In Part 1, back in May, I suggested that the corporate economy owes its imperial powers not to some “Divine Right of Corporations” but to the money we spend to buy its products. Global corporations rule the world on our behalf, exploiting its labor and resources to supply our needs, wishes, and whims. But like the 17th-century European kings who chartered the first modern corporations, we have lost control of the “Megamachine” that is supposed to serve us. It’s time to reclaim our sovereignty.

The price we pay for anything from a toy car to a Tesla includes the cost of raw materials, manufacturing and shipping, the overhead costs of wholesale and retail, the cost of labor, and the profit margin each company in the supply chain tacks on.

But if every link in that chain represents ruined land, polluted air, contaminated water, underpaid workers, cancers, asthma, malnutrition, Third World dictators, floods, droughts, wildfires and hurricanes – those “externalized costs” the Machine routinely dumps on the public – then we are not just passive consumers, but unwitting accomplices to a corporate crime spree. In effect, by paying less than the full social and environmental “cost of goods,” we are accepting a cut of the loot in return for averting our eyes.

Not that we always have a choice. But whenever we can afford it, we can align our purchasing power with our personal ethics. Sometimes we can even join others in an organized campaign, refusing to profit from a particular corporate crime – a boycott.

Boycotts have played a crucial role in the annals of nonviolent social change. Gandhi’s boycott of British salt, the Montgomery bus boycott of 1956, the United Farm Workers’ boycott of grapes and lettuce in the 1970s, and the international boycott of South Africa that helped bring down apartheid are all well-known – so well-known that we easily forget how powerful it can be to “vote with our dollars” in a coordinated voting bloc.

More recent and less well-known is the tomato boycott organized by Florida’s Coalition of Immokalee Workers back in the 1990s to raise the pay of tomato pickers by a modest amount. The campaign targeted fast-food and supermarket chains, debunking their claim that they had no control over the wages paid by their suppliers. In 2011 it succeeded in establishing the Fair Food Program, a partnership between growers who pay a decent wage and buyers who pledge to buy from them. The major fast food chains and most supermarkets are all on board; Publix, Kroger and Trader Joe’s are still holding out.

But a boycott is not just a political tactic to leverage mass consumer pressure. As I explained in Part 1, it can simply be a personal expression of values, a one-person protest. The examples I gave were oil companies. But I also boycott another company that sells a luxury item, rather than a necessity like gasoline. I’m talking about Amazon – the world’s premier purveyor of sheer convenience.

How Much Is Convenience Really Worth?

During my twenty years in the book business, starting around the time Jeff Bezos launched Amazon.com, I witnessed first-hand his aggressive strategy to capture market-share in my industry. I didn’t yet realize his game plan was to intentionally put independent booksellers out of business, followed by chain stores like Borders, then wholesalers like the company I worked for. Nor did I realize what I was watching was a real-time preview of the future.

Today Amazon sells over half the books sold in the U.S., and 83% of the ebooks. This gives it unprecedented power over the spread of ideas. The company can control the rank of a particular book in your search results, making it effectively disappear. As an author, I find Bezos’s business model so repellent that I not only refuse to shop at Amazon, but will not sell my books there or use its print-on-demand service to publish them.

But Amazon’s goals now extend far beyond books to encompass virtually every kind of product made. “One of every two dollars Americans spend online now goes to Amazon,” David Dayen wrote in In These Times, as far back as 2019. “But to think of Amazon as a retailer is to miss the true nature of this company. Amazon wants to control the underlying infrastructure of commerce.” Aiming to dominate not just markets but the entire global economy, the company deliberately loses money on sales in order to undercut competitors. This strategy sends Amazon stock soaring even as profits lag – and of course Bezos, the world’s second-richest man, owns plenty of stock.

At least 60% of Amazon’s sales now come from its third-party partners, a far more profitable game than marketing its own products. Third-party retailers pay “rent” for their niche on the website, astronomical fees for Amazon’s warehouse and shipping services, and what amounts to protection-racket rates for their position in the search results. Any attempt to recover those costs through sales outside Amazon are promptly punished by banishment, and in today’s market no one can afford to be exiled from Amazon.

