Boycotting Amazon

She doesn't have the most trustworthy looking smile in the world, does she?

Re the point or otherwise of boycotts: if Nestlé is still promoting dried baby milk in areas where people don't have access to clean water, what was the point of me and others boycotting Milky Bars and KitKats thirty years ago? It clearly had no effect whatsoever. The point for me is that it is pointless to do something pointless if the point of the pointless action is to make a point and change something. Why did I bother all those years ago? What good did it do to anyone, including me? I'm through with quixotic gestures.

Does Amazon have a New Year sale?

[badjoke emoticon]

Agreed, but is her greed any worse than Amazon's is my question? Why is her greed odious, and Amazon's not worth a boycott?

I can't remember not feeling critical of Cherie Blair - certainly not since that fiasco about her son's flat and her very bad acting.

I obviously agree Absent.
To all those who say what's the point in boycotting, I say why not?
What harm does a boycott do to you?
Can't find out if it works until you do it.
New Year's resolution. If Amazon haven't changed their ways before then, boycott in the New Year. You can buy your Christmas presents, but no birthday presents from them.
Last year nearly all my Christmas presents came through Amazon. This year, none.
I have removed all my information from the site, and they are not allowed to send me any more emails. It was at least one a day.

Ya know, all those times when one has tried not to feel critical of C Blair...
I was thinking that about SA this morning anno - the sports boycott was so much more tangible and obvious than unmeasurable lower sales of Outspan oranges.

For aeons I boycotted South African products, but the clincher for a sports-mad nation, was the sporting boycott. Sadly, there can be no such sanction for Amazon and the other culprits.

JEND . HO HUM !

Thanks Jen. I had forgotten about Ethical Consumer, although I was being slightly facetious with that comment. I think you could well be right about Nelson Mandela and I do think all the boycotting and demonstrating outside South Africa House influenced political decisions. I think boycotting wine from the Nappa Valley also helped with a solution to problems about pay and workers' rights in California. It's difficult to tell whether boyctts really have an effect but I think there's no harm in trying.

I have just looked at taxresearch.org.uk and searched for Cherie Blair.
The private equity firm she has set up to invest in medical services centres to be located in Sainsburys stores has been set up in Delaware and Cayman.
Apparently Delaware keeps it secret, though not from taxresearch.org.uk, and Cayman is for low tax. Either way money that should be invested in the NHS gets taken out of the UK.

Absent and Bags, you do not need to check Companies House to find out what is owned by whom. Ethical Consumer now does it for you.

I believe that Nelson Mandela would not be out of prison if boycotts did not work. I now buy South African Fairtrade wine as the workers get a better deal than they did.

Terry's of York closed a few years ago. Their chocolate oranges are now made in Poland, I think.

Rowntrees of York is owned by Nestle. They used to make Kitkats and Smarties in York. Half the factory has been closed down and made into a museum, I think, or that was the plan when we left York. They will soon move out of York and all York will have left will be chocolate museums.
I still boycott their products because whatever they say, they still sell babymilk powder to women who do not have access to clean water.

Rowntrees, like Cadburys, were big Quaker families, and there is still a Quaker school and village in York. You have the Rowntree family to thank for bank holidays. There is also the Rowntree Foundation which still does a lot of work on poverty and social housing.

Actually, it's fairly easy to misinterpret spoken comments too.

It's just so easy to misinterpret written comments!

Okey dokey Ceesnan. It just sounded as if you were saying that all this was a lot of meaningless hot air. I must have misunderstood.

Absentgrana I did not intend the remark to be rude, but if that's how you want to regard it, so be it. I expressed an honestly held opinion, that was all.

I'm not very keen on chocolate and eat it only rarely, so I'm not familiar with who owns what nowadays. I did know about Kraft and the disgraceful way it was allowed to barge in on a promise on which it immediately reneged. Does it pay its full share of tax here, I wonder?

They used to be, absent but the label now clearly says Nestlé. I think Rowntree was subsumed into Nestlé as Cadbury is now part of Kraft, though the name has been retained. Terry's of York (of Chocolate Orange fame) became part of Kraft as long ago as 1993. Even the organic brand Green and Black's was absorbed into Cadbury's and so presumably is now owned by the omnipresent Kraft.

Weren't Kit-Kats Rowntrees?

Indeed not. It was only Milky Bars and Kit-Kats that affected us anyway. The kids understood.

I know what you mean Bags. These huge companies are hydra-like. One cannot constantly check Company's House before writing a shopping a list. However, as before, I would point out that boycotting obvious Nestlé products and supporting WaterAid are not mutually exclusive.

Quite, absent, except that my brain tells me it's silly to continue doing something ineffective. For this reason, I don't carefully check the small print to see if Nestlé is involved, and so forth. I boycotted their products for years because they were promoting baby bottle-feeding in countries where people didn't have access to clean water. Fat lot of good it did. So I decided to support WaterAid instead.

Besides, the multinational companies are SO complex nowadays that I'm not sure it's possible to know who owns what any more. I still don't buy Nestlé products knowingly, but I'm not going to sweat about it any more.

Ceesnan Some of us have been boycotting particular companies and countries for decades. Clearly the only effect this has had is to leave us with a clear conscience; the "boycotees" have remained relatively or completely unaffected. Nevertheless, I would point out that not all of what is said here is rhetoric and sabre rattling – that is quite rude generalisation. Writing to one's MP is not an alternative but an additional line of action.

Two concurrent threads - one in which many state that Amazon and Starbucks are doing nothing wrong despite showing enormous greed- and another where many (and without checking, possibly the same) saying that the greed of the Blairs is odious. And yet the Blairs do pay tax and a lot of it- so the comparison did come to mind. Why is one greed 'odious' and the other 'fair'?

No doubt this fuming will die down soon, and all the online rhetoric of boycotts and sabre rattling will fade away. As has already been mentioned, look at the effect the 'boycott' of Children in Need had! If you feel you have to voice your dismay then contact your MP. Of course, yours might be as useless as mine, but you would be doing something positive and might even get a response!

I think the Blairs have been mentioned because people (including me) feel cynical about a lot of the rich politicians who could make changes to tax laws if they wanted to, but they don't because the current tax loopholes benefit them as well as Starbucks and Amazon (and, no doubt, other businesses). I don't think the issue is a simple black and white one though; I suppose they do have to consider driving businesses out of Britain by 'adverse' tax laws.

I've never been in a position to evade taxes (legally or illegally), but if I found myself in a situation where legally evading paying some tax substantially increased my income, I'm not sure I could resist the temptation to take advantage of a law that was an ass! I speak as one who has always had to be careful with money. I would accept a change in the law that made it impossible to evade paying the tax, of course. However, that's just a hypothetical situation.

As it happens, I don't use Amazon much, though I have bought the occasional book using it, and I also don't use Starbucks much though again, I have drunk their coffee when in dire need of a caffeine fix on a long drive! I'm not going to go into guilt overdrive about it!!

It would be good if a boycott such as this had the desired effect but I won't hold my breath about that.

I did say I was cynical on this issue!

jingle and Ana