8 ms·

Seriously, this is the responsibility consumers have in a free market. If there's behavior you don't like, move on. You don't get to complain about bad actors w

Seriously, this is the responsibility consumers have in a free market. If there's behavior you don't like, move on. You don't get to complain about bad actors when you're literally keeping them in business.

lenticular 8y ago
Collective action is essentially impossible among consumers though. Boycotts essentially never work. Not only that, but who are you going to use instead of instacart: Amazon Fresh? Uber? Or will you drive yourself to the store and buy it from minimum wage employees who work unstable hours? Also, what do you think the working conditions were like for whoever picked that asparagus?
- rubbingalcohol 8y ago
  At least there are federal protections for employees. Companies that offset their operating costs onto an on-demand contract labor force are in a really exploitative gray area. I disagree that collective action is impossible. Consumers become aware of problems, eg. high fructose corn syrup, and act accordingly, eg. buying less sugary junk. Cultural change is slow-moving but it starts with people giving a shit.
  - lenticular 8y ago
    The corn syrup example doesn't really work here. People make decisions with their money, and those decisions are primarily based on self interest. Not becoming diabetic is very much in folks' self-interest. That underlies people not wanting foods with corn syrup. It has nothing to do with concerns about wasteful corn subsidies or deceptive food practices.
  - FireBeyond 8y ago
    > Consumers become aware of problems, eg. high fructose corn syrup, and act accordingly, eg. buying less sugary junk. Are we actually doing that? I've seen / heard little evidence that our trend on sugar is moving in a healthy direction, at least in the US.
- aqme28 8y ago
  >Boycotts essentially never work Is this true?
  - roywiggins 8y ago
    Some are, but they have to be pretty overwhelmingly organized. https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-boycotts-history-20180228-htmlstory.html https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-boycotts-history-201802...
  - berbec 8y ago
    No, this is not true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgomery_bus_boycott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgomery_bus_boycott
    - lenticular 8y ago
      "Essentially" is the operative word here. The Montgomery bus boycott was a small, geographically limited boycott at just the right time for an issue that was incredibly important personally to the boycotters. The boycotters were directly being very negatively affected by the bus segregation, thus they had much more of a personal stake than an upper-middle class individual who feels a pang of guilt after taking an Uber. Go ahead, try to organize a boycott. I'll support it. I guarantee you it won't go anywhere, though.
    - tivert 8y ago
      The consumer collective-action economic effects of that boycott changed nothing. What did change things was the government action it triggered: > Pressure increased across the country. The related civil suit was heard in federal district court and, on June 4, 1956, the court ruled in Browder v. Gayle (1956) that Alabama's racial segregation laws for buses were unconstitutional. As the state appealed the decision, the boycott continued. The case moved on to the United States Supreme Court. On November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court upheld the district court's ruling, ruling that segregation on public buses and transportation was against the law.
      - 8y ago
- ohithereyou 8y ago
  >Collective action is essentially impossible among consumers though. It's not possible with an attitude like that. There is no government action that is forcing you to buy from Instacart. >Boycotts essentially never work. Tell that to Birmingham, Alabama. >Not only that, but who are you going to use instead of instacart: Amazon Fresh? Uber? Or will you drive yourself to the store and buy it from minimum wage employees who work unstable hours? Whataboutism and false dichotomy. There are many places that sell groceries that pay their workers more than minimum wage. Do a little research and give them your business. Or start your own grocery story if there's really a demand for something like this. >Also, what do you think the working conditions were like for whoever picked that asparagus? We can be concerned about more than one thing at a time.
  - crawfordcomeaux 8y ago
    I'm grateful for your response. I especially appreciate the "We can be concerned about more than one thing at a time." That's useful language I can use in the future. I'm wondering what could be possible if a group of people (say, some in prison?) started saying "We peacefully revoke consent to be governed this way and request immediate transformative justice in the form of a justice system that allows us to craft our own path to recover from the wounds inflicted upon us by ourselves, our family, and our society free from imprisonment."
    - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
      Ok, I’ll be that guy... here we go: The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it's very brightly colored, and it's very loud, and it's fun for a while. Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, "Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?" And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, "Hey, don't worry; don't be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride." And we … kill those people. "Shut him up! I've got a lot invested in this ride, shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry, look at my big bank account, and my family. This has to be real." It's just a ride. But we always kill the good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok … But it doesn't matter, because it's just a ride. And we can change it any time we want. It's only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money. Just a simple choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one. Here's what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.
