Amazon Prime Backlash and Information Cascade
Amazon has been known for its many bad practices including the dire circumstances of workers in the warehouse, monopolistic practices to tax avoidance, environmental damage, and more. This is all old news, but this year, media companies have been openly discouraging readers from shopping at Amazon. Tech site Gizmodo previously called Prime “the best deal in tech”, but this year was calling for a Prime Day boycott. Journalists and writers have also become far more willing to vocalize anti-Amazon sentiments. Jia Tolentino of the New Yorker tweeted that she had cancelled her Prime subscription and encouraged her followers to do so. Podcaster Kyle Amato offered a free handmade cup to anyone who canceled their Prime membership. However, the number of Prime subscribers is still growing, and as of this spring, there are more than 100 million of them worldwide. The phrase “cancel Amazon Prime” peaked on Google Trends in December 2017 and has been in decline since then. Tolentino says, “The backlash has actually grown slower than I would’ve thought, given that Amazon’s labor abuses have been well-documented for a long time … people are so busy… it’s easy to just close your eyes and cut corners by getting that free shipping when you can.” She also mentions, “I think we’ll have to sacrifice a lot of convenience to allow for humance conditions at Amazon. It’s such a beast at this point. It either needs to be broken up or nationalized, and I’m not sure where to start. I can only fight with my wallet.”
We have just learned information cascade in class, and this is a great example of how overthrowing an opinion is hard. If we treat each person as a node and either they choose Prime or not as two different choices, the network of people with amazon prime is so powerful that people who are trying to get people to boycott the service is having a hard time. This also shows how in real life there are other factors to think about when it comes to information cascade. Although there could be a strong network of no Prime, as Tolentino says, it is so easy to choose the free delivery when your life is so busy and you don’t have much money to spare. This would affect the threshold at where people choose either to get Prime or not, and each person would have different value of “q” (threshold) depending on how much they are willing to give up their convenience for better working conditions in Amazon warehouses. Because it is so easy for people to focus on their own livings and convenience, the q value is very high in most cases, and that makes it even harder for protesters to convince Prime members to cancel their membership on top of their very well-established network of 100 million Prime users.
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