How not to give J3ff B3zos money: a repository of alternatives

Best online sites for books?
Music? (Bandcamp will feature prominently there I assume.)
Electronics and computer stuff?
Clothing, kitchenware, tools, every other kind of consumer product?
Groceries of all kinds? Vitamins and other supplements?

Subtopic: are w@lm@rt dotcom and other big etailers reasonable substitutes in the short term while looking for more ethical longterm alternatives?

Please post links and recs. (I looked for a similar thread to this and didn't see one right off.)

yes to this

question is ebay better or as bad? ive no idea

Linked to this many times:

https://bookoutlet.ca/

Great if you're Canadian/American--free shipping over $50--not sure about international. Estimating I've bought ~$1,000-1,500 worth of books from them the past five years.

following

If you are lucky enough to have a Habitat for Humanity Restore near you, check it out.

https://www.habitat.org/restores

They have a lot of brand new and used donated furniture, housewares, materials, some really nice stuff. And they will come pick up any furniture you want to donate for a tax deduction.

Right now the LA area stores have a whole bunch of these cute blue Great Jones Baking Company "Holy Sheet" pans for $7.50 - makes a cute holiday gift.

My wife is hesitant to cancel Prime because she read she'd lose all the Kindle books she's bought, but initial research says that since she bought the ebook outright rather than using Kindle Unlimited, she won't have a problem. Can anyone confirm that?

Nice, there's an HFH store near me, ty felicity.

what you must "not" do is take advantage of their magnanimous return policy by, for example, ordering laundry detergent/hand soap/shampoo, decanting it into your own bottles, refilling the original container with water, and returning it for a refund

you must also "never" do this with busted electronics or kitchen gadgets you find at the thrift store

my own personal goal with books going forward is going to be to spend the same amount, if not less, and buy them from brick and mortar stores nearby. And definitely use the library more. I know I’m privileged to have my favorite used bookstore in the world within quick driving distance as well as a couple of my favorite not-used bookstores a slightly longer drive away.

I’m pretty sure I don’t ever need to use Whole Foods again.

what’s even on prime anymore these days that’s good? don’t say rings of power.

so much of his empire is related to providing people with the ability to copiously over-consume beyond what they can mentally handle.

I've never had Prime, if you bought an ebook then it's yours (mostly I have an Amazon account just to get ebooks from the library and read them with the Kindle app, I've bought plenty out of convenience though).

Bookshop.org is the goto for a lot of local bookstores to divert your amazon money (they get 30% cut if you buy through their individual "storefront" and chances are your favorite indie bookstore might have one) but fulfillment is handled by Ingram so there's really no avoiding some kind of Goliath hoovering up your dollars in some way.

If you're entrenched in the AMZN ecosystem, I'm pretty confident you can cost them money by being a parasite customer. Prime includes unlimited RAW photo storage which you can abuse in all sorts of ways.

The Boys was good, but it’s not good enough to give Bezos money/not pirate

the illegal streaming app subscription is the most morally defensible money i spend in a year tbh

ebay is better because you're buying directly from other people. it doesn't have warehouses or shipping operations or a streaming service. over time ebay has become a place where companies, not just people, sell things, and rando small businesses are there, and sketchy operators running dropship operations etc but it's not really any worse than amazon in that respect. i use it all the time.

if you're used to using amazon to do comparison shopping you can still do that! just don't buy it from amazon, buy it direct from the company who makes it or use ebay. or search. guys honestly i haven't had an amazon account in more than 10 years and i have never, ever thought "ooh i wish i still had my amazon account"

I think I mentioned in another thread, but I've had a handful of times where I ordered something on eBay and it showed up in a fucking Amazon bag with an Amazon order form.. like they just took my order, then turned around and ordered it on Amazon which is infuriating when you're trying to avoid their filthy tentacles

Books I’m going to try to pirate through libgen and buy a paperback if it’s an author I care about supporting (aka the vinyl record model - have I listened to the Katie Alice Greer record I bought? No. Do I even own a working record player? Also no.)

https://www.indiebound.org/indie-store-finder

Leave the Kindle in airplane mode and no worries about any disappearing books. Transfer ebook files from a computer over the USB.

FYI in case anyone was unaware, abeb**ks.com got bought up by Amazon a few years ago, so anything you buy there is part of the empire. It’s also the site with the shittiest feedback system imaginable and if the seller fucks you over you have no recourse but that’s beside the point of this thread.

