Whenever people criticize exploitative companies I notice that they tend to target consumers as if everybody using those services always have a choice in the matter, but im willing to bet that a massive chunk of the population that shops at walmart, orders from amazon, subscribe to disney+, etc, are poor/rural people who cant afford any of the alternatives. And what exactly do you expect them to do?
Disney+ is the cheapest option for reliable entertainment for poor parents with kids. Netflix is the cheapest option for that for most others. They still deserve to watch TV when they cant afford a cable package (and yes, pirating still has barriers attached to it. For one, you need to be able to afford the computer, just for starters). Not everyone who has a streaming service subscription is a bootlicker or supports the disney corporation or thinks netflix has the most correct working conditions.
Amazon is the cheapest option for shipping, well… almost anything. And in a lot of places, its the only thing that can reliably get there at all within the month. And when a prime subscription comes with free shipping and a streaming service? That cuts out one major expense AND the expense from the first point, too. Folks still deserve to be able to order things when they cant afford to pay for shipping fees or when they can only afford the cheapest possible option for the item they need. Not everybody with a prime subscription or who orders the occasional thing off amazon wants to personally suck jeff bezos’s dick or thinks warehouse workers deserve to be worked to death.
Walmart remains the cheapest possible option for most people in north america, especially in the cost of living crisis right now where groceries cost more than your rent. Not everybody who shops at walmart thinks the workers deserve to be exploited or that unions are bad or that driving out small businesses is a good thing
And im gonna be honest, every single “alternative” ive seen from people acting these ways is WAYYY more expensive and unreliable to poor and rural people than the things theyre telling us to stop using. You absolutely should support small businesses when you can but i usually dont have small business money. I can either buy a few little things to eat that will last me maybe a week or i can get enough for the month for the same amount at walmart, and thats not MY fault.
What exactly do you want us to do here
This too
Like… i dont really think the average disney+ customer is really thinking this hard about moral pros and cons, theyre just going “oh 10 bucks a month is really cheap if i and/or all my kids can watch anything disney has done as much as we want.”
Im reminded of when i saw a post about how netflix got a brief spike in profits after enacting anti password sharing from people creating new accounts, and the OP’s claim was “all you had to do was not give them money but once again yall cant even boycott chick fil-a.” And it just seemed so willfully obtuse to act like a service that everyone in the world and their tech-inept great grandmothers have was somehow going to be effected at all by a dying microblogging platform spreading posts about how problematic their business practices are among folks who didnt even have it in the first place. Netflix doesnt have a target audience, the entire world has a netflix account at this point.
But its easier to yell at individual consumers than face a really big and complicated problem that cant be solved with any one persons actions.
