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I've had this exact sentiment for many years but... what are we supporting really? Is it because you want a distributed network of inventory across the country

• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• tsujamin 2y ago
  Perhaps it’s out of fear of what Amazon’s market and price-setting power would be post-local stores
  • roenxi 2y ago
    Amazon doesn't have any extra power post-local stores. If Amazon ups their prices then the local stores reappear. In some weird future where Amazon completely obliterates small businesses it might take a few years, but it'd take more than a few years of good prices before that from Amazon to get to that state. The manufacturers always have strong incentives to defect from an AWS dominated equilibrium. They want middleman prices to be low, it means they move more goods and make more money. Although I should stress I like the idea of buying local. If the money goes off to some exotic foreign place it is less likely that I will get my hands on it later on. Better to live in a wealthy community than a poor one, etc. Local capital is local prosperity.
    • themaninthedark 2y ago
      Local stores don't just reappear. It takes initial capital to purchase stock, rent building and hire employees. It takes knowing what market segment you are selling to to know what to stock. It takes business connections to but the stock.
• lupusreal 2y ago
  When you spend money at businesses which are owned by people that live in your community, more of that money continues to circulate in your area. It's better for the local economy, if only marginally, and therefore better for you. This is more important for businesses that produce and capture a larger amount of value, like locally owned restaurants vs corporate owned chains, but any little bit helps at least a little. (Of course if you're a rootless corporate mercenary who goes wherever work takes you, with no long-term stake in the place you live, then it doesn't matter at all.)
  • vasco 2y ago
    This is an interesting take. I'm not sure it's true but I will look it up. My knee-jerk reaction is that most large purchases already siphon your money away (home, car, travel), and overthinking where to buy a random small object for the house makes no difference, but I hadn't considered the locality of money circulation!
    • lupusreal 2y ago
      Honestly it's interesting to me that this is a novel take to you. I believe it is a generally understood, if not acted on, principle. Money sent off to Detroit or Japan for your car is as good as lost to your community, but as I said even a small amount of money spent locally will help your local community a small amount, which is more than none. Even eating at a locally owned McDonald's franchise is slightly better than eating at a corporate owned store. That difference is probably too small to be worth looking up who owns a McDonalds, but if the choice is between McDonalds or some local diner then it doesn't require any time spent looking it up.
      • toyg 2y ago
        > it is a generally understood, if not acted on, principle I think you'd be surprised to realize how much that's not actually the case. If you google the "Preston model", you'll find a lot of material waxing lyrical about the government of a lone city in England that actually dared to follow that principle in their procurement strategies. They are doing well, but the fact that it feels revolutionary for mainstream sensibilities shows that those principles are still very unknown to most. (I should add: the principle of locality is not always a good thing, because there are scoundrels everywhere. Again in England, the regeneration of massive swaths of land previously used for steelmaking is being done through well-connected local businessmen and corrupted politicians, and it is a shameful rip-off for the taxpayer. If a national government had done that, the relevant minister would have faced the sack; but it's ”old boys” from the area, the national press is not interested, and so it's just business as usual.)
• vouaobrasil 2y ago
  What you are supporting is local sustainability. The world would be better off with less global trade and more local productions. Local productions means a stronger community and more visibility for business practices, because it's more sustainable. If a global business decides to just toss all the plastic it uses it in its backyard you'll never notice because it's 2000 miles away. If Amazon decides to treat their workers unfairly, you'll never notice. But you'll notice if a local business does it because you'll be walking in there every day. There's a level of accountability.
  • vasco 2y ago
    In my grandpa's village everything was local production and commerce but they all lived way worse than me and my friends that get paid through remote companies and spend our money online. It's incredibly unclear to me why a super poor and undeveloped local economy is better than a specialized globalized one. In my country there was a dictatorship with protectionism and when we opened things got way better, not worse. Regarding me not noticing crimes, I think we have police and regulations for that.
    • vouaobrasil 2y ago
      > In my grandpa's village everything was local production and commerce but they all lived way worse than me and my friends that get paid through remote companies and spend our money online. (1) That is because technology also takes away components of life that one can enjoy without being rich such as accesss to nature and local food production. (2) The global economy is only so "good" because it takes advantage of the commons in poorer places. We simply should not have the capability to do that. You only benefit off the suffering of others.
      • graemep 2y ago
        The first point is true, but most people do not choose it. I do not think your second point stands. Almost the entire world is financially better off than it was in the past. Lots of third world economies are visibly richer than they were a few decades ago. Whose suffering are they benefitting from?
