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makeitdoublelast Thursday at 2:38 PM3 repliesview on HN

I wonder if you could live a week mostly the same way you do now without touching any service that pays Amazon.


Replies

nunezlast Thursday at 3:22 PM

The way I look at it is that boycotting Amazon is similar to boycotting petroleum. Petroleum is in the supply chain of everything that we use, but energy companies would definitely feel the impacts of everyone getting EVs.

AWS is everywhere, but Amazon Retail is a separate entity and would definitely feel the crunch of even 30% of its users deciding to shop elsewhere or cancelling Prime.

(I cancelled my Prime membership a year and a half ago and do almost all of my shopping directly from manufacturers or from smaller stores. I spent thousands of dollars per year with them.

I used Walmart Lists to replace my Amazon subscribe and save purchases for a year but was finally able to, mostly, move off of that earlier this year. As it happens, HEB, a grocery chain in Texas, has just about everything I need!

I resisted doing this earlier because I thought I needed one/two-day delivery; I wrote posts on here defending this "need." It turns out that, no, I can wait a few days, and, yes, UPS, USPS, and FedEx are significantly more reliable than Amazon Flex.)

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bogwoglast Thursday at 4:25 PM

Is that really so hard? I cancelled my Prime subscription years ago and haven't missed it. Walmart, Target, Costco, BestBuy, HomeDepot, etc haven't gone anywhere. Smaller specialty retailers usually sell on their own website with shipping too. Plus, one genuine advantage the other retailers have over Amazon is that you can (usually) trust you're getting something of reasonable quality, whereas Amazon feels like an AI generated flea market filled with garbage quality Aliexpress drop shipping schemes.

I thought losing two day shipping would suck, but it really hasn't. Most of the big retailers (in my area anyways) end up delivering online orders in two days or less anyways, and the delivery fee is free if your order is over a certain size (usually around $35)

De-googling or De-appleing is hard, but De-amazoning (at least for me) was trivial and anticlimactic.

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dowager_dan99last Thursday at 7:19 PM

I spend $2/month on AWS and could change this, but use nothing else that I can think of; is this really that hard?