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

Brian Merchant
OneZero

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A photo of Amazon workers protesting. One is holding up a sign that says “Our health is just as essential.”
Amazon employees hold a protest and walkout over conditions at the company’s Staten Island distribution facility on March 30, 2020 in New York City. Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

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…

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Brian Merchant
OneZero

Senior editor, OneZero, books, futures, fiction. Author of The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, founder of Terraform @ Motherboard @ VICE.