- oarsinsync 8y ago
  Your comment suggests that it's ok to directly support bad businesses because you're probably also indirectly supporting bad businesses. If that's not what you meant, can you please clarify?
  - lenticular 8y ago
    Moreso that participating in modern society is impossible without doing business with companies who have unsavory labor and environmental practices. I'm not commenting on morality. Expecting some sort of change to come from spontaneous, collective consumer action is ridiculous. This is especially true when most consumers in America are not on financially stable ground themselves, and can't afford to spend more money or time to assuage their guilt.
    - benj111 8y ago
      "and can't afford to spend more money" These things never start from the poorest doing these things though. They start with the middle and upper classes, because the do have the money, and companies chase that money. Yes if everyone rolled over and did nothing, instcart would win. What percentage of that richer demographic would have to switch to a competitor for it to start hurting? A demographic that includes journalists and 'influencers', that are willing and able to pay more, and are able to tell the world about it?
    - oarsinsync 8y ago
      > Expecting some sort of change to come from spontaneous, collective consumer action is ridiculous. Does that mean you believe that collective consumer action had absolutely nothing to do with Travis no longer remaining as CEO of Uber?
      - lenticular 8y ago
        That had more to do with fostering a workplace culture conducive to harassment and his opening of Uber to massive legal liability from Waymo. Uber's investors forced him out, not consumers. Investors have power because there are generally few of them and they have a great deal of skin in the game. Collective action is both easier and more incentivized in that case. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/21/technology/uber-ceo-travis-kalanick.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/21/technology/uber-ceo-travi...
- nradov 8y ago
  Most employees of large grocery stores are paid significantly more than minimum wage.
- techsupporter 8y ago
  > Or will you drive yourself to the store and buy it from minimum wage employees who work unstable hours? No, I will get on a bus operated by union-organized employees and travel to a grocery store where employees are also covered by a union and inside the city limits of a city with a reasonable minimum wage and scheduling rules inside a state with mandated paid sick leave. While there, I will likely pay a bit more than if outside those borders but the people involved in the process will be getting treated minimally well. People crap on what cities like Seattle and states like Washington are trying to do as “socialist” or “a nanny state,” but workers are humans who deserve to be treated well and “the market” seems terrible at that if left to its own devices.
  - nrook 8y ago
    Washington has no state income tax, which is why their attempts to fund basically any program always seem so out there. If they just taxed like normal states did, they wouldn't look either goofy or regressive every time they tried to raise money.
- watmough 8y ago
  Here in Texas, grocery store workers often start around $10 / hr. Borderline living wage, but a lot better than being exploited by some BS company like InstaCart.
- manicdee 8y ago
  Given the option between letting the trolley run over five people or taking action so the trolley only runs over three people, you chose letting the trolley kill five people.
jopsen 8y ago
No, this is why you have regulation, and need unions. Consumers have enough parameters to optimize for: price of groceries, cost of delivery, fair trade, availability of products, delivery speed, convenience, availability of delivery slots, the list is long. Consumers are relatively good at optimizing for cost, not perfect -- but asking for more than that is unrealistic.
- crawfordcomeaux 8y ago
  To be pedantically clear about what needs are vs strategies for meeting needs, this is why we need autonomy; unions are a strategy for achieving that. Learning to empower one's self is a skill we could benefit from teaching in society. Unfortunately, our primary education systems are not oriented toward teaching autonomy. They teach independence & compliance, which is false separation (since we're interdependent, not independent) and giving up power to others, respectively.
- hoorayimhelping 8y ago
  There has to be some HN version of Godwin's law involving Unions.
- sametmax 8y ago
  There is no democraty if the people don't exercice their power. Voting once for a group of people make it one day democraty, the rest of the year oligarchy. There is litterally no other way to have a democraty that to make your day to day actions matter. Each citizen has to have a life directed to create a society. Now I understand how hard it is. And I don't blame people for failing at it, me included. But as long as we label it as unrealistic, it stops all hope of progress.
  - RealityVoid 8y ago
    This kind of assumption (that you must optimize your behavior for common good) is unrealistic. Only "good people" will do so, and that caring will put them at a competitive disadvantage compared to people who simply don't care. No, regulation has the possibility of leveling the playing field and making everyone behave in a certain way, irrespective of how good or bad they are.
quink 8y ago
Consumers pay a tip, expecting it to go to staff members directly. This steals the tip back from the staff members, directly contrary to the customer’s expectation. If you change what’s essentially the dictionary definition of the product being sold, then I have a bridge to sell you. Except it’s really just a rock.
Sargos 8y ago
There's no alternative at least where I live. I either use their service or don't get the items (since the reason I'm using them is because getting them myself is a problem). A cash tip fixes this problem. I can't do anything about the business itself.
- Jolter 8y ago
  So before Instacart, you starved?
