
I Tried to Block Amazon from My Life. It Was Impossible - laurex
https://gizmodo.com/i-tried-to-block-amazon-from-my-life-it-was-impossible-1830565336
======
lawrenceyan
I think it's unfair to judge Amazon as a monopoly. They have plenty of
competition in their two primary businesses. Retail wise they have razor thin
margins with traditional grocers on one end and identical copycat tech
platforms on the other. And with AWS, Google Cloud is dominating along with
Azure.

People are always so quick to call out monopolies when it patently isn't true.

------
Spivak
> Like millions of other Americans, we use a lot of Amazon products in our
> house. We have an Echo, an Echo Dot, two Kindles, two Amazon Prime Chase
> credit cards, Amazon Prime Video on our TV, and two Prime accounts. (Note to
> self: Why are my husband and I each paying Amazon $119/year?)

> I barely know where else to go online to buy things.

I feel like the article's conclusion basically stems from this -- good lord
that's a lot of platform buy-in. Not surprised at all that it's difficult to
leave. I have an Amazon account for an occasional purchase and an AWS account
for playing around. I don't feel like I'm missing out by not jumping into the
rest of their ecosystem but maybe I'm just blissfully ignorant.

Also is is really fair to conflate their B2B and B2C business? They might as
well be separate companies as far as this article is concerned. I feel like
this challenge would be a lot more meaningful if getting Amazon's consumer
products out of your life wasn't combined with dropping every business that
uses cloud hosting.

> Having to run to a physical store rather than opening my Amazon app every
> time the house runs out of paper towels is annoying

I can't say this experience is super relatable. Don't get me wrong, it's super
cool for groceries and home goods to just show up on a regular schedule but
this is basically arguing that someone who has been living with a team of
servants is finding life more difficult without them. Amazon's service
provides real tangible value and suddenly changing the balance from time to
money is going to be felt. You can meet in the middle and order your groceries
online and pick them up on the way home once a week.

> I would usually immediately order a weird doodad, probably within two
> minutes of realizing I needed it, using the Amazon app on my phone, but not
> this week. I ultimately order it from eBay.

Woah, the author needs to chill on the instant gratification. If your hard
requirement for shopping is impulse then of course Amazon is going to scratch
that itch but eBay is just the same wagon pulled by a different horse. It
seems like the author needs to learn how to shop. The problem of course is
that purchasing is work.

[https://www.proclipusa.com](https://www.proclipusa.com)

[https://www.scosche.com/magic-mount-cell-phone-holder-
tablet...](https://www.scosche.com/magic-mount-cell-phone-holder-tablet-mount)

[https://www.rammount.com/](https://www.rammount.com/)

[https://www.iottie.com/Product/List?Category=SmartphoneMount](https://www.iottie.com/Product/List?Category=SmartphoneMount)

------
hondadriver
Nothing is impossible. Move to the Netherlands. Amazon has almost no precense
here (yet) :)

~~~
kingnothing
Did you read the article? A huge chunk of it was focused on AWS and how most
of the internet is basically inaccessible if you block it.

