If possible I try to buy from local farmer markets (if my schedule lines up). Clothes I usually buy second hand or they’re merch to support creators I like. But if it comes to gas for my car geting something from a not billion dollar corp. is impossible. Games and game consoles are usually bought via steam or physical from the store. So I’d say it’s a work in progress, as most things are.

Forgoing the convinience isn’t easy, even gotta look at the purchase and decide if it’ll be used frequently or just a use and throw

So anyways, that’s the impact one of these “pointless” boycott posts had on me.

I didn’t say they were pointless. I say they don’t do anything. What does do something is this;

I ended up cancelling my Prime subscription

That’s it. You “buying a ton” on amazon is small peanuts in the grand scheme. Even if you buy a lot amazon is only making a percentage of whatever you spend. Something like 30%. So even if you spend $10k in a year, they make $3,000 net and have to deduct for the cost of getting those items to you. When all the financials are worked out, it’s next to nothing.

The price of their subscription service is their e-penis. They get to say “500 million people pay for Amazon Prime!” @ $139/yr is $69.5 billion. You can buy nothing and they can still survive… But if you stop paying for Prime they lose their e-penis, which affects their stock price, which loses them bargaining rights with their suppliers and ultimately can affect the price of Prime itself.

It’s the surest way to kill them.

I agree with the principal of personal boycotts, though not effective in doing anything to affect the companies that you are boycotting, are necessary. But OP is right. For instance I have been boycotting Chick-fil-A for the last 10 years because I don’t agree with their homophobic attitude. But it has zero effect on their bottom line because no one else boycotts them or even cares. I think the kesson is that you should not expect any kind of real outcome from your personal boycott of a company. You should just be satisfied that you are not personally supporting that company.

It’s so bad and cyclical while just being unavoidable in some areas. On the map, you’ll notice how heavily populated northern europe is compared to a lot of sparse areas which have less options. I’m in a relatively normal size town and there is one big box choice and maybe one defunct “local” store that’s barely getting by.

I had to beg a guy in a corner shopping center “repair shop” for a small syringe of thermal paste when I ran out (I’m not fucking kidding, there’s just no electronics store anywhere nearby, losing Radioshack was fucking hard). Dude at the shop was the only reason I didn’t have to go online and wait a week (he wasn’t selling it, just had spare for his own use). My trades and hobbies make this a common occurrence throughout the week. Most places now are forced to sell on Amazon to remain competitive (Amazon dominates with shipping cost reduction alone for large items), finding a local or even nationally based company through search algorithms becomes harder and harder as they can’t pay to keep up with SEO bullshit. You can try to keep it all legit but with competitive monopolies everywhere you just eventually find out your favorite company no longer really exists.

There are some suppliers I could shop with but each one is an hour drive in different directions and 80% of the time they’re ordering the same shit through the same companies I would be using if I went online. It works sometimes, but takes so much effort it becomes it’s own full-time job that no one has the ability to keep up with.

You just listed things that you can pick up at any number of local stores. That stupid convenience of ordering crap instead of just adding it to the shopping list is why people think going a week without using Amazon will “disrupt the system.” This is exactly the problem.

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I haven’t bought a single TV in my whole life and I haven’t missed anything important. Whenever I am somewhere where there’s a TV and I’ve got nothing better to do or I’m just curious I zap through the channels whithout finding anything remotely interesting or entertaining 99% of the time. I really wonder what people want with these ad-infested, annoying trashcans. Aren’t you dumb enough, yet? Try heavy drinking. Preferrably methanol or break fluid…

Suddenly the horrible under any administration piss in a bottle’ company is bad?