An email that Brown received from her manager this past August has a section titled “Urine bottle” and states: “In the morning, you must check your van thoroughly for garbage and urine bottle. If you find urine bottle (s) please report to your lead, supporting staff or me. Vans will be inspected by Amazon during debrief, if urine bottle (s) are found, you will be issue an infraction tier 1 for immediate offboarding.” While Amazon technically prohibits the practice — documents characterize it as a “Tier 1” infraction, which employees say can lead to termination — drivers said that this was disingenuous since they can’t meet their quotas otherwise. “They give us 30 minutes of paid breaks, but you will not finish your work if you take it, no matter how fast you are,” one Amazon delivery employee based in Massachusetts told me. Asked if management eased up on the quotas in light of the practice, Brown said, “Not at all. In fact, over the course of my time there, our package and stop counts actually increased substantially.” This has gotten even more intense, employees say, as Amazon has seen an enormous boom in package orders during the coronavirus pandemic. Amazon employees said their performance is monitored so closely by the firm’s vast employee surveillance arsenal that they are constantly in fear of falling short of their productivity quotas.

Bookshop is an online bookstore with a mission to financially support independent bookstores and give back to the book community. […] Bookshop will support indies in two ways: • 10% of sales on Bookshop.org support participating independent bookstores in an overall earnings pool that is evenly divided and distributed to stores every six months. • Stores that are affiliates, who sell books online using Bookshop (by sharing links their Bookshop link on social media, email newsletters, or on their websites) will earn 25% commission directly on any sales they generate, without having to do the work of keeping inventory, picking, packing, shipping or handling complaints and returns.

Welcome to the most lovingly curated selection of Amazon and Prime alternatives anywhere. We aim to make giving up Amazon easy and to encourage more people While Amazon's monopolistic stranglehold on our economy has made it increasingly difficult to completely avoid supporting them, we've discovered that—contrary to conventional wisdom—it’s often possible to find lower prices, sometimes substantially, by shopping elsewhere. You just have to know where to look...

Amazon sellers often buy goods from Walmart and Target to resell on the platform, but the products need to be repackaged before being sent in. This has given rise to an industry of Amazon "preppers," often located in no-sales-tax states.

Eight or nine years down the road, we can be pretty sure that if a tech behemoth suddenly feels like doing something horrible, they just will do it. Please buy paper books.

Where does this strange empire start or stop?

Looking at the big picture, these are all tiny things, mostly harmless. Considering the amount of harm Amazon does to the environment and the people who work for them, it’s hard to give much of a shit about whether or not there’s a Subscribe & Save option for a bassoon harness. But these little things matter when we’re putting massive amounts of money, personal data (including our kids’ data), and faith into a company that’s falling short of its basic business: running a website that sells stuff.

Indeed, many of the most pressing issues of the streaming music economy—artist compensation, statistical transparency, sexism—remain untouched, if not deepened, by the rise of the smart speaker. Moreover, as Amazon, Apple, and Google continue to carve out their spaces in the voice marketplace, music consumers and musicians alike will continue to fight against the companies’ preferred walled-garden approach to exclusivity. And though there’s no real reason to sympathize with Tidal or Spotify, the idea that the smart speaker industry might become the exclusive province of massive firms with enough capital to experiment (and huge captive audiences to use as guinea pigs) is significant reason for pause, no matter how little one is interested in owning the devices. A world in which three of tech’s “frightful five” become the equivalent of the major labels, with exclusive holdings in hardware and software, and plenty of incentive to lock competitors’ products and content out of their systems, is a chilling idea, and not as far-fetched as it might seem.

The tech giant’s rise has pushed mail clerks and carriers to the breaking point.

On crazy geniuses and products with and without imagination. "And the iPod itself is a shiny fruit fallen to earth from an enchanted tree in a mystical fairy land populated entirely by crazy geniuses."

A history of Amazon's site design, and a preview of what's next.