• akira2501 2y ago
  > is doing a societal good by parking money in inventory they brought near you? Yes. That generates sales taxes. That generates property taxes. That pays for insurance. That pays for upkeep which is hopefully provided by a local contractor. Where this cycle repeats. > and getting "too" rich? ie dislike of big corporations? Yes. The money actually doesn't bother me, it's the access to unrestrained political influence it buys you, and big corporations monopolize labor pools and result in worse outcomes for working conditions and wages. Where this story starts.
• _1tem 2y ago
  It's because the absolute centralization of business in one entity is almost indistinguishable from Communism. For now it may appear that Amazon is cheaper/more convenient, but in the long run this type of monopoly leads to worse products and services.
  • krapp 2y ago
    Under communism, workers own the means of production and all of the profit their labor creates. Centralizing business into a single private monopoly whose profit is entirely controlled by shareholders is the exact opposite of communism. You're correct that monopoly leads to a degradation of products and services, but that's a flaw in capitalism (specifically the myth of the self-regulating free market ideal that eschews proper regulation in favor of the "invisible hand.")
  • chgs 2y ago
    It’s all the downsides of communism, but non of the benefits.
    • sokoloff 2y ago
      "All the downsides"?! I find living in the US to be quite different from what I've seen of life depicted in current/past communist countries. It sure seems to me as if there were a few additional downsides in those communist countries that I don't see to anywhere near the same degree in the US.
• zmgsabst 2y ago
  I don’t think “efficiency” is the only priority. A few reasons: - market diversity matters, and we have a more functional market with many smaller actors - similarly, a smaller local actor is more accountable for their behavior - efficiency comes mostly from cutting things, some of which mattered (eg, individual buyers at companies do more due diligence on the product than Amazon) - it’s better that every community have a local moderately rich person than one super rich person nationally, eg, in terms of charity to your community - politics remains local and hence tractable - smaller organizations have less of a “frozen middle”, which creates numerous problems with national scale organizations There’s probably more reasons if I really stopped to think about it.
• pkaeding 2y ago
  I do it to try to keep the money flowing around in my local community.
• aczerepinski 2y ago
  For me it’s that last one and also wanting more of my money to flow through my community. I don’t want to live in a world where 10 trillionaires control everything. I already tried to avoid Amazon but Bezos blocking the Post from endorsing a political candidate as we descend into extreme oligarchy was the last straw.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• everyone 2y ago
  It's basic ethics. Amazon are an evil corp, vote with your wallet and don't support them.
• rainsford 2y ago
  I found myself gravitating back to local stores after years of buying essentially everything on Amazon because local stores at least to some degree curate their inventory while Amazon increasingly does not. If you're looking for a specific product that doesn't matter as much (although Amazon also has counterfeiting problems). But if you're just looking to browse what's available in a certain category of product, Amazon is nearly unusable. You'll almost certainly find dozens of Chinese companies with randomly generated names selling what are essentially copies of the same product with no good way to pick one or even tell if they're any good (reviews being basically useless on Amazon these days). Because they don't have the same unlimited inventory capacity, local stores have to put at least some effort into selling products with some base level of quality and focusing on the products most likely to sell in each category. Local stores are by no means perfect here, but they're vastly better than Amazon in this regard. And it's especially important because finding good independent product reviews on the internet these days is also a challenge, and even where they exist they're not reviewing whatever no-name Chinese brand Amazon is selling anyways.
  • macNchz 2y ago
    It has been surprising to me for years that people put up with this, I find it really terrible as a shopping experience. Like shopping in the worst dollar store you’ve ever been in that’s also the size of a city and loaded with ads, except you can’t actually touch the products or smell the pervasive scent of cheap plastic while you browse. And they want you to pay a subscription! Shopping from retailers that employ actual buyers feels like a real upgrade.
  • justinrubek 2y ago
    While the junk item situation on amazon is real, I can't agree with this take about local stores. I find that local stores tend to have random crap that they want to sell rather than high-quality items.
    • crazygringo 2y ago
      This is my experience too. Local stores supply the cheapest crappiest version of something, but sell it at full price. This maximizes their profit. Online, I can actually see from the reviews which product is best, and buy that one. I spend the same, but get a much higher quality product. There are so many products only sold on Amazon that have 20,000 reviews because they're so much better than anything you can buy locally. I'm not talking the random Chinese brands with 50 reviews -- I'm talking the #1 best selling item in each product category.
