Re:Goodbye Amazon
by candiodari on Saturday April 29, 2017 @04:37AM
(#14225624)
It's not just your local neighbor that's suffering. You're also working to promote employee working conditions like these :
https://www.macrumors.com/2017/04/11/nyu-student-undercover-...
Note that this is the very upper end of factory worker conditions in China. For the local market, this is genuinely considered good. Knowing that conditions for "cheap" stuff produced in China are as bad as those documented in the article or (a lot) worse, it is almost immoral to buy that stuff.
If you buy cheap stuff from China or almost anywhere in Asia or Africa, you are inflicting a small amount of harm on every employee that has better conditions than that, and harm on humanity as a whole.
Why is creating an environment where my neighbor is suffering a good thing? We've built this fragile global supply chain for things that benefit the large scale producers and distributors and deliver low value to the consumer. Amazon is the great middleman and ultimately raises costs for the market.
I was in Georgia last year at the heart of peach harvest season. The local supermarket sold Peaches shipped in from California that cost 100% more than the fresh produce sold by small purveyors and were an inferior product in every dimension.