In the ear­ly 1990s, future bil­lion­aire Jeff Bezos pur­chased the domain name Relentless.com, intend­ing to brand the online store that he had in mind with that name. Friends con­vinced him oth­er­wise, how­ev­er, and when his online store even­tu­al­ly launched in 1995, it was under the moniker Amazon.com.

Although Bezos became rich as the founder of Amazon.com, not Relentless.com, relent­less cer­tain­ly describes how his com­pa­ny operates.

It has gone from being a tiny start­up oper­at­ing out of a garage to one of the largest and most pow­er­ful com­pa­nies in the world in just twen­ty plus years. Ama­zon may have been only a blip on the retail land­scape in its ear­ly days, but today, it’s an enor­mous juggernaut.

Con­sid­er these metrics:

• Mar­ket cap­i­tal­iza­tion: Ama­zon is con­sid­ered to be the nation’s most valu­able retail­er, hav­ing passed brick-and-mor­tar behe­moth Wal-Mart (the bane of Main Street retail shops) in 2015. Aside from Apple, Alpha­bet, and Microsoft — three oth­er tech titans which it com­petes with in some mar­kets — it is also the most valu­able com­pa­ny overall.
• Rev­enue: Ama­zon brings in more rev­enue than any oth­er tech company.
• Num­ber of employ­ees: Ama­zon now employs more peo­ple in the Unit­ed States than any oth­er com­pa­ny besides Wal-Mart.

As Ama­zon has grown, its pol­i­tics and busi­ness prac­tices have come under greater scruti­ny, as has its work­place cul­ture. Ama­zon has not tak­en kind­ly to this scrutiny.

The New York Times — which iron­i­cal­ly par­tic­i­pates in Ama­zon’s online ads sys­tem, dis­play­ing ads from amazon-adsystem.com on its site — angered Bezos and his exec­u­tives in 2015 when it pub­lished a lengthy front page sto­ry detail­ing aspects of the com­pa­ny’s cul­ture that its reporters found trou­bling and dis­con­cert­ing.

Wrote reporters Jodi Kan­tor and David Streitfeld: 

At Ama­zon, work­ers are encour­aged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meet­ings, toil long and late (emails arrive past mid­night, fol­lowed by text mes­sages ask­ing why they were not answered), and held to stan­dards that the com­pa­ny boasts are “unrea­son­ably high.” The inter­nal phone direc­to­ry instructs col­leagues on how to send secret feed­back to one another’s bosses.

Employ­ees say it is fre­quent­ly used to sab­o­tage oth­ers. (The tool offers sam­ple texts, includ­ing this: “I felt con­cerned about his inflex­i­bil­i­ty and open­ly com­plain­ing about minor tasks.”)

Many of the new­com­ers fil­ing in on Mon­days may not be there in a few years. The company’s win­ners dream up inno­va­tions that they roll out to a quar­ter-bil­lion cus­tomers and accrue small for­tunes in soar­ing stock. Losers leave or are fired in annu­al cullings of the staff — “pur­pose­ful Dar­win­ism,” one for­mer Ama­zon human resources direc­tor said. Some work­ers who suf­fered from can­cer, mis­car­riages and oth­er per­son­al crises said they had been eval­u­at­ed unfair­ly or edged out rather than giv­en time to recover.

That may sound bad (and it is), but life is even worse for work­ers in Ama­zon’s ware­hous­es, or as the com­pa­ny prefers to call them, ful­fill­ment cen­ters. Work­ing con­di­tions there have been the sub­ject of sev­er­al exposes.

In May 2018, the Finan­cial Times report­ed on an inves­ti­ga­tion under­tak­en by the labor union GMB about con­di­tions in Ama­zon’s Unit­ed King­dom warehouses.

The full arti­cle can be read at FT, but here’s a snippet:

One per­son said she was preg­nant and had to stand for 10 hours a day with­out a chair.

Oth­ers said they were treat­ed like “slaves” or “robots”, or that it was like “liv­ing in a prison” and “soul-destroy­ing”.

Anoth­er work­er said: “It is an awful place to work, can’t breath[e] or voice an opin­ion, feel like a trapped ani­mal with lack of sup­port and respect.”

One female work­er, who asked not to be named, said she had asked to be trans­ferred to a dif­fer­ent depart­ment when she found out she was pregnant.

