Yes, and without too much effort one can also just shop online at other retailers (in case one lives way out in a rural area). Maybe free 2-day shipping won't happen at other places, but free shipping and equivalent prices are easy to find.
Yes, that is what I do (buying online but from a more local seller). If it takes 2 or 5 days to delivery doesn't makes much of a difference for me at least, I will have to wait anyway.
Been using Target Staples, and Bestbuy more and while they don’t always have the same items, brand names end up being roughly the same price due to auto price matching and contractual minimum prices.
Only times I’m using amazon is for cheap items no one else will ship. They’ve really just turned into AliExpress.
I felt like I had to remember how to shop other places online as I’ve been making my switch to less Amazon. I’m so tired of finding little business cards in all my orders to review the products. I gave a bad review on a vacuum cleaner, and the seller has been contacting me every few weeks to refund me if I take it down. I sympathize with sellers because I know it’s hard to sell anything less than a five star product on there. The whole system feels so broken these days.
I don't know about the warehouses, but a family member stocked shelves at Target for years, and was paid the minimum wage the whole time. Hours were 1) part time, 2) too inconsistent to allow any other work.
There really isn't a company at that scale that doesn't have problems. I rank Target over Amazon simply because I know the products are going to be legit. Most of the time I'm doing curbside pickup there anyways.
For a quick and concrete example of this, do a search on Amazon for "dent puller". You'll get pages and pages of obviously identical suction cups and dent removal kits with obviously randomly generated brand names like "LTGABA" and "QGMZZMF".
To cement this example, do a search for a product like this on Amazon, and then do the same search on Alibaba/AliExpress. Most sellers on Amazon don't even bother changing the stock images from the ones on AliExpress.
It really drives the point home that you're paying premiums to unnecessary middlemen by buying on Amazon.
We talk about Amazon being able to do distributed systems "at scale" all the time. They also do worker exploitation at scale. There are knock-on effects -- for instance we might look at a mom and pop shop and say, "That's not ok, I won't do the bad thing they do to their employees at my shop." But we'd look at Amazon and say, "Well, if Amazon does it, then surely I can too."