Never Again! - Ten Reasons to Avoid Doing Business with Amazon.com

Amazon.com is great for buyers, just like eBay, but ONLY for BUYERS!

You can find almost anything you need there. It's easy, shipping speed is fast and prices are reasonable. I am still a happy buyer on Amazon.com, purchasing a special cat food for my senior cat all the time, since local stores hardly stock them any more!

I love shopping from Amazon.com, BUT WILL NOT SELL ANYTHING EVER AGAIN ON AMAZON.COM! Why? I used Amazon.com for years, but recently had an eye opening surprise, I realized that same as eBay, they don't care for small business, authors or artists! ALL they care for is to charge you more and more, to make their profit while hastening the demise of small, independent businesses. No thank you! I would rather give my "HazelMoon's Hawaiian Tarot" to people and small independent book stores who value them. They struggle just to pay their bills like the rest of us.

I used Amazon Market Place in USA, and the United Kingdom, especially the

"Fulfill by Amazon". From the beginning, everything  sounded good, so many of us sent them our products with little or no fees. Back then that was acceptable. Now, they want to charge you a long term storage fee? If you wish to not pay this, then you get stuck with the shipping bill too. Thank God I was not stupid enough to sent them all of my "HazelMoon's Hawaiian Tarot". I know some of the authors  were charged for $5000 or more for a new storage fee rather than be grandfathered in! I think that was disgusting. It made my stomach turn upside down.

If greed would be physical pain, these big corporations would be screaming right now!

So from now on, I will clean up my Amazon accounts and will ONLY sell my "HazelMoon's Hawaiian Tarot" through my website, my blog and on my eBay account. I will NOT make the FAT CAT corporations fatter. So, if you feel the same, and would like to have my "HazelMoon's HawaiianTarot" , please contact me directrly. I will be able to give you a "No Amazon" discount, just don't forget to ask! I am very flexable and more then happy to provide it to you from my heart to yours with Aloha!

If interested in, please visit artist/illustrator/author website direcly:

www.MyHawaiianTarot.com

Ten Reasons to Avoid Doing Business with Amazon.com

From: TheNation.com / By Staff

Even with Borders gone and independent booksellers struggling to get by, the war for the future of publishing rages on. As Steve Wasserman explains in “The Amazon Effect,” which appears in this week’s special issue of The Nation, booksellers and publishers have shifted toward digital books, and Amazon.com, which sells more electronic Kindle books than physical hardcovers, is well positioned to overpower its rivals. But what’s at stake in the battle over e-commerce and why should you avoid doing business with Amazon.com?

1. Amazon Dodges Taxes and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Doesn’t Contribute to Local Economies Through Charity

Last year, the Greenlining Institute reported that Amazon’s tax rate was among the lowest, at just 3.5 percent, of all companies included in the study. Yet despite the massive savings Amazon enjoys from exploiting tax loopholes, the company contributes surprisingly little to charities around its Seattle-area headquarters.

2. Amazon’s Business Model Is Monopolistic

Amazon is the world’s largest bookseller, offering more than 2 million titles. In an effort to lower prices, the company has demanded additional discounts from distributors—which, as Colin Robinson points out, is illegal under anti-trust law that prevents companies from selling a product at different prices to different customers. The company has been accused of having a “monopolistic grip on the publishing industry.”

3. Amazon Contributes to the Demise of Small, Independent Businesses

Amazon offers bestsellers at a loss in order to attract customers, a practice that has upended traditional publishing in the United States. But it doesn’t have to be this way, as Germany’s bookselling model illustrates.

4. Amazon Collects Your Information

Amazon.com states that it is “not in the business of selling” customers’ private information—e.g., what you buy, what you review, how you browse—to other companies, but last year Amazon.com was embroiled in a class-action lawsuit (Del Vecchio et al. v. Amazon.com) for allegedly bypassing customers’ privacy settings. Others have raised concerns about Kindle Fire’s web browser, fearing it would allow the company “to track customer behavior all over the Web, gathering data and marketing intelligence as it goes,” according to the New York Times.

5. Amazon Removed WikiLeaks from its Cloud Server

Under political pressure, Amazon removed WikiLeaks from its cloud server in 2010, prompting this question from Keir Thomas of PC World: “In an idyllic future where we make heavy use of the cloud, what happens if a cloud service provider removes content it deems inappropriate, or just doesn’t like?”

6. Amazon Was a Long-time Member of ALEC

Amazon was late to pull out of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative, pro-business nonprofit that recently came under fire for helping spread voter-identification and “Stand Your Ground” laws. Amazon, which has fought state-level taxation, focused on tax laws in ALEC.

7. Amazon Fights Unionization

When the Communications Workers of America launched a campaign to unionize Amazon’s customer-service representatives, the company argued that “unions actively foster distrust toward supervisors” and “create an uncooperative attitude among associates by leading them to think they are ‘untouchable’ with a union,” according to the New York Times. To make matters worse, many Amazon employees are temporary workers who do not receive basic benefits like healthcare, and for whom forming a union is “virtually impossible.”

8. Amazon Abuses Its Workers

Working conditions at Amazon.com warehouses can be brutal. Last fall, the Morning Callreported that employees were being “pushed to work at a pace many could not sustain” in warehouses where the temperature exceeded 100 degrees, causing workers to feel light-headed and pass out.

9. Amazon Has Turned Searching Into Another Way To Collect Users' Information

Amazon has made searching easier and more efficient, providing free information about books and, in some cases, permitting readers to “look inside” them. However, as Anthony Grafton explains in “Search Gets Lost,” the company has gradually cut back on its search capabilities, instead inviting the customer to provide information of every sort for Amazon to digest and profit from.

10. Amazon Is Just Too Big

In 2011, Amazon’s $48 billion in revenue exceeded that of all six major publishing conglomerates combined. It now resembles an “online Walmart” rather than a bookseller, writes Steve Wasserman, and has begun to colonize movie, baby product and shoe retailer websites, as well as the high-end fashion industry. For more on Amazon’s outsized power, be sure to read all of the articles in this week’s special issue on the retail giant.

DON'T MAKE THE FAT CAT ANY FATTER!
THANK YOU AND MAHALO FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION!

*****

Comment from: Tarotholics Anonymous

Jim Maher: ‎

Katalin ...that is why I am glad I bought my signed copy of your Hawaiian Tarot with other words of wisdom that you wrote with a pen...

directly from you :)

Katalin E Csikos-Gould:

Aloha Jim! I did post your comment on my blog!

Thank you for your input!
Many Blessings!
Mahalo and Big Hugs!
Katalin

Jim Maher:

My pleasure Katalin, I meant it, Best Wishes & Hugs right back to you always. I think people need to see and use your deck to better understand it, there is always something new there every time I use it/read for someone with it.. for me that is always the sign of a deck that will never wear out


Victoria Lanakila Generao:
A wonderful visionary deck that encompasses Ho'omanamana beautifully. I appreciate the thought put into the imagery and colors used in this deck.
Aloha wela ka hao!