“I was told I could not be trans­ferred and must con­tin­ue pick­ing, which involves bend­ing, stretch­ing and mov­ing a heavy cart, and walk­ing miles,” she said. “After a while I told them I could not walk so many miles and I could not pick from low loca­tions. I had a meet­ing with a safe­ty man­ag­er and was also told, ‘It’s not what you want, it is what we decide’ … I saw ladies with huge bumps picking.”

Liv­ing in a prison. Soul-destroy­ing. Those are harsh words. And yet these com­ments match­es up with what oth­er peo­ple have said about work­ing in Ama­zon’s ful­fill­ment cen­ters, includ­ing peo­ple here in the U.S. One for­mer ware­house work­er apt­ly describes the com­pa­ny as obsessed with becom­ing the very def­i­n­i­tion of a face­less cor­po­ra­tion with no redeem­ing val­ues.

A lot can be said about the faults of Ama­zon. It exploits work­ers, feeds our cul­ture of con­sumerism, and so on.

But the real dan­ger is how the human ele­ment is slow­ly being elim­i­nat­ed. Man­agers man­age using a com­put­er pro­gram. Write ups are deter­mined by machine-made deci­sions. No one says, “Hey, what’s going on? Talk to me.” There is no human wig­gle room. Human­i­ty is treat­ed like a fault to be man­aged and overcome.

As a Native Amer­i­can, I under­stand the dam­age wrought by col­o­niza­tion, and I see even in the very name Ama­zon the specter of that demon. The indige­nous peo­ple in South Amer­i­ca prob­a­bly had dozens of names for the riv­er called “Ama­zon,” in dozens of lan­guages and dialects. The name ‘Ama­zon” is a name cre­at­ed by Euro­pean explor­ers set on exploit­ing the peo­ple and suck­ing their resources out from under them. How appro­pri­ate, then, for Jeff Bezos to choose it as the name of his soul-destroy­ing empire.

There’s that phrase again… soul-destroy­ing.

In Seat­tle, the largest urban cen­ter in the Pacif­ic North­west, Ama­zon has attract­ed even more scorn after wad­ing into the debate over the City Coun­cil’s abort­ed ordi­nance to raise more mon­ey to build afford­able hous­ing and fight home­less­ness by levy­ing addi­tion­al tax­es on busi­ness­es oper­at­ing with the city limits.

Ama­zon qui­et­ly cam­paigned against the ordi­nance at first. Then the com­pa­ny pub­licly threat­ened to pause its Seat­tle-based expan­sion if the ordi­nance passed. Lat­er, Ama­zon donat­ed mon­ey to the cam­paign to over­turn the ordinance.

At Cross­cut, Knute Berg­er recent­ly sug­gest­ed that Seat­tle and the Puget Sound region begin plan­ning for a post-Ama­zon future… a future in which the com­pa­ny moves its head­quar­ters and its cor­po­rate oper­a­tions elsewhere.

(Ama­zon is already engaged in the search for what it calls HQ2, or a loca­tion for a “sec­ond head­quar­ters”, although it claims it has no plans to aban­don Seattle.)

“Seat­tle is a sticky place, Ama­zon or not,” Berg­er writes. “Peo­ple who move here tend to want to stay. Of course, Ama­zo­ni­ans are not as set­tled as the 1970s Boe­ing salary­men and may pre­pare to decamp for the next tech hotspot.”

“Still, instead of get­ting trapped into end­less appeas­ing [of] big com­pa­nies that wield threats, it’s bet­ter for us to start prepar­ing for a sus­tain­able post-Ama­zon econ­o­my,” he goes on to say. “That seems like a smart move while at the same time redou­bling our efforts for mas­sive tax reform to make pay­ing for the dam­age of ‘success”‘more equi­table in the long run. That won’t elim­i­nate the “growth para­dox,” but it would give us more tools for han­dling it.”

We agree. We also think there’s a case to be made that Ama­zon has sim­ply got­ten too big, and should be bro­ken up into a num­ber of small­er inde­pen­dent com­pa­nies. Pres­i­dent Ted­dy Roo­sevelt did his coun­try a great ser­vice more than a hun­dred years ago when he embarked upon a trust­bust­ing cam­paign that took aim at some of the coun­try’s most pow­er­ful cor­po­rate conglomerates.

We sore­ly need a mod­ern-day equiv­a­lent of that.

But beyond macro-lev­el action by our local, state, and fed­er­al gov­ern­ments, we ought to rethink our own shop­ping habits. Ama­zon could nev­er have become as dom­i­nant and pow­er­ful as it is with­out our cooperation.