In the UK hive.co.uk is a good destination, there's even options to have some of your money go to local indie bookshops. Has a bit of a branding problem because of that furniture brand with the same name. Mostly bookd but you can find some music, blu rays and such.

do kindles allow side-loading of books? the alternative, Adobe-based drm is easily broken and books converted from epub to Kindle format can be done using Calibre, which will allow you to use a whole bunch of other legit ebook stores.

(most of which mirror the Amazon daily and monthly deals)

At this point I am not going to cancel my w@$hingt0np0$t.com subscription. But just now I was able to read an article via archive.ph.

abeb00ks.com owns b00kfinder.com, but it's possible to find sellers that are not Amazon/abebooks.

Pouring out a glass for fabric.com, which Amazon bought and promptly enshittified.

I've always used calibre to load stuff onto my kindle though its an older model so idk if they've added drm to the newer ones

bilbio.com and bookshop.org for used and new books respectively

for ebooks i use a kobo and calibre. epubs are easily soulseek'd.

biblio*

For me, a big thing will be breaking the convenience habit of delivery. I've shifted some pet supplies to Chewy and love our local pet food store. Now to drop the monthly pantry/drug store stuff and return to in person local shopping.

bookfinder and abe are both owned by amazon, but to
say they are part of Amazon’s empire is a little bit much— Abe is mostly individual sellers and for some used booksellers it’s their main source of income. I have never ordered a book from Abe and had it arrive in an Amazon box. from what i understand, ordering from
Abe’s site directly rather than ordering a used book through Amazon makes the fees Amazon receives relatively minimal.

i write this mostly because i have several friends for whom Abe is a huge source of income and they have nothing, NOTHING, to do with Amazon, and punishing them seems wildly unfair to me.

my current Kindle is less than a year old and my ebooks are almost all zlibrary -> Calibre

I order my new books in English on Blackwell's (ownership of Waterstones), I find the rest in my local bookstores (new / second-hand).
Clothing we alternate between expensive boutiques (brands) and second-hand. For the baby, second-hand + we have a network.
For electronics and physical things, we have local Swiss stores that sell online everything you might ever need. I avoid them like the plague.
I don't really buy music beyond the money I give to Spotify.

i write this mostly because i have several friends for whom Abe is a huge source of income and they have nothing, NOTHING, to do with Amazon, and punishing them seems wildly unfair to me.

Do you know, or could you find out from these sellers, what their relationships with abebooks entails (e.g., do they take a cut of sales placed via abebooks)?

If I were to guess, Amazon likely profits from the (frankly exorbitant IIRC) monthly fees paid by the seller to Abe.

Table has a good point that the sellers themselves don’t have anything to do with Amazon per se; Amazon just owns the company that enables the web platform via which buyers connect with independent sellers. Obviously it’s not ideal, but you’re never going to be able to be purist about it — Amazon enables cloud computing (through Amazon Web Services) for probably any large-ish company you buy things from, thereby indirectly profiting from your custom. In a way, it’s like trying to boycott oxygen.

I agree that by and large total personal abstention is both impractical and more about feeling less icky about yourself than punishing Jeffy but by that same token, I'm sure there are ways you can end up Bezos-neutral or even Bezos-negative.

Some might involve you doubling down on your usage, but concentrating it in ways that cost Amazon more than they take in. If you work for Amazon, it's clear that unionizing hurts them far more than you quitting.

re AWS: there's a trend for some smaller companies repatriating services back to local hosting -- if you can have a hand in helping make that happen even once, that's likely worth many thousands of individual customers canceling Prime. There are also substantial resources AWS simply gives away for free that you can use/abuse without any intention of giving them anything else.

There are also substantial resources AWS simply gives away for free that you can use/abuse without any intention of giving them anything else.

Examples pls?

I've posted this in other threads, and it isn't about Amazon, but it seems relevant here.

https://refuseuline.com/

Like most places AWS has free tiers of hosting, compute, etc..., though you might find better or more suitable free options from competitors.

One one-time perk is $25K of free credit card processing, which if you were going to make a fundraiser that depended on smaller transactions, can make the difference between the processing fees eating the bulk of what people pledge, to you collecting 100% on your $2 "Fuck Bezos" button pin store.

Obviously all this kind of stuff depends on you never letting them make their money back on future business...

Follow-up to my Book Outlet post near the top of the thread: especially good if you have to buy books for a kid, either your own or a friend/relative's. (Also for charity donations around Christmas.) Putting together an order of a dozen books for ~$50, no shipping, is very easy.

Echoing the support for hive.co.uk

I'm not absolutely sure how useful the nominating your local bookshop thing is (based on my nearest bookshop deciding not to be involved) but perhaps someone can give a sense of this??

More often than not as good, price-wise, as Amazon. If anyone has a Blue Light card this generally gives another ten per cent off.

