[beardedscotsman]

I would love to boycott amazon, but its near impossible. In France especially with the lockdowns, most of my groceries are delivered either via amazon (for next day delivery) or from Monoprix, but that is generally two days in advance. Luckily these days I have been able to push to Monoprix directly.

For non food items, amazon are still one of the cheapest once you include delivery and interestingly, even with Amazon Prime Delivery in France, almost all items are cheaper in Amazon.de including paying the 5 euro shipping to France, so I order a lot from there too.

Looking at idealo.fr for me on all my items I bought in the last few months, they are the same price as what I paid, but are all 3 euro or more including shipping. So as a consumer, amazon is still pretty much the cheapest.

Ultimately, I could save buckets by just going to the shop, but that won’t start for me until Q3.

[linspace]

There was a time when we gathered a group of friends to order books from Amazon (USA) to Spain to share shipping costs. We were students and waiting a month to save a few bucks was worthy.

I'm buying less and less from Amazon recently. And I no longer "go shopping" to Amazon and just go there to check prices. I think other companies are catching up and I was surprised when my latest laptop was delivered from a traditional retailer (El Corte Inglés) in under two hours. Just to share some anecdata.

[tarsinge]

I'm from France and it was relatively easy to boycott Amazon for a lot of things, even after years of being a big prime user. I agree there are no good direct replacements, for me the solution was different consumption altogether (going to local food markets for food, buying less crap, going to specialized physical or web shops for board games, books, music, electronics, even if it means paying a little more it's great for socializing, etc...). Buying on Amazon is highly correlated with buying plastic from China for me, so it's a double or triple win. But yeah I still go to Amazon for tech.

[Normille]

  >I would love to boycott amazon, but its near impossible

I've found I use Amazon a lot less since they upped the price of Prime. When it was £49 for the year, I used to buy almost everything on Amazon because I really hate actual shopping [as in traipsing round real bricks & mortar shops]. And £49 a year was a good bargain to get all that stuff delivered free.

Then they put Prime up to £80 a year and bundled a load of shite I don't want with it [chart music and crappy American telly]. So I only ever have Prime these days whenever I get offered the 99p for a month's trial.

What I find myself doing a lot now is looking up something on Amazon, reading the reviews and then, if it's under £20 and doesn't qualify for free delivery, I get it off eBay instead --where all the same sellers are selling all the same things, but usually with free postage.

I realise that's just swapping one tax-avoiding US megacorp for another. But, to be honest, I couldn't care less about how much tax big companies avoid paying. Fair play to them for 'socking it to the man'. Does anyone seriously think that, if they coughed up their fair share, the taxman would reduce what he bleeds off the rest of us?

[jimktrains2]

My experience has been that Prime doesn't even mean fast delivery anymore. My wife and children use the streaming service, or I would have dumped it years ago.

[Normille]

Yes. Prime "One Day Delivery" used to nearly always mean you got the item the next day. Now it seems to mean "One Day Delivery --after we get around to dispatching it"

[gryzzly]

I guess we are lucky here in Berlin to have many of these companies sell the items at original prices directly. Also most will have 20-50€ minimal amount that allows then for delivery to be free. Sure, you might need to batch a purchase, but is it not a good cost to pay a company [and its employees] directly instead of the tax avoiding american company known for being terrible to its employees? [not so much in EU because we have laws here, but still]

[orthoxerox]

Why haven't local shops switched to deliveries in France?

[ad404b8a372f2b9]

I can only speak to my experience but I've always felt that french society is aggravatingly slow to adapt to modern technology. During the height of the pandemic we'd get documentaries on small businesses struggling, it'd often be the same speech from the owners "I hate the internet, I don't want to use it but it's been 6 months and I'm on the verge of bankruptcy and my child has been begging me for years to get an online presence so maybe I'll do the bare minimum."