Consumers are too lazy for The Truth about Amazon to really make a difference – iNews

I never use Amazon. You shouldnt, you know Jeff Bezos is the richest person in the world, they have ravaged independent business, there have been all sorts of reports about the punitive employment practices in their manufacturing metropolises, their Alexa technology is listening to you without your permission and thats without even mentioning the environmental impact of the endless deliveries.

I wouldnt dream of using it, except for when I urgently need something absolutely essential that I couldnt possibly buy elsewhere, like a bottle of rhubarb gin, or a set of allen keys, or a smart oil diffuser I can have puff out some neroli just by barking at it. Which is to say, unfortunately, I am one of those whose use of Amazon skyrocketed this past year and increased the marketplaces monthly profits by 40% to 1.6bn.

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The Truth about Amazon: How to Shop Smart fortuitously opened the week of Black Friday, after which I expect Mr Bezos will be in the market for a couple more private islands. Helen Skelton and Sabrina Grant, with the help of experts and a couple of acquiescent Amazonaddicted guinea pigs, offered an engaging manifesto more or less to the tune of: go in armed, without condemning (perhaps not condemning enough) those of us who continue to use it despite our better judgment.

They outlined Amazons wildly confusing user interface, which profits from overwhelming the consumer, how the buy box on the right-hand of the screen usually does not include the cheapest price, how Amazon forces high street sellers to undercut the prices on their own websites (and how we can use this to wangle further discounts), how environmentally friendly their refurbished tech shop really is (not very), whether we can trust Alexa to do our shopping for us (no) and how after supposedly deleting more than 20,000 fake five-star reviews from the site earlier this year many sellers now steal positive reviews of one product in order to increase the rating of another. I suspect this is why it took me 90 minutes to watch the 50-minute programme, using a wifi range extender which supposedly had 4000 five-star reviews.

Certainly, with every new revelation about the evil corporation the ignorance is bliss argument for continuing to shop there diminishes further, but if were going to, then Skelton advised with a bit of patience and flexibility, you can save a fortune. But given Amazons USP of convenience has the specific advantage of demanding the consumer bother with neither, I do wonder if it her words will fall on deaf ears.

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Consumers are too lazy for The Truth about Amazon to really make a difference - iNews