Honestly don't know, will ask my local bookshop about this.

I mean, obviously its better than someone buying from Amazon.

Amazon used to be cheaper, but if I buy a new hardcover now, pretty sure my local bookstore matches their price exactly--i.e., both just go with the suggested retail price.

Good to see hive co uk discussion. Been using them for a few years, and do not fuck with Amazon. Otherwise 2nd hand bookshops are still a thing in London and we have an ok Oxfam. LRB bookshop is a great physical bookshop.

Other than that I will buy from the publisher direct too.

Have thought of sending my olde stuff to Amazon, letting them deal w storage, shipping etc. when it sells---other places?

In US.

I would not recommend farming out to Amazon FBS and letting it ride. Their storage prices went from "ooof" to "fuck off" and their charges shot way up during the pandemic. The only way it appears to be feasible to me is buying containers of the cheapest junk you can find on Alibaba to mark up with your own branding.

and even then I'd guess more people lose money with their Amazon FBS home goods and sock stores than make money

that sound like a str8 up con.

I was thinking old books, records, CDs---but haven't looked at storage prices lately---no other better place for this in US?

I used to know people who worked for an EBay consignment shop but I'm not sure those really exist anymore since EBay largely went the same direction of drop-shipping junk.

isn't there some relatively local shop you can sell to?

...or retro day markets/record shows?

as to my friends in the booktrade, yea, basically a percentage of the fees they pay to Abe— i think it is somewhere around 5-10%— goes to Amazon, and their wares get advertised in the “other new and used options” on Amazon. according to my best friend, who makes his living as a used book and record dealer, these amazon click throughs account for a tiny percentage of sales.

honestly i think that not buying anything directly from Amazon fulfillment services is quite easy— it’s the Abe stuff that occasionally gives me pause but honestly, the used book market can be insane and sometimes there aren’t alternatives that are economical.

If you buy a record from an independent place and it has a quality control problem, don’t return it to the shop. Buy it from Amazon, switch out the scratched record and return the bad one to Amazon, get your refund.

I think bookshop.org is a much better deal for the stores that sign up to it than hive is

isn't there some relatively local shop you can sell to?

― sleeve, Sunday, November 10, 2024 8:07 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

...or retro day markets/record shows?

― Charlie Hair (C. Grisso/McCain)

I recently finished selling 4K records that belonged to a deceased friend, it took a few years but I did the following steps:

1. gave away stuff (limit 50 per person) to friends, family, active local DJs (may not apply in yr case)
2. called shops (or went in and talked to them), had dealers come look through the collection and take what they wanted for a flat rate, I think I started at $10 per and then $5, then $3, then $1
(note: you may want to set aside some high grade stuff that's worth more in a separate bin, but once u get under say $15 Discogs median I'd go flat rate)
3. sold a bunch of the rest at a yard sale, then gave away the remainder to a local thrift, prob down to around 500-600 by then

I made one FB public event for the last sale round, but that was it

Thanks sleeve, I've done all that to some extent, would rather have somebody else sell & ship--but--

If you buy a record from an independent place and it has a quality control problem, don’t return it to the shop. Buy it from Amazon, switch out the scratched record and return the bad one to Amazon, get your refund.

― Cow_Art, Monday, November 11, 2024 11:08 AM

^^^ this guy gets it (as long as yr ordering from beezo and not an individual/shop using beezo's platform)

Unsolicited testimonial... if you need cheap hard drives, check out serverpartdeals.com. Their name sounds like sponsoredSEObait, but I've been buying from them for a year and they beat AMZ, NewEgg, etc.

One major thing that keeps me buying many items on Amazon is that they (and few others) offer a locker service - rather than having items shipped to your home address, you can send them to one of the many lockers they have in nearby grocery stores, convenience stores, and malls, and a code sent to my phone that lets me open it. This is a huge advantage for those of us that don't have a good alternative place to send to, and who live somewhere where a box on the porch will likely be stolen if left there for a long time (as has happened to me twice). I'll still send small/cheap items to my doorstep for convenience, but there's no way I'm having a new laptop dropped on my porch. There seem to be few alternatives. Home Depot and Lowes have lockers in front of their stores - a 10 to 15 minute drive for me - and several retailers like Target, Walmart, and Apple let you ship items to their store customer service desks, but again that involves a fairly long drive and arriving during store hours.

The major shipping services - USPS, UPS, and FedEx if you're in the US - allow you to ship items to their locations, but I often don't know which shipper an online merchant will use when I buy something online, and again their brick & mortar locations are far away (USPS excluded) and have short hours. Many times I'm home all but one day that week and send orders arriving on those days to my home even if they're pricey items, as Amazon is pretty good with arrival dates, often giving prospective arrival dates before you order. Few other online merchants give you the exact delivery day before you place the order.