The com­pa­ny has worked hard not only to try to get our busi­ness, but to keep the sales com­ing with gim­micks that seek to sat­is­fy our desire for instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion. Gim­micks like “free” two day ship­ping (which isn’t real­ly free), one-click order­ing, and, more recent­ly, same-day deliv­ery on select items in select met­ro­pol­i­tan areas.

Ama­zon has long been syn­ony­mous with low prices and best selec­tion; the com­pa­ny has done an incred­i­ble job get­ting into our heads and train­ing us not to shop around, even though the Net makes com­par­i­son shop­ping remark­ably easy.

In truth, Ama­zon does­n’t always have the low­est price, nor does it car­ry every item there is. But that does­n’t mat­ter, because Ama­zon already has what real­ly counts: Mind­share. When we want to buy some­thing online, we think of Ama­zon first, and we search amazon.com or the Ama­zon app for what we want.

Many small busi­ness­es par­tic­i­pate not in Ama­zon’s mar­ket­place because they real­ly want to, but because they feel they have to.

“Amer­i­cans say they prize com­pe­ti­tion, a pro­lif­er­a­tion of choic­es, the lit­tle guy,” not­ed Tim Wu in an op-ed for The New York Times back in March.

“Yet our taste for con­ve­nience begets more con­ve­nience, through a com­bi­na­tion of the eco­nom­ics of scale and the pow­er of habit. The eas­i­er it is to use Ama­zon, the more pow­er­ful Ama­zon becomes — and thus the eas­i­er it becomes to use Ama­zon. Con­ve­nience and monop­oly seem to be nat­ur­al bedfellows.”

Old habits die hard, as the say­ing goes, but if you’re an Ama­zon cus­tomer who is increas­ing­ly con­cerned about Ama­zon’s greedy pol­i­tics and bad busi­ness prac­tices, you can do some­thing about it. You are not pow­er­less. You can vote with your dol­lars, and send less of them to and through Amazon.

Of course it will be less con­ve­nient… but if you’re will­ing to give up some con­ve­nience, you can make our econ­o­my more diverse and inclusive.

At NPI, we believe in lead­ing by exam­ple, so we have made a con­scious effort to look beyond Ama­zon for sup­plies and equip­ment nec­es­sary for our events and oper­a­tions. That effort has been very reward­ing: we’ve dis­cov­ered firms we nev­er knew exist­ed that offer fast ship­ping, rea­son­able prices, and good cus­tomer ser­vice. We’ve also increased our patron­age of brick-and-mor­tar retailers.

If the prospect of diver­si­fy­ing your shop­ping and reduc­ing your depen­dence on Ama­zon is appeal­ing to you, then have a look at this guide of alter­na­tives that we have put togeth­er. When­ev­er pos­si­ble, we try to shop local and union (and when it comes to food, organ­ic), and we encour­age you to try and do the same.

Books

The greater Seat­tle area is blessed to still have many inde­pen­dent book­stores. In NPI’s home­town of Red­mond, we gained an inde­pen­dent book­seller, Brick & Mor­tar Books, last year, and we’re pret­ty thrilled about that. Here’s a list of inde­pen­dent book­stores in our region that would love your business:

• Ada’s Tech­ni­cal Books and Café (Seat­tle)
• Book Larder (Seat­tle)
• Book­Tree (Kirk­land)
• Brick & Mor­tar (Red­mond)
• Eagle Har­bor Books (Bain­bridge Island)
• Edmonds Book­shop
• Elliott Bay Book Co. (Seat­tle)
• Fan­ta­graph­ics Book­store (Seat­tle)
• Island Books (Mer­cer Island)
• Lib­er­ty Bay Books (Bre­mer­ton, Poulsbo)
• Magnolia’s Book­store (Seat­tle)
• Moon­rak­er Books (Lan­g­ley; on Whid­bey Island)
• The Nev­erend­ing Book­shop (Both­ell)
• Open Books (Seat­tle)
• Phin­ney Books (Seat­tle)
• Queen Anne Book Com­pa­ny (Seat­tle)
• Seat­tle Mys­tery Bookshop
• Secret Gar­den Books (Seat­tle)
• Third Place Books (Seward Park, Raven­na, Lake For­est Park)
• The Trav­el­er (Bain­bridge Island)
• Uni­ver­si­ty Book Store (Seat­tle, Mill Creek)

If you can’t find what you need at any of these fine inde­pen­dent book­sellers, there’s a good chance that Pow­ell’s has it online. You can buy in per­son from Pow­ell’s when in the Port­land area, or online. Orders over fifty dol­lars ship free.

