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The Pandemic Has Ended the Amazon Debate
It’s clearer than ever that supporting Amazon is a tacit endorsement of abusive work policies and more
Most corporate slogans do not double as the actual key to a company’s success, but Amazon’s does — the online retailer’s dedication to being “Earth’s most customer-centric company” has been the main driver of its explosive growth. Between Alexa, predictive shopping, one-click ordering, and two-day shipping, Amazon has engineered a user experience so intuitive that it has transcended “convenience” and sent us onto whatever plane — cyborg consumption? — we’re on now. In the process, it has entirely overridden our standard-issue moral compass.
Amazon has treated its workers brutally, bullied competitors, dodged taxes, and generally been a bad civic actor. Unlike its fellow tech giants, Amazon has never been very interested in casting itself as a benevolent, doing-no-evil, world-connecting, different-thinking force for good. Its gambit has always seemed to be to lodge its user-friendly services into the middle of our lives so totally that we shoppers would tolerate or ignore its obvious failings, or at least convince ourselves that its transgressions amounted to a gray area. It has thus fed an endless debate about whether it’s ethical to patronize such a large and complicated and…
