I respectfully disagree that it’s “sheer laziness.” There’s the same dynamic as the so-called Walmart Effect, wherein brick-and-mortar “Mom N’ Pop” shops are increasingly being put out of business to the point where there really aren’t many “viable alternatives.”

You say “Walmart is evil, so I’m going to go buy this power drill at the local hardware store!” Okay, but Walmart ran your local hardware store out of business so you have to drive 50 miles to find the Mom N’ Pop hardware store and when you get there, they don’t have the power drill you want or if they do, it costs 10 dollars more, not counting the gas and time costs you spent getting there to buy the damn thing.

In my case, I don’t have a car and I work 60+ hours a week between writing and my side job. I don’t really have time to ride the bus to the Best Buy an hour to and from every time I need an HDMI cable or whatever. I wouldn’t call that “laziness”—I’d call it dealing with real world constraints in the most optimal way possible.

Anyways, the bottom line, as I explained in the piece, is that this all really useless individualistic behavior that doesn’t change things one iota aside from giving people the satisfaction that they’re “not part of the problem.”

For consumers, Amazon provides a great service. There’s nothing wrong with using it per se. The problem is its labor practices, which can be reformed without sacrificing that service. The service that delivers a huge chunk of its packages, UPS, has one of the highest unionization rates in the industry, and they deliver packages on time.