kaishiro 8y ago
Can I ask - and this isn't just me being glib because I want to believe what you say is possible - but can I ask if you know of any consumer collective actions in the past decade that have succeeded?
- BeetleB 8y ago
  Better yet - what percentage have succeeded?
- atom-morgan 8y ago
  Roku and Alex Jones just a week or two ago.
maxxxxx 8y ago
No, there need to be laws or regulations. even if some people watch these things and stop using the service most people don't know about the practices of a service. For most companies I deal with I have no idea if they are doing shady things or not and I generally don't bother checking.
james_s_tayler 8y ago
I think there is license to complain. You're upset that the thing that solves a nice pain point for you and is very useful is doing it in a way that you find disagreeable. You don't yet have an alternative or at least it will take some amount of time and effort to find one and make the switch. You are voicing your dissatisfaction and dissapointment in the hope that the situation will be rectified and you won't have to go through the process of switching because it might be expensive (in some sense) to do so or there may be no alternative that you find compelling. It's a two way street. If the company refuses to change and it upsets you enough, you need to move on. If you voice loud enough complaints and there are enough of them then it may cause the company to change. Complaining is part of the mechanism that makes the system work.
matt4077 8y ago
It’s just that boycotts never work, could only ever work on consumer-facing companies, arbitrarily seek to punish the select few whose misdeeds become viral, etc. Remember United Airlines? Yeah, neither does anyone else. Exxon Mobile? You’d first have to find out their local brand name. Etc etc
celticninja 8y ago
you do get to complain actually, complain to your elected representative and get them to legislate against this sort of behaviour. It is the responsibility of the businesses in a free market to act responsibly, if they dont then regulation is the result. Funnily enough most companies will continue to do things considered immoral or unfair until they are regulated, many will spend the money that they have generated 'immorally' to lobby against regulation.
gshulegaard 8y ago
You would correct if this truly was a free market, but the viability of a free market is dependent on perfect competition where there are identical competing sellers readily available for consumers to "move on" to. No such market with perfect competition exists, which leads to market externalities and the need for outside forces to get involved to correct (such as regulation).
Myrmornis 8y ago
I know this sounds right to you and many people, but it's very flawed. The idea that everything will be fine if consumers in a free market use their purchasing power wisely and ethically is cant. A particularly ugly side of it is the tipping culture in the US, where Joe public gets to decide on how much waiting staff get paid according to their personal assessment of how good their waiting was. It's a fig-leaf over the society's love of controlling, criticizing and ordering others what to do.
Waterluvian 8y ago
I wonder if we can gamify this. Where your social media profile can display badges if you don't use various services. I imagine that's next to impossible.
- dwighttk 8y ago
  Virtue Signal Badges!
sayno3 8y ago
All you can do is complain until you get critical mass to move off the platform all at once in most cases. If I need to order something online without a physical address, do I have an option besides amazon or do I just go without and pay more for the same product? If I want to receive payments online do I use paypal or try and use something niche like bitcoin and have most customers move elsewhere? If I want free email do I use gmail or do I go with a service that is way less secure? It's a winner-take-all effect in an unrestrained market where the corporations have more power than the actual government. The only thing that has an effect is massive propaganda supported by large tribal groups, an individual is literally meaningless and in fact encouraged to slough off and die.
AlexandrB 8y ago
This narrative is fundamentally anti-democratic. "Vote with your dollars" means that those with the most disposable income get the most "votes". Meanwhile, the people most affected by these kinds of policies probably can't afford instacart in the first place and thus get no vote at all. In addition, it's difficult to have empathy for a situation you've never experienced yourself. For every ethical consumer who knows how shitty these jobs are and makes decisions on that basis, there are many who either either unaware, don't think too much about it, or don't care because of the companion narrative of "they knew what they were signing up for". In the final analysis, "vote with your dollars" often ends up being a defence of the status-quo against any labor regulation that might have real teeth and help people get paid a fair wage.
dang 8y ago
We detached this generic ideological subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19030072 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19030072 and marked it off-topic.
- atom-morgan 8y ago
  This is much more substantive than a lot of other comments in that thread. How often does this "detaching" happen on HN? Edit: Oh, YC backed Instacart. Got it :)
  - dang 8y ago
    Actually, we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is involved, even though (or rather because) it's the cheapest trick in the book to accuse us of otherwise. However, that doesn't mean we don't moderate at all. A generic ideological "yay markets" vs. "yay unions" tangent discussion quickly becomes predictable, tedious, and off topic. Marking it such has nothing particular to do with YC or Instacart. It's trivial to verify that this is standard HN moderation: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20generic%20ideological https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=by:dang%20generic%20tangents https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

