I’m kind of surprised that this seems to be an unpopular opinion around here, since I’ve always thought of Lemmy as being pretty leftist as opposed to liberal/capitalist, but there seems to be a base assumption here that voting with your dollar and trying to purchase the most “ethical” thing through the most “ethical” channels is worth the time and energy.
To me it has always seemed intuitive. I mean, what is the goal anyway? If the goal is to destroy the company you hate and replace it with the one you like (which btw you won’t, for many reasons), you’re doomed from the start because capitalism is gonna capitalism, and that brand you like and think is more ethical is at the end of a day, still a brand whose primary purpose is to make money, and they will put that above all else. If the goal is for the unethical company to make a smaller, more specific change, you’re also doomed because the company you’re silently protesting has no idea why you’ve stopped spending money with them, and likely doesn’t care so long as others continue to spend.
To me, it seems more about making you feel good about yourself than bringing about real change. Which is further supported by the hostility that often comes with ethical consumerism towards people who don’t engage with it - people who fundamentally agree with them but who apparently must be shunned for their purchasing decisions. Obviously I’m all up for humiliating Cybertruck owners or whatever, but there’s a limit (looking at you, anti-Brave thread that pops up every month or so).
This brings me into the other problems with ethical consumerist rhetoric - it takes an inordinate amount of time because you have to research every company you engage with in every area to find the “most ethical” one, whatever that means, as well as the subsidiaries of those companies so you can recognize them in the wild. Many of these companies are monopolies or oligopolies and actively try to hide their subsidiaries. This time could be better spent toward much more productive activities that actually have the potential to bring about change. “More ethical” products also tend to be more expensive, and for this reason low income people typically can’t engage in ethical consumerism. This money is likely also better spent donated toward organizations trying to bring about real sociopolitical/economic change.
I also draw a distinction between “vote with your dollar”/“ethical consumerist” rhetoric and well-organized boycotts with specific demands because these types of boycotts have actually been effective in the past, and it makes intuitive sense why. When you have a lot of organized people who together have lots of buying power asking for one specific thing, with the carrot of “if you do x specific thing, we will come back and start spending again,” rather than the vague ethical consumerist position of “you’re not ethical enough for me,” all of a sudden it makes good financial sense to the company to make that specific change. The successful boycotts I’ve seen in the past have met both of these criteria.
Sorry this got to be so long and sorry if there are errors in it, I just kind of word vomited.
So does my local mom and pop business owner. In fact they probably donate a larger fraction of their net worth than bezos. And they fund changes that have a larger impact on my local area than bezos.
If you don’t see that mega corps like Amazon are a bigger problem for society than the individuals in your town there’s a lot more to go into than I can right now. Perhaps I can come back to this later. PS. All this debate is in good faith!
Of course mega corps are a bigger problem than owners in my town specifically. I’m just trying to understand what the end goal even is if we were somehow able to convince the whole country to do ethical consumerism (which for many reasons I think will never happen). Of course coloring all of this is we may have different optimal outcomes in mind since I’m a socialist. I appreciate the good faith debate.
Before big corp stores like Amazon and Walmart came along, towns had a lot more small business that helped the local communities thrive. Then the big stores (using unfair leverage) put them all nearly out of business, with average Americans unable to resist the subsidized low prices and free shipping then turning their back on their neighbor’s store. What followed was the decimation of small town economies and the ability for working people to earn a decent living. Meanwhile, the centralization of all that profit and power in a few hands has allowed the creation of the oligarchy we have today. So what would life be like if every American stopped patronizing Amazon and started funding their local community? All of that would start to become undone, and we would begin to regain that lost prosperity and wrest control over our politics away from billionaire oligarchs.
I’m just not convinced things were as peachy as you describe. Basically since the beginnings of capitalism there have been people with power and influence similar to modern billionaires. It is just the natural trajectory of capitalism for those people to accrue more and more wealth and increase the gap between those at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy.
Small town businesses abuse their employees and rip off their customers as much or more in my experience than big businesses. And many of them are directly politically opposed to me and are actively doing damage in my local community. Their suppliers are big businesses who I don’t have control over. I just don’t see them as ethically better.
And I don’t think this is true either - if people spent their money locally on small businesses and their criteria for where they spent their money primarily revolved around that, all that would do is prop up more local oligarchs and turn those small businesses into the big businesses you say are worse.
Bezos has oligarch powers because Amazon has control of such a huge portion of the market. If we all shopped at 20 million different stores instead of the same one, we would not recreate the same oligarch power. Breaking up monopoly power by keeping market share from consolidating under one set of owners is econ 101. The way things are today is not the way it has always been, or the way it naturally must be. The level of inequality today is orders of magnitude worse than it was even earlier in my lifetime. We lost more and more control by allowing these mega corps to runaway without guardrails.
Even if it didn’t, which I’m still skeptical of, the products on the shelves would likely still become consolidated into mega corps. The shipping companies would consolidate. Every piece of the supply chain that the consumer doesn’t have direct control over would consolidate. Would that really be that much better than the current situation?
You can’t just count on markets to manage themselves. That’s how we got into this mess.
Fair, but the only way to combat that would be to have more shopping options: Different stores with different suppliers instead of fewer stores with more centralized suppliers. And the only way to make sure those options exist is for people to vote with their wallets and keep them alive, instead of giving in and shipping at Amazon. The problems you’re describing seem to me to be directly caused by not voting with your wallet in this way.
But this just lends to my point that it’s ridiculous to expect average consumers who are just trying to survive to juggle all of these things that they can’t easily see and which business owners have a direct incentive to hide. There’s a reason that ethical consumerism hasn’t worked.