• pyrale 2y ago
  > you just don't like someone doing it more efficiently For some value of "more efficiently". I mean if the most efficient way to work is to have delivery drivers pee in a bottle and warehouse workers develop RSIs, who am I to complain? Someone else's dignity is a small price to pay in order to get a 3% rebate on some commodity.
  • bdangubic 2y ago
    you have no issues using iphone/pixel/whatever you got based on how those are manufactured? you gonna buy your next phone from a local producer? At least in the USA we have some semblance of a Labor Department etc...
    • pyrale 2y ago
      Of course I have, but I also don’t have much choice. I mitigated it by having my first smartphone last 12 years, and I am now using the company-provided one in order to avoid a second buy. Not ideal, I’ll admit. I hope that, by the time I need a change, I can use a pinephone and convince my company that I only need a rsa otp or a yubikey. But is that really related to the thread? > At least in the USA we have some semblance of a Labor Department etc... Any local alternative to amazon will also have it, and less execs/lawyers whose only job is to make them irrelevant.
• dartos 2y ago
  One big reason is it keep money local. When you buy from a non local business, that money leaves your towns microeconomy. It’s part of why dollar stores destroy low income areas.
  • crazygringo 2y ago
    When I buy from Amazon, it pays local warehouse workers and local delivery people. Amazon is a big employer in a lot of local communities.
    • jjav 2y ago
      Yes, minimum wage jobs for the locals, most of the profit goes to Bezos. When you shop at locally-owned stores the money goes to a local small business owner, truly staying local. Look up how walmart used to destroy small town economies by bankrupting all the local businesses and converting all those previously middle-class shop owners into minimum wage jobs at walmart.
      • crazygringo 2y ago
        > most of the profit goes to Bezos. Incorrect. Bezos only owns 8.8% of Amazon. Most of the profit is distributed to a wide variety of shareholders in the form of rising share prices, reflected in things like retirement accounts. In other words, a lot of that profit goes to grandmas across the country with their money in a Vanguard retirement fund. Including grandmas in your local community. And you really think the local shopowner kept all the profit in their community? E.g. they didn't send their kids to college in another state? Or build a house with materials sourced from all over the country? It's a whole lot more complicated than you seem to think.
        • dartos 2y ago
          > And you really think the local shopowner kept all the profit in their community? E.g. they didn't send their kids to college in another state? Imagine spending money and having that money allow people in your local community to afford college. Then imagine thinking that’s a bad thing. Obviously it’s complicated, but the gist is longer money stays in a local area, the better off that area is going to be. It’s better for money to leave my town so that my neighbor’s kid could go to college than it is for me to get two day shipping on a new game console. A pathological case could be made that every dollar that you keep in town is a dollar someone spends outside of the town. That’s a valid argument in theory, but in reality that doesn’t happen. People go to local businesses and spend money. Local bars, specialty markets, farmers markets, etc.
• nine_k 2y ago
  A hyper-efficient system is inherently fragile: if something happens to any part of it, it has a big ripple effect all over the place, because there's no slack anywhere. More resilient systems always have some redundancy that helps them cope in a case of failure. If you think about societally optimal setup, it likely should include a mix of systems, from very efficient to very resilient. Something about eggs and baskets.
• throw__away7391 2y ago
  This is an insightful breakdown, though I think it leaves out the option I would have chosen. A small business run by a human who is physically present is going to make different decisions that are better for the community. I have to say though I have evolved a bit in this perspective as I've come to realize that these small business owners can be every bit as greedy or even more. Especially there are a lot who are just fundamentally incompetent at business and try to make up the difference by extracting it from their employees, willfully ignoring labor laws in ways a large company would not dare. A large company is a big target surrounded by people who want a piece of the action and often must tread carefully as a result. I've personally never worked in such a position, but I have heard absolutely crazy stories from people who have, things like demanding that commission only sales people come in hours early to do unpaid work like cleaning unrelated to their job title, "fining" people $75 for checking their phone while "on the clock" (again in a commission only job), constantly helping themselves to their employees paycheck finding things to "charge" them for, and just generally being a menace and treating employees like they personally owned them. Their ego and sense of entitlement go completely wild. The owners I have known personally will brag about cheating on their taxes while railing against the government, running an atrociously inefficient business that they talk about as if it's some sort of charity. In many cities there's a whole good old boy network type system in place that's no less corrupt and ugly than whatever you want to say about companies like Amazon.
