Anyone else struggling to avoid Amazon because of the price of some things? I need 3M Tegaderm for example and on Amazon it cost 28€ for 10cm by 10m roll and on other sites that are not Amazon I can only find it for pretty much double the price (shop-apotheke.com has it for 58,40€ https://www.shop-apotheke.com/arzneimittel/3816512/3m-tegaderm-roll-10-cm-x-10-m.htm and medizinbedarf.eu has it for 49,60€ https://www.medizinbedarf.eu/3M-Tegaderm-Roll-Transparentverband-unsteril-10-cm-x-10-m). Stuff like this really makes it difficult.
Anyone know where I can find this as cheap as on Amazon or at least not much more expensive?
Price and availability.
Which is part of why “voting with your wallet” is a fallacious late capitalist trap. You don’t have much of a vote and you can’t use it freely.
I’ve lived in places not covered by Amazon and they have much better local alternatives than the Western European regions where Amazon has sucked the air out of the space. You’re not going to re-enable competition in logistics by buying from local online stores, you’re re-enabling competition by breaking up Amazon and nationalizing their local branches (or taxing them to hell until they can’t compete, I suppose).
I have the privilidge (or I might consider it a curse, since I’m under the poverty line and extra savings would mean a lot), of living in a country without Amazon. So the amazon shipping prices and customs mean it’s inconvinient and often more expensive to order from amazon.
Yeah, last time I was in a place under those same circumstances I was surprised at just how competent their local big online retailer was. It really did most of the same things Western Europeans and North Americans think only Amazon could do. Same day delivery in major cities, free delivery, no-questions-asked returns, the whole deal.
It was a remarkable confirmation that Amazon isn’t deploying some secret sauce. Their model is entirely replicable, they’re just so big that any local retailer doing the same thing is just crushed before they can compete.
You don’t fix that with a soft boycott.