Dropshipping

[blimix]

I don't order items from the Amazon warehouse (3rd party sellers are fine) because of humanitarian concerns over the treatment of their warehouse workers. If it costs more, that's fine: It only reflects the real costs of treating employees like human beings. So when I buy something on eBay and it get dropshipped from Amazon (meaning the seller doesn't have it, they just order it on Amazon as a "gift" for me), that annoys me. They just profited by wasting my effort to make the world a better place. This is a common practice that does not violate their agreements with eBay or Amazon (unless they ship with Amazon Prime), and it satisfies their orders, so there's no justification for negative feedback. I just want to be able to avoid Amazon dropshipping, and I'm not sure how (without giving up eBay entirely). I could look for low-volume shippers, but that's a very inexact heuristic.

Edit: I figured it out! The eBay listing often includes an item location. I can search for that city in this list of Amazon warehouse locations. I just did that for an item that I strongly suspected was being dropshipped. Joliet, Illinois turned out to be on the list, so I knew not to order that item.

Comments

[kirin]

I haven't used it recently, but I guess there's no way on eBay to leave a feedback note that's merely informative, without a positive or negative rating?

[blimix]

Yes, or neutral rating. But leaving anything other than a positive rating is a dick move (due to eBay policies that are harsh on sellers, possibly causing them to not show up in search results) unless it is truly deserved. I *could* attach the comment to a positive rating, but probably ten people at most would see it before it left the first page of ratings, and zero out of those ten would care.

[beth_leonard]

Is Amazon still that bad? Or did they improve as a result of the bad press? I note that your link says the original story was published in 2011. They enable so many people to make a living on their own terms (for example, your eBay seller) I'm reluctant to condemn them.
--Beth

[blimix]

From 2013, Gawker collects stories from Amazon workers. Positive, negative and mixed stories, but includes: "... below zero temps INSIDE the warehouse" "My feet hurt so bad, I would have trouble going to sleep, I was in so much pain."

This article has links to the above and many others that I can't sum up right now due to time constraints.

Here's a 2014 article about The supreme court backing up Amazon (and their warehouse subcontractor) on not paying employees for the mandatory screenings that waste a half-hour of each of their days.

From 2015: A NYTimes article basically describing Amazon engineering as a white-collar sweatshop, with simultaneous contrasting (extreme) views on the merits of these conditions. (The money quote is, "Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk." But a lot of the interviewees also appreciated being driven hard.)

I see no reason to assume that Amazon has improved since then. But like I said, I'm happy to order things from small business that sell through Amazon as third parties. They need the business, and presumably aren't running giant sweatshops. (My dropshipping eBay seller, though, isn't providing a service worth paying for. I could have ordered the thing from Amazon directly and paid less. I don't consider wasting money on a parasitic businessman to be virtuous.)