• jvanderbot 2y ago
  I used to work at Amazon. What you want to support are: - local retailers offer better jobs, and often better benefits. The work you do stocking at Menards is much better than sorting boxes at Amazon - support local repair vs repurchasing. This cuts down on the upstream demand and does wonders for local small-business economies. And again, provides better jobs than sorting boxes. - Efficiency is great! But what is Amazon efficient at? They have maximized the speed and convenience of delivery. Once stated that way it's obvious there must be tradeoffs. One of those tradeoffs is the shit work. In one dist center, a guys entire job was to wheel odd shaped boxes from one side of a warehouse to another. Whenever you order a big or weirdly shaped box, that guy moved it. Even he hates that job. It's meaningless, non social, provides no transferrable skills. - ultimately what your parents were talking about is how one chooses to shape their local economy and jobs market. I want to buy from companies that I would want my friends and family to work for. But yeah, I buy from Amazon all the time too.
  • gruez 2y ago
    >- local retailers offer better jobs, and often better benefits. Is this backed by empirical evidence? I've also heard that small local companies have worse labor conditions, because they're small and fly under the radar compared to multinationals. One incident of an Amazon delivery driver peeing in bottles (even if they're technically working for a local subcontractor) is enough to show up on the New York Times. The same isn't going to be true for some local firm. Moreover, it's possible that "local retailers" targets a more upmarket segment compared to national chains. When I think "local retailers", I think small boutique shops in gentrifying neighborhoods. Obviously those stores will have better working conditions than Amazon, but it's not as if we got rid of Amazon, it'll get replaced by boutique shops, or that most people would be better served by them.
    • jvanderbot 2y ago
      I was wrong to imply "local" since that conjures images of things like a main street one window shop with 3 employees. Obv their benefits are lower. I had in my head things like Target, Best Buy, or more social, occasional-customer-interaction-based work. It's just those mega corps are local. Also the large retailers like Home Depot, Menards, etc. At least those aren't as soulless and monotonous. By "local" I meant "brick and mortar" etc. But I'm out of the edit window so, best to ignore it.
• psychoslave 2y ago
  >Is it because you just don't like someone doing it more efficiently and getting "too" rich? ie dislike of big corporations? That’s such an odd way to paint it. When people live in a system with millions of quettallionaires and the bilion left are mere millionaires where 1 unit of currency is enough to buy the best meal in town with all towns in the world equally provided in services, the system won’t see much strikes happening soon. When people live in a system where a small cake is growing at a slow rate and a few hundreds people are cornering always more of it at an accelerating rate, all the more when the extraction rate of the cake is known to exceed the cake regeneration rate, the system is well on its road for repeated strikes or even bloody social movements. Ok, these allegories are two possible points in a spectrum. Which scenario is most likely to be closest to the world as its perceived by most people out there? People don’t love or hate big corporations and riches out of the blue. If there are given room out of the vivid feeling that their life is a day to day struggle to survive, most people can perfectly demonstrate nuances in their judgment.
• Symbiote 2y ago
  There are many replies already, but one point that hasn't been mentioned: The local store pays their taxes — local and national taxes. Amazon is big enough to evade these, or where possible, pay small amounts only in Luxembourg, Delaware etc.
  • gruez 2y ago
    Amazon pays sales taxes, which makes up a big chunk of the local business' tax burden anyways. Moreover, the retail division Amazon barely makes any money, so any taxes on profit going to delaware or whatever is probably minimal (as % of your spend).
    • Symbiote 2y ago
      > Moreover, the retail division Amazon barely makes any money That is exactly the kind of creative accounting unavailable to a small business.
    • themaninthedark 2y ago
      If the retail division of Amazon barely makes any money, why hasn't it been cut or spun off so that the company can concentrate on the things that it is really good at and are more profitable?
• beowulfey 2y ago
  It's called "community" and our generation has no idea what that word means or why there is value to it.
• partytax 2y ago
  On the localist/resilient extreme in a developing world village you have the problems of: * Inefficiency * Lack of options * Stupid business practices uncritically continued See https://asteriskmag.com/issues/07/want-growth-kill-small-businesses https://asteriskmag.com/issues/07/want-growth-kill-small-bus... On the globalist/efficient extreme in the USA, for example, you have the problems of: * Economic dependence on large, national players that can leave at any time * Business proprietors feel no social responsibility to your community because they do not live there and interact with locals * Little power in deciding what products businesses offer * Profits enriching another place rather than your own place I don't want either of these.
• archagon 2y ago
  Given that Bezos has announced plans to donate $1M to Trump’s inaugural fund, supporting local businesses helps keep money out of the hands of fascists.