lenticular 8y ago

Collective action is essentially impossible among consumers though. Boycotts essentially never work. Not only that, but who are you going to use instead of instacart: Amazon Fresh? Uber? Or will you drive yourself to the store and buy it from minimum wage employees who work unstable hours? Also, what do you think the working conditions were like for whoever picked that asparagus?

rubbingalcohol 8y ago
At least there are federal protections for employees. Companies that offset their operating costs onto an on-demand contract labor force are in a really exploitative gray area. I disagree that collective action is impossible. Consumers become aware of problems, eg. high fructose corn syrup, and act accordingly, eg. buying less sugary junk. Cultural change is slow-moving but it starts with people giving a shit.
- lenticular 8y ago
  The corn syrup example doesn't really work here. People make decisions with their money, and those decisions are primarily based on self interest. Not becoming diabetic is very much in folks' self-interest. That underlies people not wanting foods with corn syrup. It has nothing to do with concerns about wasteful corn subsidies or deceptive food practices.
- FireBeyond 8y ago
  > Consumers become aware of problems, eg. high fructose corn syrup, and act accordingly, eg. buying less sugary junk. Are we actually doing that? I've seen / heard little evidence that our trend on sugar is moving in a healthy direction, at least in the US.
aqme28 8y ago
>Boycotts essentially never work Is this true?
- roywiggins 8y ago
  Some are, but they have to be pretty overwhelmingly organized. https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-boycotts-history-20180228-htmlstory.html https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-boycotts-history-201802...
- berbec 8y ago
  No, this is not true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgomery_bus_boycott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgomery_bus_boycott
  - lenticular 8y ago
    "Essentially" is the operative word here. The Montgomery bus boycott was a small, geographically limited boycott at just the right time for an issue that was incredibly important personally to the boycotters. The boycotters were directly being very negatively affected by the bus segregation, thus they had much more of a personal stake than an upper-middle class individual who feels a pang of guilt after taking an Uber. Go ahead, try to organize a boycott. I'll support it. I guarantee you it won't go anywhere, though.
  - tivert 8y ago
    The consumer collective-action economic effects of that boycott changed nothing. What did change things was the government action it triggered: > Pressure increased across the country. The related civil suit was heard in federal district court and, on June 4, 1956, the court ruled in Browder v. Gayle (1956) that Alabama's racial segregation laws for buses were unconstitutional. As the state appealed the decision, the boycott continued. The case moved on to the United States Supreme Court. On November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court upheld the district court's ruling, ruling that segregation on public buses and transportation was against the law.
    - 8y ago
ohithereyou 8y ago
>Collective action is essentially impossible among consumers though. It's not possible with an attitude like that. There is no government action that is forcing you to buy from Instacart. >Boycotts essentially never work. Tell that to Birmingham, Alabama. >Not only that, but who are you going to use instead of instacart: Amazon Fresh? Uber? Or will you drive yourself to the store and buy it from minimum wage employees who work unstable hours? Whataboutism and false dichotomy. There are many places that sell groceries that pay their workers more than minimum wage. Do a little research and give them your business. Or start your own grocery story if there's really a demand for something like this. >Also, what do you think the working conditions were like for whoever picked that asparagus? We can be concerned about more than one thing at a time.
- crawfordcomeaux 8y ago
  I'm grateful for your response. I especially appreciate the "We can be concerned about more than one thing at a time." That's useful language I can use in the future. I'm wondering what could be possible if a group of people (say, some in prison?) started saying "We peacefully revoke consent to be governed this way and request immediate transformative justice in the form of a justice system that allows us to craft our own path to recover from the wounds inflicted upon us by ourselves, our family, and our society free from imprisonment."
  - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
    Ok, I’ll be that guy... here we go: The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it's very brightly colored, and it's very loud, and it's fun for a while. Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, "Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?" And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, "Hey, don't worry; don't be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride." And we … kill those people. "Shut him up! I've got a lot invested in this ride, shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry, look at my big bank account, and my family. This has to be real." It's just a ride. But we always kill the good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok … But it doesn't matter, because it's just a ride. And we can change it any time we want. It's only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money. Just a simple choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one. Here's what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.
oarsinsync 8y ago
Your comment suggests that it's ok to directly support bad businesses because you're probably also indirectly supporting bad businesses. If that's not what you meant, can you please clarify?
- lenticular 8y ago
  Moreso that participating in modern society is impossible without doing business with companies who have unsavory labor and environmental practices. I'm not commenting on morality. Expecting some sort of change to come from spontaneous, collective consumer action is ridiculous. This is especially true when most consumers in America are not on financially stable ground themselves, and can't afford to spend more money or time to assuage their guilt.
  - benj111 8y ago
    "and can't afford to spend more money" These things never start from the poorest doing these things though. They start with the middle and upper classes, because the do have the money, and companies chase that money. Yes if everyone rolled over and did nothing, instcart would win. What percentage of that richer demographic would have to switch to a competitor for it to start hurting? A demographic that includes journalists and 'influencers', that are willing and able to pay more, and are able to tell the world about it?
  - oarsinsync 8y ago
    > Expecting some sort of change to come from spontaneous, collective consumer action is ridiculous. Does that mean you believe that collective consumer action had absolutely nothing to do with Travis no longer remaining as CEO of Uber?
    - lenticular 8y ago
      That had more to do with fostering a workplace culture conducive to harassment and his opening of Uber to massive legal liability from Waymo. Uber's investors forced him out, not consumers. Investors have power because there are generally few of them and they have a great deal of skin in the game. Collective action is both easier and more incentivized in that case. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/21/technology/uber-ceo-travis-kalanick.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/21/technology/uber-ceo-travi...
nradov 8y ago
Most employees of large grocery stores are paid significantly more than minimum wage.
techsupporter 8y ago
> Or will you drive yourself to the store and buy it from minimum wage employees who work unstable hours? No, I will get on a bus operated by union-organized employees and travel to a grocery store where employees are also covered by a union and inside the city limits of a city with a reasonable minimum wage and scheduling rules inside a state with mandated paid sick leave. While there, I will likely pay a bit more than if outside those borders but the people involved in the process will be getting treated minimally well. People crap on what cities like Seattle and states like Washington are trying to do as “socialist” or “a nanny state,” but workers are humans who deserve to be treated well and “the market” seems terrible at that if left to its own devices.
- nrook 8y ago
  Washington has no state income tax, which is why their attempts to fund basically any program always seem so out there. If they just taxed like normal states did, they wouldn't look either goofy or regressive every time they tried to raise money.
watmough 8y ago
Here in Texas, grocery store workers often start around $10 / hr. Borderline living wage, but a lot better than being exploited by some BS company like InstaCart.
manicdee 8y ago
Given the option between letting the trolley run over five people or taking action so the trolley only runs over three people, you chose letting the trolley kill five people.

