Amazon customer service is shit. My wife is currently on the fifth round of disputing a charge for a product that Amazon itself asked us to dispose rather than returning it; this after trying to get them to ship the correct product four times (and every time they shipped the wrong one), before she finally gave up and just asked to do a return.

Amazon product quality is shit. Fakes are prevalent, half of reviews are fake these days, sellers use blatant fraud such as swapping one item listing for something completely different while retaining the existing collection of 5-star reviews etc.

But meanwhile Amazon's sheer size and monopolistic practices (https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/09/...) mean that alternative choices are often simply not available.

And then that market dominance is itself built on large-scale abuse of its workforce. Which is to say, people who are my neighbors.

Ironically, I used to be a hardcore right libertarian; ancap, even. I just couldn't do it anymore because none of it was possible to reconcile with day-to-day observations. I still believe that free markets are good for the people overall. I just don't see any free markets when I look at capitalism. For a market to be truly free and competitive, there must be a balance of power between the players. We don't have anything even remotely like that - not between capital and labor, and not between large and small capital.