Can you help me understand how you know the other companies are better?
There's no denying that Amazon is known for being not great to workers, especially warehouse staff who are hired as contractors. But long before Amazon existed I did temp factory and warehouse work for a couple of summers. I promise you that also varied from miserable to criminal. I have no reason to think a random vendor is better than Amazon here.
Reasonable people could differ, but my current thinking is I'm better off pressuring Amazon, who at least has a brand they care about, than to swap to whatever anonymous company is doing US fulfillment for a random Chinese manufacturer.
The arguments for ways other companies are better work both in and out of favor for them. Conversely, centralizing it (Amazon becomes a monopoly) also works both ways: It's possible worker conditions can be better or worse compared to the average standard, but with greater number of them in a single go.
Thus the counter-argument, for me at least, stands out, which is less volatility from a decentralized market, however, if a centralized market would turn out to have better employee conditions, then this reduced volatility would in turn work against other companies as an argument, and so we're back at square one.
History tells us that monopolies tend to ...treat their employees badly? I don't know and I think it depends on the company and market it serves, but my gut-feeling says yes and so, to me, less volatility sounds like the sanest gut-decision I can make.
It's up to each and everyone for themselves to decide, I guess.
I don't like it. I also don't have time to run all over town (or web) trying to find a highly specific bicycle seat post, or go to every sporting goods store to get the one brand of bouldering chalk I like, or every housewares store shopping for the specific coffee grinder that will fit in my 300sq-foot apartment.
Maybe I should go Thoreau and live in a cabin, but until then I'm very busy. I do a lot of other things to adapt my life to try and improve the general world, but ecommerce habits just isn't making the cut yet.
There's no denying that Amazon is known for being not great to workers, especially warehouse staff who are hired as contractors. But long before Amazon existed I did temp factory and warehouse work for a couple of summers. I promise you that also varied from miserable to criminal. I have no reason to think a random vendor is better than Amazon here.
Reasonable people could differ, but my current thinking is I'm better off pressuring Amazon, who at least has a brand they care about, than to swap to whatever anonymous company is doing US fulfillment for a random Chinese manufacturer.