jopsen 8y ago

No, this is why you have regulation, and need unions. Consumers have enough parameters to optimize for: price of groceries, cost of delivery, fair trade, availability of products, delivery speed, convenience, availability of delivery slots, the list is long. Consumers are relatively good at optimizing for cost, not perfect -- but asking for more than that is unrealistic.

crawfordcomeaux 8y ago
To be pedantically clear about what needs are vs strategies for meeting needs, this is why we need autonomy; unions are a strategy for achieving that. Learning to empower one's self is a skill we could benefit from teaching in society. Unfortunately, our primary education systems are not oriented toward teaching autonomy. They teach independence & compliance, which is false separation (since we're interdependent, not independent) and giving up power to others, respectively.
hoorayimhelping 8y ago
There has to be some HN version of Godwin's law involving Unions.
sametmax 8y ago
There is no democraty if the people don't exercice their power. Voting once for a group of people make it one day democraty, the rest of the year oligarchy. There is litterally no other way to have a democraty that to make your day to day actions matter. Each citizen has to have a life directed to create a society. Now I understand how hard it is. And I don't blame people for failing at it, me included. But as long as we label it as unrealistic, it stops all hope of progress.
- RealityVoid 8y ago
  This kind of assumption (that you must optimize your behavior for common good) is unrealistic. Only "good people" will do so, and that caring will put them at a competitive disadvantage compared to people who simply don't care. No, regulation has the possibility of leveling the playing field and making everyone behave in a certain way, irrespective of how good or bad they are.

quink 8y ago

Consumers pay a tip, expecting it to go to staff members directly. This steals the tip back from the staff members, directly contrary to the customer’s expectation. If you change what’s essentially the dictionary definition of the product being sold, then I have a bridge to sell you. Except it’s really just a rock.

Sargos 8y ago

There's no alternative at least where I live. I either use their service or don't get the items (since the reason I'm using them is because getting them myself is a problem). A cash tip fixes this problem. I can't do anything about the business itself.

Jolter 8y ago
So before Instacart, you starved?

kaishiro 8y ago

Can I ask - and this isn't just me being glib because I want to believe what you say is possible - but can I ask if you know of any consumer collective actions in the past decade that have succeeded?

