How to Resist Amazon and Why

The Fight for Local Economics, Data Privacy, Fair Labor, Independent Bookstores, and a People-Powered Future!

Danny Caine

• Publisher: Microcosm Publishing
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781648410086
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Economics

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 world: 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.

How to resist amazon and why

the fight for Local Economies, Data Privacy, Fair Labor,

Independent Bookstores, and a People-Powered Future

© 2021 Danny Caine

© This edition Microcosm Publishing 2021

eBook ISBN 9781648410086

This is Microcosm #589

Cover by Lindsey Cleworth

Edited by Lydia Rogue

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Portland, OR 97227

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Introduction

Why How to Resist Amazon and Why

Books. Every task I perform in every workday is somehow related to books. I open boxes full of them. I put them on the shelf. I order them. I return them. I hand them to customers I think will love them. I watch as a team of dedicated booksellers does all of the above alongside me. Every day I unlock the doors of my bookstore—The Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas—so I can preach the importance of books alongside my team. Every day I go to work and I’m reminded that there can be a place for independent bookstores in 21st century America. I’m reminded that independent small businesses can carve a space to earn a living and shape their communities. I’m reminded that books, and those who sell them, are resilient and beloved.

Many of us in the independent bookstore world would fight to defend the idea of The Book with a capital B. It’s hard to even talk about how we feel about The Book without getting grandiose. We believe the right book can change the world. We believe the right book can grow empathy in its reader, and that empathy can blossom into positive change. We believe the right book can forever alter the course of the right reader’s life. It’s all high and mighty, but it’s true. We believe in these objects and their power, and our work is to help the right books get into the right hands.

Since 1995, we’ve watched as Amazon has become a bigger and bigger threat to that work.

There has never been a company as big, powerful, and pervasive as Amazon. Amazon is disruptive to the ability of small businesses to stay afloat. Amazon is a continuation of the story begun when Walmart and other megastores began their rapid spread. Amazon is indeed the latest link in a chain of threats to the American retail small business, from shopping malls to chain megastores to online e-commerce giants, each acting in their own pernicious way to destroy the American downtown.

Yet Amazon is more dangerous than Walmart because it’s so much bigger, and it has its hands in so many more businessesses. Amazon Web Services is a cloud computing system that provides the data infrastructure for much of the Internet, from government servers to Netflix. It’s near impossible for anyone to use the Internet without Amazon’s silent participation. This alone means Amazon has a gigantic impact on everyday life. Beyond that, Amazon’s massive portfolio of companies and products mean Amazon has a hand in every Ring doorbell, every Whole Foods grocery purchase, every Audible audiobook, every Goodreads review, every article in the Washington Post, every shoe from Zappos, every stream on Twitch, plus many online advertisements and smart speakers and e-readers and TV shows. Amazon has even built its own nationwide delivery network; rather than work with USPS, UPS, and Fedex, Amazon has fashioned its own private version from the ground up, and the results are dangerous.

Amazon executives regularly downplay Amazon’s size; in a PBS Frontline documentary Amazon CEO of Worldwide Commerce Jeff Wilke claims, “We’re 1% of the retail sales in the world, about.”1 But what percentage of eBook sales does Amazon control? Of cloud hosting? Of online advertising? Of lobbying? Of groceries? Of online shoe sales? Of online book sales? A single company having a stake in so many different aspects of the market is dangerous. Through its Amazon Marketplace platform, Amazon acts as host for a third-party marketplace and a competitor on that platform. Basically, Amazon is a referee and a player in the same game, and the game is the world’s largest online retail marketplace. Walmart is still a threat to American small businesses, but Walmart never did quite so much. It’s possible to argue, even, that Walmart is now trying to catch up to Amazon. Walmart is now just one of many large corporations trying to adapt to the Amazon world by taking pages from Amazon’s playbook.

Amazon’s impact is huge. One of the world’s most valuable companies, it has caused havoc in every industry it has touched. My industry, books, happens to be the first industry at which Amazon took aim. Everybody in the book business feels Amazon’s might. Booksellers feel it the most in this way: it is possible to buy the latest bestseller on Amazon for less than the wholesale price my bookstore pays. Let that sink in. A book that costs me $14 to put on my shelves could be for sale to customers on Amazon for $10. It’s stunning: you can buy a book below cost and have it at your door tomorrow with free shipping. That fact alone underlies everything I do at The Raven. Even more, the cheapness of Amazon’s books serves to diminish the value of all books, regardless of where they’re sold.

It’s so easy to buy things on Amazon, and millions of people know it. Amazon’s smiling boxes sprinkle stoops across the world. Their smiling vans double park on blocks in countless cities and their smiling semis haul down countless interstates. The massive shipping network required to get that box to you so cheap and so fast can be a strain on the environment, not to mention unsafe to its drivers and customers. The warehouses that feed that shipping network have injury rates high above industry average and are highly susceptible to outbreaks of deadly diseases like COVID-19. Ring home cameras make it far too easy to feed video data to police departments. Amazon Web Services earns lots of money, including from violent agencies like ICE. Amazon makes things easy; they don’t necessarily make them right.

Some may try to attribute the explosion of Amazon’s reach to Jeff Bezos’s business brilliance. However, even if Bezos had the right idea at the right time...

Table of contents

• How to Resist Amazon and Why