In Consumers Republic by Lizabeth Cohen, there is a blow by blow recounting of the struggles over equal access to the marketplace . For many Black folks, the right to pay at all for goods and services, followed by the right to pay the same prices as white people for goods and services, was seen as a key battleground in the fight for civil rights. Duh. We've read about the lunch-counter sit ins, the bus boycotts, etc.

While there are fewer clear cut examples of Black folks being intentionally blocked from spending their money where they want here in 2022 (at least on the scale we'll call "consumer facing decisions), there are still plenty of examples of inequality in our current marketplace along less overt lines. Algorithmic bias - systematic and repeatable errors in a computer system that create unfair outcomes - is rampant in things from facial recognition software to redlining in costs of home and auto insurance. This shouldn't be much of a surprise: any algorithm is only as good as the data that is fed into the machine, and our data (and our assumptions about data) have been gathered in a racist society. The outcomes follow without a clear anti-racist programming mindset.

What does all this have to do with Amazon? Specifically, the Consumer Facing perspective of amazon that we're talking about on this forum? Well... Amazon Doesn’t Consider the Race of Its Customers. Should It?

In short, this article (you should read it) traces the ways that many communities (usually poor, usually BIPOC) don't have access to Amazon Prime shipping. On the one hand, this seems like a huge victory for us - a whole group of people who are already boycotting Prime! YAY! But then you start to think about the basic human right under capitalism, and you it seems pretty shitty that groups who already live in places with worse supermarkets, less access to goods and services, and fewer resources overall are getting frozen out of some of the real benefits of this service.

This is, at its heart, a muddying of the dichotomy that Cohen describes between the "Citizen Consumer", (who sees their role in the consumer movement as “responsible for safeguarding the general good of the nation, in particular for prodding government to protect the rights, safety, and fair treatment of individual consumers in the private marketplace”) and the Purchaser Consumer (who came to see consumption in any form as a patriotic role to promote the general welfare).

Anyway, this is a long winded way of acknowledging the myriad privileges of any boycott. Not only the time to shop elsewhere or wait for shipping, or the money to buy things at something other then the lowest price, but also the access to Amazon products to Boycott in the first place! What a fascinating mess.