling to exist in a world where most people just use Amazon.

You can make a real difference this way! Focus on growing competitors rather than hoping the bad company will go away because of your abstention. Kind of like using Lemmy instead of Reddit.

The most plausible way is a short-term boycott for like 2 weeks at the end of their fiscal reporting period. You want the rebound not to be reflected in the quarterly report so it fucks with the share prices.

Even if all end users boycott Amazon, they’ll still make billions from AWS.

Being poor and living on the edge paycheck to paycheck taught me that there are a whole lot of things you can live without that you didn’t think you could.

You can literally cut all subscriptions out of your life and eat nothing but groceries you buy cheap at a food co-op and you’d be surprised how ok you are.

There’s a LOT of fat you can cut out of your life. And it makes things simpler and simple is peaceful.

Its only vialble if there’s a organized critical mass of people doing it.

Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Considering how much of the Internet is now backed by AWS… yeah good luck with a full, 100% boycott, unless you’re willing to install a plug-in to let you know which parts of the web are on AWS and specifically avoid them.

That being said, a 100% boycott is borderline puritanical. It’s very easy to order nothing from Amazon, and if enough of us do it will make a noticeable dent in their profits.

A direct boycott of Amazon and its subsidiaries? Super easy, barely an inconvenience.

But boycotting services that happen to use Amazon? Impossible!

Any business may use products ordered from there. Your local toll gate may use AWS. Unless you are a major client nobody is going to let you audit their supply contracts.

There is never a perfect solution. Just boycotting them in any way you reasonably can will go a long way.

Uhmmm, I haven’t used Amazon for anything in at least four years, pretty sure it’s really easy

Yeah, I don’t struggle with boycotting Amazon. The only times I’ve really used Amazon in the past have been for PC parts, audio headphones, and a random thing or two. I do my absolute best not to buy needless things as it is, and I know that there are plenty of other websites to use if I really need to get something online. (I knew this was gonna come in handy one day ha.) Here’s a website called amazonalts.org. It’s curated websites/online stores for the ethical consumer in mind. The categories are Food, Home, Clothes, Beauty, Books, Electronics, and Miscellaneous.

Boycott is the wrong word.

Permanently change your spending habits. A temporary change a company can ignore, but permanent change in spending will affect them.

You can’t avoid everything 100% of the time but simply closing your Amazon account and not ordering their trash EVER AGAIN will make a difference.

Every one of us needs to change permanently to not empower this oligarchs any more.

Amazon doesn’t make anything. There’s very little on Amazon that can’t be purchased somewhere else.

100% is unattainable, but tbh even 10% would hurt them

No modern boycotts have been shown to be effective.

The last genuinely effective “boycott” was the bds movement focused on SA, which created real pressure.

BDS movements have been effective because they go well above and beyond boycotts, and in some ways, its easier to target “all” of a national economy than it is to single out singular companies. That action also took place in a world of reduced globalization.

More broadly we should all be considering the relevance of individual versus collective action. There was a real propaganda effort to drive peoples thinking to be focused on individual action as a means for creating social change. Be the change, recycling, changing your habits, etc. It shifted the focus from the responsibility being on those creating the damage to consumers, and it had a range of outcomes.

One of the most important is that individual action, while basically meaningless, acts as an analgesic towards further action. Its a way to create a sense of relief that something has been “done” while nothing meaningful has changed. If this psychological pain reliever prevents the escalation to the use of force or more extreme actions, its done its job to protect the system. There are very good reasons why the system accepts individual actions, are supported almost exclusively over collective or more extreme behavior.