Also, Amazon is good? What planet are we on?
I'm on a planet where poor people are not just laborers but also consumers. Walmart and Amazon are great for low-income consumers (and to be honest, for laborers in comparison to small businesses). They have used scale to achieve great efficiencies and bring/keep prices low on a lot of products consumed by low-income individuals, boosting their quality of life. As per the above, if you hit a point of minimum wage hike that really starts hitting prices, that starts to look like a regressive tax hike. It's the conundrum with our agricultural labor too. If we had a $15/hr minimum wage and strictly enforced immigration, the cost of food would skyrocket and make people at the bottom worse off. That may not justify the pay or conditions that migrant farm workers live in, but it is at least something to keep in mind. Also worth keeping in mind is that the conditions migrant farm workers live in are still arguably better than in their home countries. See also concerns about sweatshops overseas...not something we should completely ignore, but if the alternative is no jobs, just subsistence farming, you've made their lives worse by trying to make their lives better.
Amazon and Walmart keep people poor by being the only business in town, thus being able to control wages, then peddle their shit to them, and no one needs to be thankful for that. It is not good. It is evil. Through this wondrous mechanism known as the "free" market (in quotes because it's impossible to actually get into without the proper backing, so very few people can actually be anything besides cogs in the play thing of the rich), they put their competitors out of business or co-opted them through so-called "marketplaces", so an individual has to do some level of research and (and, I'm sorry, but it's true) have a decent education to even know what the alternatives are. Walmart and Amazon are the race to the bottom, they are near the logical ends of capitalism. Once they merge or just make some sort of mutual pact to coexist, then that will be the actual end. Let us not even talk about the impact on the environment from shipping all this meaningless crap all over the planet. BTW if Amazon and Walmart were so effective at what they supposedly "do" for low-income consumers, then we wouldn't have problems with items such as food insecurity, so how efficient and effective can they really be. I wouldn't be going to a community garden tomorrow if they just had us all taken care of.
Might sound crazy, and I'm saying this out of anger, but also kind of actually feel this way: People might just get what they deserve. No one seems to stand up for themselves. They're just comfortably consumed by all of their cheap, meaningless, stupid things. Not enough people wonder how things came to be this way, or how we can take hold of this infrastructure for the people's benefit. Part of that is why I feel the need to get active. I am incapable of toiling in cynicism for too long. But I do wonder why it just seems like nobody gives a shit. While I'm at it, is this the ends of identity politics? That instead of just white men screwing over 99.9% of the country, the world, the planet, now LGBTQ+, Black, indigenous, Latinx, women, etc., also get a chance to screw over 99.9% of the country, world, and planet?
Humanity might just not know how to be human anymore. Maybe the word "human" should just be replaced by "consumer". I don't know, I will have to try to have more faith going forward, but every time I talk with someone who is so taken by this awful system, I just want to disappear.