I wanted to buy a book recently – a 60-year-old bestseller that I could have got anywhere. Instinctively I hopped onto Amazon and found I could get it for as little as £4.49, or just 74p on Kindle – and by tomorrow if I was quick.
But then I had a thought, the sort I’ve been meaning to get round to having for some time. Why should I buy it from them? Why not make this a protest purchase and support an independent retailer?
So I searched again and quickly found a suitable seller and paid £6.88 plus postage of £1.29. The book arrived three days later. What do you know? Buying from a small-ish specialist bookshop worked!
I am now resolved to remain thus principled when it comes to the annual Christmas Shopping Session, which will soon be upon us. Partly to support independent retailers, and partly because each time I hear about how little tax Amazon pays (£4.2m last year in Britain, having sold us £4.3bn worth of goods), my heart sinks and resentment arises.
And then there are the reports about how Amazon treats its warehouse staff – only last month, thousands of workers in Germany went on strike to protest against their low wages. And Greenpeace has scored Amazon’s Web Services arm poorly on its environmental credentials. A British campaign to boycott the online Goliath has attracted around ten thousand signatories.
Rob Harrison, editor of Ethical Consumer magazine, which is running the campaign, told me the firm is “unique in its disdain for any corporate social responsibility discourse. It’s not interested in talking about tax avoidance or environmental impact or anything.”
My click away from the mega-site gave me that excited “defiant midget” feeling that I got when as a student I started spending the little cash I had on tea and coffee bearing the Fairtrade Mark, which is celebrating its twentieth anniversary this week.
Such products were sold for a mite more by firms that promised to pay producers in the developing world a decent wage as well as an annual premium for their community.
Stretching my student grant close to breaking point I was hardly a financial big hitter, but with what money I had, I was determined that I would take a stand. And I certainly wouldn’t spend my 29p (my student days were a while ago) on a KitKat or Toffee Crisp. After all, those bars were made by “naughty Nestlé”, which didn’t go near Fairtrade until 2005. KitKats are now one of the few Nestlé products to use Fairtrade ingredients: progress, albeit small.
Back then, Fairtrade efforts didn’t even taste particularly nice, as a former Café Direct director once jokingly acknowledged. But that wasn’t the point. There were thousands of us disobeying a basic economic rule – that we’ll buy at the lowest price available – and it felt great.
Today Fairtrade has been taken on by the mainstream, so perhaps the next battleground for us altruists is not for workers in the developing world but those closer to home. I’ve signed an e-petition or two about Amazon to express my anger that our public purse is billions of pounds emptier than it ought to be, but the most effective way I can get through to a company such as Amazon will be by shopping elsewhere.
This will of course mean rooting around further to find out where else I can buy all those discounted DVDs, CDs and books. And it may cost extra, but I hope my resolve holds. The toughest challenge for me, an expert in last-minutism, will be allowing the extra two or three weeks Mr Harrison advised me to factor in to source my acquisitions Amazon-free.
Amazon declined to comment for this article.
Abigail Frymann Rouch is The Tablet's Online Editor
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User comments (4)
If you have a 'hive' bookshop locally then you can get the best of both on-line and local shopping for books - http://www.hive.co.uk/
Just to remind readers the baby milk campaign against Nestle is still unresolved and alive despite their rather reluctant attempt at fartrade and you can still support it - look up babymilkaction
As I remember it, our objection to all things Nestlé was based on their promotion of baby milk products in Africa which is slightly more moraly chalenging than having workers on roller skates in a Scottish warehouse.
The reason Amazon does not pay tax is because it doesn't make any profit, after it has ploughed such margin as it makes back into growing the business.
In the past it has taken advantage of a tax exception created to help channel-island flower growers to sell CDs and DVDs free of VAT. It now dominates book publication to the extent it now dictates terms to publishers and authors. Indeed I believe Amazon's profit strategy depends on becomming a natural monopoly. However it has radically changed the access we have to the things we want to buy. The fact my wife can buy an ex-library copy of a novel - off the shelves of a New York library - and have it pop through our letter box 2 days later is something inconceivable 5 years ago. This "long-tail" marketing is a major aid to small artists, publishers and particularly, second hand booksellers. It also enables new micro-business models to evolve "fulfilled by Amazon". It also allows the vast factories of China to dis-intermediate and flog their tat straight to the end consumer. It's a new world, not necessarily brave, but radically enabling to small manufacurers and small consumers. It's not all bad.
Abigail, I'm not sure who you include amongst "we". As well intentioned as your actions may have been, you could equally apply them to a host of other companies. Amazon are the flavour of the month for criticism, but why not the likes of "Virgin" "Apple" or "Ebay". They are all very successful tax avoiders and will presumably remain so until the law changes to make it difficult for them to continue doing so.