Amazon returns are also easier than any of the alternatives. They'll often even repack everything for you.
A huge lockable dropbox built into the porch or near the front door of a house for delivered packages is becoming more popular - how do those proof-of-delivery photos work when your package is hidden in a metal box?

How does everyone else handle this?

I'm buying more stuff in person although I realize that's not a convenient option for some folks.

This weekend I wanted to buy some ramekins. I found a "family-owned" housewares store on duckduckgo and went there in person. It was a good experience.

Bookshop now sells ebooks! I need to check on removing their drm and loading to a Kindle vs. reading in their app on a phone but great to have an option that supports a local bookstore.

https://bookshop.org/

A minor thing, but one thing I've found surprisingly difficult to avoid buying on Amazon is major label released, non Top 40 records (vinyl and CD). Like stuff that's on big labels with no Bandcamp presence and rarely with artists specific webstores, but stuff that's not quite popular enough for brick and mortar stores to definitely stock because everyone will be looking for it.

I feel you there. no one stocks that stuff in brick and mortars. I have been using dearbornmusic.net or amoeba.com. both have free shipping in the USA (after a certain minimum).

Yeah, I sometimes also order from Music Millennium in Portland. Not free shipping, but generally a great selection and quick turnaround!

Amazon returns are also easier than any of the alternatives.

This is my #1 reason to keep using Amazon.

A thing I have definitely never done is if I receive a defective product from a local retailer, to order another one from Amazon and then return the defective one to them.

I made a New Year’s resolution to stop buying from Amazon. Finding alternatives has been successful: bookshop.org for books, CDs through Discogs.

ebay for everything else. feels good man.

My Kindle is what keeps me tied to Amazon for the moment. I read an interesting book review and then with the click of a button, there it is on my Kindle. Yes I know I could source the book elsewhere and then use some software on my laptop to export it to the Kindle, but that takes away the ease-of-use aspect that I like about the Kindle. Is there any way to replicate that experience without Amazon? Because I'm feeling increasingly dirty having anything to do with it.

yeah, buy a kobo

amazon purchases here are usually my family getting me to order stuff for them (last christmas was replacement kitchen tap tops, the one before that inter dental brushes...)

but i do need 2 more disks for my nas and i don't know, or perhaps don't trust, anywhere else for like £200 worth of hdd.

(then there's work, which is all aws-based)

(disks available many places according to seagate. they are £15 more expensive everywhere else though, and i need 2)

my boss was saying that having prescriptions shipped to his porch, with a text msg saying they're on the way, is the main reason he won't drop amazon.. too many long waits to pick thing up at Walgreens, and Walgreens seem to be closing left & right around here anyway

Surprised at this stat:

As of last spring, 75% of American consumers had Amazon Prime memberships, a total of 180m Prime accounts, according to Bloomberg.

yeah, I saw that.. had no idea it was that high

my boss was saying that having prescriptions shipped to his porch, with a text msg saying they're on the way, is the main reason he won't drop amazon.. too many long waits to pick thing up at Walgreens, and Walgreens seem to be closing left & right around here anyway

yeah, I do the benefits bill for my work, and it's crazy to me how many people stick with Blue Cross when we offer Kaiser, especially in NorCal where they have a large footprint

Kaiser doesn’t operate in a lot of places

“you should switch to this thing we have”

:person can’t switch to thing because it doesn’t exist where they live:

:A story of Californians and their obliviousness:

amazon offered free 6 month subs to students last year. they didn't require any evidence of customers being students.

:A story of Californians and their obliviousness:

I don't think sarahell is so oblivious... we both live in the same northern california area, that's likely where her recommendation came from

There are ~130 million households in the US, I imagine that number above includes a lot of 3-4 account households and college kids signing up for free.

Andy, i have known sarahell for more than a decade— i used to live in that same area, and probably still would if tech vampires hadn’t completely obliterated any chance of finding affordable housing.

i just get a little tired of Cali friends saying stuff or giving advice that really only works if yr in California. i get it, truly, but it still stings.

okay, I just don't think she was offering general advice to the masses but maybe specific to the boss I mentioned who lives in marin county

also, it's not just 'oblivious californians' that do that, how about 'omg why didn't you go to white castle instead?' or any number of variations of that

but with Californians it's things i actually want lol

Kaiser is far from perfect, but I often imagine it as a model of what a national system could be like in some alternate timeline.

