Because they are one of the few internet companies that I find actually useful. If you live in a rural area, there's really no other way. A new PC, a floor jack, large book store, decent boots, are all 60 miles away. Of course, Amazon caused part of the retail desert, although I'd mostly blame box stores (and the Sears catalog before that).
With the sites I named, I think my life would trundle on pretty much unchanged. Maybe Usenet could be added to the list for the odd bit of online socializing.
While I'm designing my personal minimal internet, I'd add that all the interfaces were text based. Potentially a person could bolt on a low/no vision voice-based front-end.
Before the Sears catalog you instead had local monopolies by general store owners who could be absolute tyrants since there weren’t any cars. Getting what you need has always been difficult unless you literally live where it’s being made, which these days is Shenzhen or Guangzhou or somewhere like that.
The Rise and Fall of American Growth [0] is a fascinating book that talks about how much the Sears catalog revolutionized commerce in rural America.
How can you bemoan what the internet has become and support Amazon in the comment?
Amazon is a lifeline for people who live in remote places, which is what I think he means by cabins in Canada.
Amazon is the new Sears Catalog, enabling people who live pretty much anywhere in North America to buy things quickly and safely that are not available to them any other way.
Pre-pandemic I spent a lot of time with people who live in places where a "supermarket run" happens every other month, when the person with the largest truck drives three hours to the nearest Costco to fill ten grocery lists for all the neighbors. Amazon handles the days in between.
Amazon annoys the living daylights out of me, but that's because of usability issues, not because of deceptive or intentionally-misleading practices. What are the ones you're thinking of?
If anything, Amazon's incompetence at search screws them out of sales they would otherwise make. Their "dark patterns" are all aimed at their own foot.
Amazon is the best thing that every happened on the web. I know people here hate it, and in the US apparently it has an issue with fake goods, haven't had any think like that happen to me here in Europe.
I can buy just about anything from one shop and have it arrive at my door. The weirdest combos ever. An HDMI cable and cat food? Yes sir that will be on your doorstep next monday. A #2 screw driver and a new bag for my vacum cleaner? A bag pack, a pair of pants and a flash light? Right you go.
I no longer have to go out to small shops and find the item I want, saving me a ton of time. Plus so, so many books.
Maybe it is different in the US where you have wallmart, but here I have to source things from different online shops, which takes time, is annoying an results in higher fees, plus I don't know which shops are any good.