Amazon’s monolithic presence on the internet allows it to gradually tighten its stranglehold on this in-house competition. The company monitors all third-party sales – then uses the data to cut them out of the market. In a 2018 interview for The Sun, Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance described how Amazon tracks what sells fastest and creates an Amazon-branded clone. “It’s copying what other companies are selling and then giving its own products top billing in its search results,” Mitchell told interviewer Tracy Frisch.

Does Jeff Bezos Really Need My Money?

The results out in the brick-and-mortar world are scary. One by one local malls – which once decimated downtown shopping districts as the suburbs spread – are losing their big department stores; the reduced foot traffic then kills off smaller stores. Dying malls now litter the landscape between the dead downtowns. Local economies and tax bases sag as revenues are diverted to boost Bezos’s stock value. Jobs and wages decline as retailers struggle to compete. “Amazon needs only about half as many workers to handle the same sales as a brick-and-mortar store,” Dayen writes. “For every one job that Amazon creates, two jobs at existing businesses are lost.”

And a job at Amazon is not like the ones it replaces. The work is grueling and turnover is high. Workers are constantly monitored to enforce work quotas. “Because the warehouses are so automated, the workers are in service to the machines, instead of the other way around,” says Mitchell. Delivery drivers “wear Amazon uniforms, use Amazon equipment and work out of Amazon facilities,” but are classed as independent contractors, Dayen adds, ineligible for benefits or Bezos’s much-touted $15 minimum wage. Despite the recent success of a union drive at a Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse, the company continues its aggressive union-busting tactics around the world.

This part of the business model operates behind the scenes, invisible to customers. You see only low prices, wide selection, and the near-instant gratification of one or two-day shipping. Over 60% of U.S. households are now Prime subscribers, which means their search for a needed item begins and ends at Amazon. But let the buyer beware: ​the company is compiling data about you in order to influence your future purchases. “Personalized pricing” allows it to adjust the price according to your prior history. A new facial-recognition system uses your phone or webcam to authenticate sales, but can also hike prices when you appear excited about a purchase.

Alexa, the company’s “virtual personal assistant,” will slyly recommend products you didn’t ask for, or suggest a recurring rather than one-time purchase. But Alexa also transmits everything it sees and hears to analysts at Amazon, ostensibly to “refine comprehension”; this surveillance data is integrated with tracking via the website and other “smart” products like Amazon’s Ring doorbell. Alexa now dominates the digital assistant arena with double the sales of all competitors combined.

Scariest of all, the over-the-top success of these innovations has Wal-Mart, Target, and other top competitors scrambling to duplicate them. But how can they keep up? Bezos’s tentacles have stretched into television and movies, video games, groceries, journalism, health care, fashion design, money-lending and digital payment. Amazon is edging into the competition between UPS, Fedex, and the Postal Service. Its facial-recognition system is now working for law enforcement. Its cloud-computing branch handles data storage for the Pentagon, the CIA, and the Israeli military.

So what’s the alternative? If I absolutely have to buy something online, I look up the manufacturer and order it direct. If that costs more, it simply confirms that I’m not participating in Bezos’s smiley-faced swindle in exchange for a cut of his loot. If it costs too much, that means I – and most likely the planet – simply can’t afford it.

I’m not the only Don Quixote out there tilting at Amazon. “I am done giving my money away to this corporate entity,” Dana Rhea Elliott declared recently on Daily Kos. “Of course, it will take many people making the same decision I made to change things, but a good journey always begins with a single step. I have taken that step, and no matter how things play out in the future, the step I took is not a futile one.  It was the step I personally needed to take for the sake of my own moral compass.”

That makes two. Join us!

Note: These are my personal opinions and do not represent any organization I’m involved in. If my words resonate for you, please share widely. You can subscribe at StephenWing.com. Read previous installments of “Wingtips” here.