I was talking specifically to Andy. Kaiser doesn’t even cover all of California… the county where most of my family lives doesn’t have Kaiser as an option; a friend of my dad who moved 5 miles away to a different county had my parents receive mail for this guy at their address so he could have Kaiser.

As in, my parents live on the Kaiser border … one county southeast = no Kaiser; one county southwest = no Kaiser.

Kaiser is far from perfect, but I often imagine it as a model of what a national system could be like in some alternate timeline.

Jeff Bezos blandly throttling the Opinion section the WaPo has finally made me rethink the idea of using Amazon for online shopping of any sort. in general there's nothing it can sell me that I can't find somewhere else or do without. there may be minor exceptions, but I can't think of any right now.

Target delivery is pretty solid imo

i just get a little tired of Cali friends saying stuff or giving advice that really only works if yr in California. i get it, truly, but it still stings.

unless they have a job and a house for me…

A house lol … would you settle for an affordable rental unit without life safety hazards where habitation is legal?

no

honestly nothing will get me to move back

Our primary credit card (put almost everything on it, pay off in full monthly) was an Amazon rewards card. I just got a different card for that & will get all standing charges transferred as soon as the card arrives.

After years of reading koogs's posts about Kobo, I'm replacing my Kindle with one. While there was a tiny amusement factor in buying it off Amazon, I went direct.

i would recommend bookmarking Amazon daily deals and wishlisting things on kobo site and Google Play Books and checking them regularly - Kobo and Google mirror about 80% of Amazon's deals but the kobo site is just not as good at telling you. and Google play often has multiple entries for the same editions of the same book at different prices.

(110 unread books in my todo list)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GBpyYLUWgAAhYTK.jpg

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/its-not-just-setting-teslas-on-fire-now-irate-americans-are-shoplifting-from-whole-foods/ar-AA1BKHP3?ocid=BingNewsVerp

(For my part, I avoid Whole Foods for the same reason I don't think Neiman Marcus when I need underwear--even if they do have what I need I trust I can find something suitable at a better price.)

food should be free, shoplifting food is always good

(For my part, I avoid Whole Foods for the same reason I don't think Neiman Marcus when I need underwear--even if they do have what I need I trust I can find something suitable at a better price.)

― Infanta Terrible (j.lu),

their selection of Stilton cheeses tho

worth shoplifting imo

What's a good alternative to Audible? I actually had no idea they were owned by Amazon until I was about to sign up.

kobo do audiobooks.

We got Prime cancelled with much less stress than anticipated. Our main household credit card paid rewards in Amazon credit, so I got a different card (Cap 1 Savor, cashback optimized for groceries and restaurants) and got all recurring charges changed over. WaPo is going to be tougher.

nice work, comrade

Continuing effort to cut back the Subscribe&Save - located compostable K-Cups at Costco yesterday. Mr. Jaq generally does the Costco runs but doesn't drink coffee - he wrecked his car last week so we did this biweekly run together.

No way is he driving my car and hooray added benefit of dropping more subscriptions.

My younger brother has worked at Amazon for over a decade, and I could mentally justify buying from Bezos since it paid his salary etc. But he's preparing to bail due to their stupid RTO (which in his case means he would have to move to a "hub city").

attempting to de-google, which is going to be hard given a pixel phone.

Joplin was mentioned as an alternative to Keep notes, but it is raw. i think it is more focused on the syncing functionality and the way it looks is secondary - titles only in the main screen, no custom per-note colours. maybe it's better on a tablet with more real-estate where you can see the note list and the active note at the same time.

windows 11 is going to be a big thing, i think. current laptop, which is perfectly fine despite being from 2017, probably won't update. i am 99% linux already, but the adobe digital thing for ebooks is the one thing i use on a monthly basis. i should look into using Wine for this

(there was a library that basically used curl to do the same thing, but i couldn't get it to work, although this write-up looks like it has the details - https://pig-monkey.com/2024/07/libgourou/ )

(success! just downloaded and converted a recent kobo purchase and can read it in calibre)

Leave the Kindle in airplane mode and no worries about any disappearing books. Transfer ebook files from a computer over the USB.

If you do this, be sure to keep backups of not just any non-Amazon-purchased books but more importantly, the associated notes file (*.sdr) for each book. I'd kept my paperwhite in airplane mode for a couple of months and when I shut it off to download an Amazon book, it deleted everything. Months of notes all gone. Apparently this is a recognized problem that Amazon has never addressed. I've managed to get pirated local versions of most of my Amazon purchases but I'm still missing a handful. Someday...

almost like amazon doesn't want it to work with non-amazon files

My hatred of Amazon is an ever-deepening well