I won't criticize anybodies decision to keep shopping at amazon for this reason, it is very difficult to ethically consume in our current environment.

However, for me, I realized that

1) I am fortunate enough that saving fractions of my order will not make a material difference to me (the amazon cancellation page informed me that i had saved 140 dollars in shipping using prime over the last year)

2) In the current environment, supporting local and/or smaller businesses is more important to me than saving a day of shipping time, or 10% off my order

3) Even if your alternative retailer is equally unscrupulous to its warehouse employees, for instance, a shipper that uses UPS, which is unionized labor with benefits, as opposed to amazon's own courier service which is contract labor with no benefits, can be a meaningful difference.

For me, the above 3 made me realize that I could do without amazon prime despite being a prime member for 10 plus years. For household staples, I am a costco member, and I feel much better about costco's relationship with their employees than amazons. For other purchases, it makes sense for me to consider local alternatives. And I can always use amazon if I need to, I'll just pay shipping.

What if we improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of Amazon employees but didn't completely solve the problem of working conditions across the nation?

Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. You can push for legislation AND cancel your Amazon Prime. Both are valid strategies for letting your voice be heard.

I cancelled my membership because it makes little sense when pretty much all shipping is taking over a week. This is not about getting the laws changed, this is about what tbray wrote in his blog - strong arming the poor employees and not providing a safe working environment. These workers are literally putting their life at risk for you. Why not send a message to Amazon that this is not acceptable?

Believe it or not its slightly easier to click a cancel button than to lobby for a major law change.

If an amazon worker gets paid and treated better, then other employers will need to do the same if they want people to choose to work for them.

Try googling "ethical amazon alternatives"

There's no burden of consistency that anybody needs to meet. I can boycott Amazon because I like purple and they don't have it in their logo. And then tomorrow decide to continue the boycott because it's a cloudy day and my dog has fleas.

If you want a better reason, it can be as simple as, Amazon is the 13th-biggest corporation in the world by revenue (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r...), and someone simply doesn't want to confer any further advantage to them or support that level of wealth concentration.

It's not cherry-picking unless you know that's the only company being avoided. In my case I've significantly cut my direct reliance on the top 12, quite unintentionally, just by

- not shopping at WalMart

- not living in China

- not owning/driving a car

- not using Apple products, and ironically

- using Amazon

Yep that's right, ordering from Amazon keeps me from being tempted to fall back on numbers 3, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 which are all petroleum and car companies. I guess I'm going on the theory that a delivery truck making the rounds to 20 people is more efficient and less damaging than 20 people driving their own cars to various stores. On the other hand, if it's me we're talking about, I would be biking to the store. So already I'm not totally consistent, and I might be further inconsistent tomorrow and decide to boycott Amazon, especially if they don't get their act together on the labor side!

Sets a precedence for future behavior. Not every murder gets solved, but the threat of consequence can influence things in the right direction.

What you are proposing is that if you see clear evidence that a company is behaving badly or counter to your beliefs you should take no action because other ones may also be?

Whether or not you feel it applies specifically to this case, that doesn't make sense to me.

> there needs to be transparency across the entire world economic landscape.

> Why cherry pick?

You have to begin somewhere. You could always ask "Why begin here? Why not elsewhere?". A fine response would be "Why do you care? Where have you started? Oh wait, you haven't, and you aren't even making it clear you intend to. Bye."

I have a dream where customers need for transparency is the sole and adequate reason for companies to responsible provide and therefore abide by the current ethical standards.

Amazon's sheer size places it in an entirely different category from something like a medium-sized enterprise with a couple thousand employees.

There is a name for what you are saying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy

Alternatively, "perfect is the enemy of good".

No, you just take whatever action where you can, when you can, when it becomes clear that it is necessary.