Uh, what? Amazon is competing with retailers, so if Amazon goes away you'd buy from other retailers. In a big city get your books and music from local independent booksellers and record stores (in the country or for esoteric things you get them from alibris and discogs). Electronics you can get from Best Buy, Target, Wal Mart, Newegg. Or you can go to a secondary market for all the things, a little company called "eBay".

Why do I know this? Because I don't use Amazon anymore at all for anything after they blatantly screwed me over as a seller.

Sometimes I feel like engineers on HN have centralization on the brain. We are so impressed with scale and complexity of Amazon! We forget this size and complexity arose because it's trying to compete with (and presumably supplant) an enormous, biologically evolved distribution and retail ecosystem.

If Amazon dies, we all simply go back to that ecosystem, like I did, both online and real life. (And you know what? It's better. Newegg is better for electronics because they only do electronics, and they fight patent trolls; Alibris is better because they have a better selection, better prices, and support local business; Discogs is better for the same reason; all are better because they are focused.)