I still stand by my theory that the end stage of capitalism is one person having all of the money and resources while everybody else has nothing.
The only reason it hasn’t gotten to that point is because there’s normally a revolution or coup before that happens.
I’m far less pessimistic - I think it’ll end up with about half a dozen across the world owning about 99% of everything.
I’d say we’re either very close to the end or nowhere near the end. If we can emerge from the current situation without any significant structural changes then we need to resign ourselves to a long and slow ecological decline that has most of us dead before anything gets really bad. I think it would take a black swan event for any other outcome.
The way things are moving politically is that the West is losing faith in democracy at a time when, as abhorrent as it is to say it, such a shift may be of huge benefit to the environment.
When you say “most of us dead” you’re probably right about most of the global population (or the poorest parts of it) being sacrificed in the name of profit and “who dies with most spacecraft/sports teams wins”, but it’s also true that politicians are now so canny at gaming the electoral/campaigning situation and lying to a gullible electorate anaesthetised by a potent cocktail of reality TV and pharmaceuticals/narcotics that democracy is on its last legs, and that a shift in the direction of globally-connected undemocratic governments may turn out to be largely indistinguishable from the present if things are allowed to continue unimpeded.
In a horribly utilitarian sense, the planet can well afford to lose billions of us and our incessant drain on the earth’s resources.
It’s the easiest decision ever because the site is completely unusable hypercontagious airborne AIDS. Imagine having a store that wins on ease of use and low price and then opening it up so that every feral, inbred scammer in the world can set up a three-card Monte table inside.
Yeah we are Prime members and my wife buys a LOT of stuff on Amazon whereas I buy almost nothing. I’ve been trying to get her to cut back for a while to little avail but like most things she came to the realization herself that she was spending unnecessarily and that Amazon/Bezos are fairly garbage. I don’t think we’re entirely off the train as Amazon has the unique advantage of being able to get basically any random item to your house in 2 days (during a pandemic no less) but I’ll be very happy to spend my money elsewhere, especially locally, when able. Also my worst pandemic grocery experience was at Whole Foods: way too crowded, very few mask wearers, and the person in front of us took forever to pay using her phone or something. An associate grabbed the person behind us and ferried them to a different line despite us obviously being ahead of them and having fewer items in our cart. I also like to joke that they are price gouging during a crisis but it’s just their regular prices.
Also Grue keeps unsuccessfully shilling for Target but afaict they are the best large retailer to work for, at least for the store associates; I would have had them tied with Costco but they dropped the ball during the pandemic, exposing their workers and being late to moving corporate to wfh. Anecdotally a Target worker told us that she was given 30 days paid off during the pandemic, which I haven’t heard anything close to from other retailers. I’ve never had a problem with their in store pickup or shipping and returns are generally easy, except for the weird snafu where I can’t use store credit plus my Target wallet in the same transaction. Oh and you get 5% off on their card, has anyone mentioned that?
Speaking of which, our spend on groceries is up something between 50% to 65%. (Need a few months more data to know for sure.)
I know we are eating all meals at home now versus most prior to the pandemic, and that is some part of it, but I think food has to have gone up across the board. Certain things like eggs and meat are obvious, but they’ve probably increased the price at least a little bit on everything else too.
Of course just another smack upside the head of low income folks who are already bearing the brunt of this.
I feel like fewer things are on sale when I go to the store but I haven’t noticed prices being actually higher on the things that I normally buy. Milk, butter, and yogurt have possibly been a little higher, or at least not on sale frequently like they used to be. I usually buy Pasture raised eggs which are always $4-5 a dozen. I also do the vast majority of my shopping at Trader Joe’s, which has remained reasonably priced, and Sprouts, which generally has the best prices on produce (this week they had organic strawberries on sale for $1/lb which is basically insane; they were also excellent although some of the other fruit I bought was pretty bad).
Around me eggs and hamburger have tripled. Chicken has doubled. (These are from sale prices, which were basically always available before.) The other stuff I just assumed has gone up but I don’t have a real handle on that.
Or in our case, divorce.
Seems about right. Unlike most trash companies worth boycotting, Amazon is unfortunately an amazing service.
You guys ever shop toothpaste at Scamazon? Every other store I checked had it cheaper with hundreds of fewer cockroach scammer listings to sift through. That’s because they’re real motherfucking stores competing on price and reputation. Meanwhile, some Buried Alive: Animal Hoarder is selling the 1.7 oz travel size Crest for $13.48 out of a garage in Peoria hoping you’ll think it’s the 12-pack shown in the item listing. But it’s only for ONE TUBE shoulda read the description CAREFULLY sucka.
The entire premise of the third-party platform as a retail end-game is so fucking transparently stupid it would be laughable if not so depressing. To believe in it, you’d have to believe that dinar experts in Ohio can compete with major international retailers on price by selling genuine goods out of an $80 StorageMart unit. Does not compute. There’s even a sneak preview called eBay.
I’m not tryna buy an expired box of MCT Bars at 30% markup from your Aunt Linda, dawg. Then there’s lowest-possible-quality Chinese electronics sold by “companies” whose AI-created names will be NSA untraceable before the capacitors bleed and soak the traces in 90 days. Like, we tried this before a long time ago but also recently and there are strong theoretical arguments and empirical evidence that brands, reputations, and search costs matter a lot. Then again, people emptying bank accounts for counterfeit goods with no warranty sounds like something in Idiocracy so we’re drawing live.
That is a correct read.
It’s not quite as innocent as you make it sound though. Some sex offender steals the Buy Box and sells me coffee filters drenched in cat piss that his friend is skimming off a truck. Nah I’d rather pay the extra $2 and get the shit from the manufacturer kthx.
Some of the best_scams_you’ve_never_heard_of type shit in this piece if you can make it that far without smashing your screen. The best one, of course, is that barcode monkey doing $250k/month revenue by telling fraud victims to admit wrongdoing.
Yeah my point is just that none of these people are in any way reputable sellers of merchandise. Something goes tits up like selling damaged / defective goods that injures kids or w/e and these assholes would all be on milk cartons. Like returned merch from Costco they are describing those items accurately? Would bet dollars to donuts most people doing that are fraudulently listing them as new items when possible.
I’m not allowed inside Costco. Is that enough of a boycott? IE, can I still eat their pizza and have a clear conscience?
My wife shops there. She’s listed on her dad’s membership. So I consume their stuff. I don’t try to tell my wife where to shop though. She wants to shop Amazon, Walmart and Costco then that’s where she goes. I do my fighting with strangers online.
I think Wal-Mart operates the same way? Probably every major retailer at this point since it’s basically a race to the bottom. And I dunno what the expert take on Scamazon valuation is, but the core business model of fly-by-night idiots selling busted/stolen/fake merch seems pretty fragile to me. It’s just that–as you pointed out with the hydroponics store–the competition hasn’t figured out how to get their shit together yet.
Sellers of quality, genuine merchandise are still stuck in the 00’s model of internet retailing trying to “capture” people into their system with account creation, loyalty programs, hiding fees (e.g., shipping) until the end of checkout, fake “rewards” (lol magazines) and other lame shit that should already be extinct. I’ve experienced all of those things you mentioned including the magazines specifically in the last few months. How about a platform where I can combine items from multiple stores like Walgreens and Target to get the free ship, have one account that I can one-click order from without deciphering the myriad Yu-Gi-Oh! scoring system rewards programs. A lot of places are offering Amazon/Google/PayPal/Visa one-touch pay but it feels like an afterthought when it should be the primary forethought.