BeetleB 8y ago
Better yet - what percentage have succeeded?
atom-morgan 8y ago
Roku and Alex Jones just a week or two ago.

maxxxxx 8y ago

No, there need to be laws or regulations. even if some people watch these things and stop using the service most people don't know about the practices of a service. For most companies I deal with I have no idea if they are doing shady things or not and I generally don't bother checking.

james_s_tayler 8y ago

I think there is license to complain. You're upset that the thing that solves a nice pain point for you and is very useful is doing it in a way that you find disagreeable. You don't yet have an alternative or at least it will take some amount of time and effort to find one and make the switch. You are voicing your dissatisfaction and dissapointment in the hope that the situation will be rectified and you won't have to go through the process of switching because it might be expensive (in some sense) to do so or there may be no alternative that you find compelling. It's a two way street. If the company refuses to change and it upsets you enough, you need to move on. If you voice loud enough complaints and there are enough of them then it may cause the company to change. Complaining is part of the mechanism that makes the system work.

matt4077 8y ago

It’s just that boycotts never work, could only ever work on consumer-facing companies, arbitrarily seek to punish the select few whose misdeeds become viral, etc. Remember United Airlines? Yeah, neither does anyone else. Exxon Mobile? You’d first have to find out their local brand name. Etc etc

celticninja 8y ago

you do get to complain actually, complain to your elected representative and get them to legislate against this sort of behaviour. It is the responsibility of the businesses in a free market to act responsibly, if they dont then regulation is the result. Funnily enough most companies will continue to do things considered immoral or unfair until they are regulated, many will spend the money that they have generated 'immorally' to lobby against regulation.

gshulegaard 8y ago

You would correct if this truly was a free market, but the viability of a free market is dependent on perfect competition where there are identical competing sellers readily available for consumers to "move on" to. No such market with perfect competition exists, which leads to market externalities and the need for outside forces to get involved to correct (such as regulation).

Myrmornis 8y ago

I know this sounds right to you and many people, but it's very flawed. The idea that everything will be fine if consumers in a free market use their purchasing power wisely and ethically is cant. A particularly ugly side of it is the tipping culture in the US, where Joe public gets to decide on how much waiting staff get paid according to their personal assessment of how good their waiting was. It's a fig-leaf over the society's love of controlling, criticizing and ordering others what to do.

Waterluvian 8y ago

I wonder if we can gamify this. Where your social media profile can display badges if you don't use various services. I imagine that's next to impossible.

dwighttk 8y ago
Virtue Signal Badges!

sayno3 8y ago

All you can do is complain until you get critical mass to move off the platform all at once in most cases. If I need to order something online without a physical address, do I have an option besides amazon or do I just go without and pay more for the same product? If I want to receive payments online do I use paypal or try and use something niche like bitcoin and have most customers move elsewhere? If I want free email do I use gmail or do I go with a service that is way less secure? It's a winner-take-all effect in an unrestrained market where the corporations have more power than the actual government. The only thing that has an effect is massive propaganda supported by large tribal groups, an individual is literally meaningless and in fact encouraged to slough off and die.

AlexandrB 8y ago

This narrative is fundamentally anti-democratic. "Vote with your dollars" means that those with the most disposable income get the most "votes". Meanwhile, the people most affected by these kinds of policies probably can't afford instacart in the first place and thus get no vote at all. In addition, it's difficult to have empathy for a situation you've never experienced yourself. For every ethical consumer who knows how shitty these jobs are and makes decisions on that basis, there are many who either either unaware, don't think too much about it, or don't care because of the companion narrative of "they knew what they were signing up for". In the final analysis, "vote with your dollars" often ends up being a defence of the status-quo against any labor regulation that might have real teeth and help people get paid a fair wage.

dang 8y ago

We detached this generic ideological subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19030072 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19030072 and marked it off-topic.

atom-morgan 8y ago
This is much more substantive than a lot of other comments in that thread. How often does this "detaching" happen on HN? Edit: Oh, YC backed Instacart. Got it :)
- dang 8y ago
  Actually, we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is involved, even though (or rather because) it's the cheapest trick in the book to accuse us of otherwise. However, that doesn't mean we don't moderate at all. A generic ideological "yay markets" vs. "yay unions" tangent discussion quickly becomes predictable, tedious, and off topic. Marking it such has nothing particular to do with YC or Instacart. It's trivial to verify that this is standard HN moderation: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20generic%20ideological https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=by:dang%20generic%20tangents https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...