No, economic forces are not completely in our control, not in any meaningful sense of control. The whole human agency thing is IMO mostly bullshit; faced with a modern economy, we have very little agency. Free will is a cool concept, but drop the prices in your store by 10% and everyone will come to you instead of your competitor - that's how trivial people as a group are to control. And companies are all about exploiting this.

So yeah, technically if you, and me, and everyone else agreed not to use Amazon Go and stick to our regular grocery routine, mom&pop shops would survive. But that doesn't take into account the fact that coordination is a super hard problem. One that's essentially impossible to solve for a group larger than a dozen people without creating some strong external incentive structures[0]. On the other hand, a company like Amazon is in a position to unilaterally change the incentive landscape. There's no consumer agency to talk about here, anymore than we talk about agency of sheep being herded.

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[0] - that's also why every society, as it grows, invents structured forms of governance.

Except for the fact dropping your prices by 10% isn't trivial at all. Your claims are also empirically false. People routinely buy name brand products that are more expensive than alternatives.

All you're saying is "If your offer is far more attractive than anything else on the market, people will flock to your store and buy. What a bunch of fools acting like lemmings, Lol."

How are people supposed to react when faced with more interesting alternatives? NOT choose them to demonstrate their free will? That doesn't make much sense.

Advertising is amazing to behold. You slap together some low quality ad unit, dial in your target audience on Facebook, throw a couple hundred K into the coffers... and then watch the machine crank out LPVs and conversions.

The upfront effort needed to steer consumer behavior is shockingly minimal.