I read this article After Irma, Some Florida Stores Reopen and it got me thinking. The article is about bookshops in Florida, the damage they’ve received (or not) from Hurricane Irma and if they’re going to be able to open. I started thinking about shopping local and Amazon popped into my mind. Essentially, it’s shop local so that these big online megastores don’t take over and the local shops have to close.
All very well but Amazon is opening a warehouse in Melbourne soon. I can’t tell you when but if I could be bothered I could tell you where, find out in this article. It’s got both good and bad. We’ve lost manufacturing in Australia so it’s good to have a big company opening up supposedly with thousands of jobs, the location isn’t in the area where the manufacturing closed down but never spoil a good story with actual facts or logic. Don’t forget to have a look at the comments in the article, some of them are quite pertinent. One person talks about a mechanical book handling service and it reminded me I’ve seen a video in an Amazon warehouse of something like that. If they use this then the number of jobs is likely to be vastly reduced.
I don’t know what this will do to the market but I do urge you to shop local. Sometimes we have to spend a little bit extra on an item to make sure the shop is still there in the future. I try to use this logic with a lot of my shopping. And no, my supermarket of choice is not one of the big two.