You can also some­times buy direct from a pub­lish­er — Chelsea Green is an exam­ple of a pub­lish­er that has their own online store.

Final­ly, there’s Barnes & Noble. You should patron­ize your local book­store before turn­ing to B&N, but if you can’t find a book there that you real­ly want, you may be able to find it in B&N’s online cat­a­log. B&N also ships real­ly fast. In fact, B&N typ­i­cal­ly ships out items faster than Ama­zon does for nonmembers.

Gro­ceries

For gro­ceries, we advise becom­ing a mem­ber of an organ­ic food co-op like PCC Com­mu­ni­ty Mar­kets, which has a grow­ing num­ber of loca­tions in the Puget Sound area. (PCC in May opened its newest store in Burien, which has made it pos­si­ble for more peo­ple in the South Sound to belong to and enjoy the co-op.)

PCC is a pro­gres­sive tri­fec­ta: It’s a union employ­er, it’s local, and it sells whole­some, organ­ic food. While organ­ic food some­times gets pil­lo­ried for cost­ing more than con­ven­tion­al food, that’s actu­al­ly not a bad thing. Those high­er prices rep­re­sent an invest­ment in sus­tain­able farms and fish­eries that our soci­ety needs.

Fur­ther­more, when shop­ping for gro­ceries, don’t allow your­self to be fooled that size equals val­ue. Because organ­ic food usu­al­ly lacks filler ingre­di­ents like high fruc­tose corn syrup, there’s more good­ness and nutri­tion packed into every bite.

Orange juice is a good exam­ple of this.

A small cup of real orange juice is equiv­a­lent to a larg­er cup of orange juice made from con­cen­trate. The real orange juice does­n’t have all that added water.

There may be less liq­uid in your cup to drink, but with real orange juice, every sip is more sat­is­fy­ing. You don’t need as much.

So don’t wor­ry about the small­er serv­ing sizes of pack­aged organ­ic foods… be hap­py. Buy­ing organ­ic gro­ceries in small­er serv­ing sizes can also help reduce caloric intake to a more appro­pri­ate lev­el, because sci­en­tif­ic research has shown that por­tion con­trol is actu­al­ly the key to weight loss, or keep­ing weight off once lost.

PCC part­ners with Instacart, so you can get your gro­ceries deliv­ered to you if you don’t have time to go shop­ping your­self, or don’t want to.

You can also find organ­ic gro­ceries at rea­son­able prices and larg­er quan­ti­ties (or both) at Trad­er Joe’s, Cost­co Whole­sale, and online at Thrive Mar­ket.

Music

When it comes to music, you’ve got lots of options, from stream­ing ser­vices like Pan­do­ra, Spo­ti­fy, Sound­cloud, or Tidal to stores that will sell you down­load­able tracks like Beat­port. (Bea­port even offers tracks in uncom­pressed .wav format.)

Want music on com­pact disc or vinyl? Try Discogs or CDUni­verse.

Elec­tron­ics

For com­put­er parts, there’s Newegg and TigerDi­rect.

If you need a new com­put­er, buy direct­ly from a man­u­fac­tur­er. The big play­ers in the indus­try are easy to find (Apple, Dell, HP, Acer, Leno­vo, and Asus), but there’s also small­er firms spe­cial­iz­ing in build­ing com­put­ers for enthu­si­asts who want to run free soft­ware on their hard­ware, like ZaR­ea­son or System76.

We advise all of our read­ers to buy direct from a man­u­fac­tur­er, because when you do you can typ­i­cal­ly cus­tomize the components.

Par­tic­u­lar­ly with note­book com­put­ers, upgrad­ing the com­po­nents is key to future-proof­ing your machine, which will make it last longer, allow­ing you to do your part to com­bat e‑waste and planned obsolescence.

This is even true of the noto­ri­ous­ly fick­le Apple, by the way. When you buy through Apple and cus­tomize your build, you can beef up your Mac­Book Pro or Mac­Book Air with more mem­o­ry and pro­cess­ing power.

If you do this, you’ll be very hap­py with your­self later.

Pre­fer a brick and mor­tar super­store? Check out Fry’s in Renton.

For elec­tron­ics and par­tic­u­lar­ly cam­era gear, you can’t go wrong with Ken­more Cam­era or Glaz­er’s Cam­era, both of which are local to the Seat­tle area and have com­mu­ni­ty-cen­tric own­ers. If they don’t have what you want or need, there’s also the big New York cam­era stores, Ado­ra­ma and B&H, which nowa­days are real­ly nation­wide online elec­tron­ics super­stores. Ado­ra­ma and B&H are gen­er­al­ly com­pa­ra­ble to Ama­zon with respect to both selec­tion as well as price.

