How to Resist Amazon and Why: The Fight for Local Economics, Data Privacy, Fair Labor, Independent Bookstores, and a People-Powered Future!

by Danny Caine

When a company's workers are literally dying on the job, when their business model relies on preying on local businesses and even their own vendors, when their CEO is the richest person in the world while their workers make low wages with impossible quotas... wouldn't you want to resist? Danny Caine, owner of Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas has been an outspoken critic of the seemingly unstoppable Goliath of the bookselling Amazon. In this book, he lays out the case for shifting our personal money and civic investment away from global corporate behemoths and to small, local, independent businesses. Well-researched and lively, his tale covers the history of big box stores, the big political drama of delivery, and the perils of warehouse work. He shows how Amazon's ruthless discount strategies mean authors, publishers, and even Amazon themselves can lose money on every book sold. And he spells out a clear path to resistance, in a world where consumers are struggling to get by. In-depth research is interspersed with charming personal anecdotes from bookstore life, making this a readable, fascinating, essential book for the 2020s.

Genres: Nonfiction

251 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 20, 2022

Reviews

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The consolidation of power and influence, especially in regards to books, rarely leads to freer expression."

The irony of me using Goodreads for this.

You should cancel your Amazon Prime account right now and you already know that, but if you need a reason why, keep reading.

When you can get the same book shipped free to your front door for 40% less than the list price on release day… Is it really so bad if you buy a bestseller or five from Amazon instead of your local independent bookseller? (YES.)

First of all, Amazon is deliberately luring you in by selling books at a loss. “[Amazon] can offer Crawdads as a loss leader because of the staggering array of profitable revenue streams in their portfolio. Much of Amazon’s revenue doesn’t come from retail; their server company Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the backbone of much of the Internet.”

So you saved a few dollars on a book by shopping at Amazon. But what about the community benefits that you lost by not supporting your indie bookstore? When there is a fundraiser for the local pet food pantry, you know who donates gift cards to it? My local indie bookstore--which also provides community events, participates in downtown beautification projects, recirculates money into the local economy, and brings people together. Amazon ain’t doing any of that.

Remember back to middle school social studies and learning about the difference between vertical and horizontal monopolies? Amazon asks, “¿Por qué no los dos?”

“Any new book by Dean Koontz is edited, printed, published, marketed, and sold by [Amazon]...Traditionally, a publisher and a bookseller and a wholesaler and a shipping company are four different entities that all have a hand in selling a book. It’s four different companies that can make money off of a single title…But with Amazon-exclusive deals like Koontz’s, the pie isn’t even sliced. Koontz gets his percentage of the royalties, and Amazon gets the rest of the entire pie.”

When you buy a book by Colleen Hoover, Dean Koontz--when you see Montlake, Thomas & Mercer, 47North, or Lake Union Publishing on the spine of the book, you are purchasing a book that feeds Amazon, even if you bought it from an indie bookstore.

Why does this matter?

“The same way a totalitarian government silences dissenting voices, a totalitarian publishing industry will silence any voice that doesn’t serve its algorithms. One example of Amazon’s massive growth having a dampening effect on free speech can be found in China: in recent years, Amazon has disabled comments and reviews on many books on their Chinese site, in one instance going so far as to only allow five-star reviews on a book by Chinese president Xi Jinping.”

Maybe that doesn’t bother you that much. Well, this should:

You’ve heard about the warehouse workers and delivery truck drivers who had to wear diapers or urinate in bottles because of unrealistic productivity expectations, and maybe you murmured "That's inhumane" sympathetically as you added another package of petroleum-based tat to your cart and selected free next day shipping.

I get it. It's hard to grasp someone else's life that feels theoretical at best, especially when acknowledging your complicity in their suffering also makes life less convenient for you. But is that what life is supposed to be? Convenient for those who can afford it at the expense of others?

"In Spring 2021, Amazon denied reports that its third-party drivers regularly urinate in bottles during their routes in order to keep up with Amazon’s crushing rate. Later document leaks made it clear that Amazon was in fact aware of the peeing-in-bottles issue."

"After acquiring internal injury records from 23 of Amazon’s 110 fulfillment centers, the study [from The Atlantic] finds that 'the rate of serious injuries for these facilities was more than double the national average for the warehousing industry.' Some individual [Amazon] fulfillment centers, in fact, were operating with an injury rate quadruple the national average."

Did you know that repetitive stress injuries and constant pain are so prevalent in Amazon warehouses that they installed pain medication vending machines in the warehouses?

Caine pulls in research including On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger in which she writes:

Question: Your warehouse workers work 11.5 hour shifts. In order to make rate, a significant number of them need to take over-the-counter painkillers multiple times per shift, which means regular backups at the medical office.
Do you:
A: Scale back the rate--clearly, workers are at their physical limits
B: Make shifts shorter
C: Increase the number or duration of breaks
D: Increase staffing at the nurse’s office
E: Install vending machines to dispense painkillers more efficiently.
What kind of fucking sociopath goes with E?

Amazon warehouses are more dangerous than other warehouses. People are permanently maimed in Amazon warehouses at higher rates. The scanners are set to impossible levels of achievement on purpose. Multiple people have died in Amazon warehouses because it is policy not to let them leave a shift during a tornado warning nor keep their phones on them while on the warehouse floor.

“Even on normal days, Amazon warehouses have double the injury rate of industry peers. Therefore, a non-increase still means abnormally high injuries. Further, documents from Reveal ‘reveal a mounting injury crisis at Amazon warehouses, one that is especially acute during Prime week and the holiday peak--and one that Amazon has gone to great lengths to conceal.’ Indeed, the weeks of Prime Day and Black Friday ‘had the highest rate of serious injuries for all of 2019.’ So not only is Amazon injuring workers at staggering rates, but it’s also working very hard to conceal those injuries.”

You do not need to engage in capitalistic overconsumption to the point where people are dying so you can get your made in China arsenic-filled plastic crap the next day.

Emily West in Buy Now: How Amazon Branded Convenience and Normalized Monopoly writes, “Given the environmental concerns that some consumers have about ecommerce, it’s a missed opportunity not to present shipping options in terms of their estimated carbon impacts.” Imagine how customers could be incentivized to opt for earth-friendly shipping. I mean, in a perfect world, isn’t eco-friendly shipping the free option rather than next-day?

Speaking of environmental concerns, “An analysis of publicly-available data has found that 80% of Amazon’s US warehouses ‘are located in zip codes that have a higher percentage of people of color than the majority of populated zip codes in their metropolitan area.’ Put simply, Amazon’s pollution-spewing warehouses are almost always spewing pollution into communities of color.”

“Residents of these neighborhoods ‘face increased air pollution from trucks and vans, more dangerous streets for kids walking or biking, and other quality-of-life issues, such as clogged traffic and near-constant noise.’ Further, this kind of air pollution has immediate health costs: ‘Breathing in tiny particles from diesel and gasoline exhaust increases a person’s chance of getting asthma, developing cancer, or having a heart attack, decades of studies have shown.’”

And it's only getting worse: "Amazon’s reported carbon footprint increased just over 36% from 2018 to 2020."

Here's the link to cancel your Amazon Prime account: https://www.amazon.com/mm/pipeline/ca...

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a solid overview of the many problems with Amazon and the never-ending list of things they are doing that hurt not only small businesses, but also their own employees and any user of Amazon, AWS, etc. It wasn’t a full 5 stars for me, however, since I found the zine to be a bit repetitive and with typos. I also wish there had been more than just one okay-ish chapter about what we can actually do to resist Amazon, especially living in such expensive times. I understand that it is mostly on the government to fix the systemic issues and tax laws in order to limit Amazon’s power, but I wanted to know more about what WE as individuals could do.

[Andrew Razanauskas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Published by a grassroots group. Purchased from the front display stand at a local bookstore. This book walks the walk, and it talks the talk, too. Artfully researched and written with mainstream publication quality. I think a book has reached legendary status when it gets me to rethink my habits, and Danny Caine does just this. Power to the People!

[Kai · Rating 5 out of 5]

Early chapters, centered on the impact of Amazon's low pricing on booksellers, was especially compelling. The rest of the book felt like a dedicated curation to try to capture the far reaches of Amazon, with vignettes drawn on the community's stories. I think the author's ability to make these vignettes is a testament to what we are missing in our increasingly optimized and dehumanized market society. And the book is inspiring, partly because he's right about the effectivness of the antitrust movement led by Lina, and mostly because it has crystallized Amazon's malpractices.

[Tiffany M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone who has a Goodreads account should read this I'm sure my post will be removed as I'm praising this book on GR owned by Amazon.

[Heather Cole · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good suggestions, although a little too in the weeds. Plus I found typos. :(

[ronni c · Rating 4 out of 5]

the irony of reading this book and then opening goodreads is not lost on me. i also have a storygraph account guys. let’s all go there so we can stop using goodreads!! @rronnniii

[Anna Månsson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This will maybe be the last book I add and review on Goodreads.

[Eliza Thorpe · Rating 5 out of 5]

lfgg got my mom to delete her prime account

wish there was an updated version but it’s kind of nice this was written in a more hopeful time

[Sophie Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

I guess it’s time to get off goodreads…