Want to buy used? Check out Keh.

Appli­ances and spe­cial­ty electronics

If you pre­fer to buy from a com­pa­ny with local roots, make tracks to a trust­ed firm like Albert Lee, which has serv­ing Wash­ing­to­ni­ans for decades. If you’d rather buy your fridge, dish­wash­er, or oth­er large appli­ance online, there’s Abt.

Look­ing for air puri­fi­er, humid­i­fi­er, or oth­er tool to improve your indoor air qual­i­ty? Try Syl­vane. They main­tain an infor­ma­tive web­site with lots of videos.

Need a vac­u­um clean­er or a blow­er? Metrovac will sell you one that’s Made in the USA and is pret­ty much indestructible.

Fur­ni­ture

If you’re for­tu­nate enough to have an IKEA near you (the Seat­tle area has an IKEA in Ren­ton), you can find lots of dif­fer­ent kinds of fur­ni­ture at rel­a­tive­ly afford­able prices. IKEA can be hit and miss, but some of their fur­ni­ture pieces are quite good. (IKEA also sells high qual­i­ty bat­ter­ies under the Lad­da moniker at great prices.)

If you work at a non­prof­it and need office fur­ni­ture, you can inquire with Green Stan­dards to find out if you can obtain sur­plus fur­ni­ture at no charge. Remem­ber, reuse comes before recy­cle, along with reduce!

For ergonom­ic office fur­ni­ture, there’s Human Solu­tion, which offers a large selec­tion of desks and chairs and will hap­pi­ly sell you high end prod­ucts from the likes of Steel­case that are some­times only sold in bulk.

Office sup­plies

While look­ing for Ama­zon alter­na­tives for office sup­plies, we came across OfficeWorld.com, based out of Eugene, Ore­gon. Their web­site isn’t the slick­est, but they ship very quick­ly and their cus­tomer ser­vice is good. Thanks to Office­World, we were able to obtain gar­ment friend­ly nametags for our Spring Fundrais­ing Gala at a good price, and we avoid­ed patron­iz­ing Ama­zon for that purchase.

Kel­ly Paper, which has a store in SoDo, is the best place to obtain reams or car­tons of spe­cial­ty papers in the Seat­tle area, such as the envi­ron­men­tal­ly-friend­ly, pri­mar­i­ly recy­cled card­stock that we use for a por­tion of our in-house printing.

If Kel­ly Paper does not have the paper you want in stock, they can usu­al­ly get it in store next-day for you at no extra charge.

Print­ing

When we need some­thing print­ed that we can’t print our­selves (or don’t want to), we turn to But­ton­smith. Found­ed by young entre­pre­neur Hen­ry Burn­er, But­ton­smith is a Car­na­tion-based, union­ized print shop that can pro­vide you with stick­ers, but­tons, lit­er­a­ture, signs, t‑shirts, and much, much more. But­ton­smith is an Ama­zon mar­ket­place sell­er, but they’ll hap­pi­ly do busi­ness direct­ly with you.

Appar­el

There are sev­er­al com­pa­nies mak­ing qual­i­ty tex­tiles right here in the Unit­ed States that will sell online direct to you. bgreen is an exam­ple. They make com­fort­able under­gar­ments here in the States with organ­ic cotton.

Out­door gear

REI (for­mer­ly Recre­ation­al Equip­ment, Inc.) will be hap­py to equip you with what you need to explore the great out­doors safe­ly and com­fort­ably, whether that’s a tent, sleep­ing bag, skis, trekking poles, or sportswear.

REI has a very good online store in addi­tion to many phys­i­cal locations.

REI is one of sev­er­al retail­ers that has tak­en a stand against greed and ram­pant con­sumerism by clos­ing its stores on “Black Fri­day”. On the day after Thanks­giv­ing, the com­pa­ny urges its cus­tomers to #OptOut­side instead.

You should also patron­ize Patag­o­nia, which has a track record of fight­ing against right wing poli­cies that are bad for our plan­et. Patag­o­nia is suing the Trump regime over its attempt to shrink Bears Ears Nation­al Mon­u­ment in Utah. They have two loca­tions in Seat­tle plus an online store.

Now it’s your turn!

Know of any good Ama­zon alter­na­tives we did­n’t mention?

Please leave them in the comments.