Side Note

This Amazon Prime Day, try not to be a scab

It’s Prime Day, that magical 36 hours out of the year where it for some reason becomes socially acceptable to get publicly psyched over the prospect of paying a tech giant marginally less to send Alibaba-quality products to your door in a disturbingly short amount of time. Instead of rushing into the uncomfortably jacked arms of Jeffrey P. Bezos this Prime Day, we suggest doing literally anything else with your time and/or money. Think of it like a Prime Day Deal but for your soul.

Amazon workers in Spain and Germany are on strike today to protest just how awful conditions are at the tech company’s fleet of warehouses and fulfillment centers. Organized by the group Amazon En Lucha, the strike is expected to last until July 18 and comes with a call for a customer boycott.

This is not the first such strike, by far, and definitely won’t be the last. Despite the fact that from now until Christmas most media organizations will be busy churning out the journalistic equivalent of a supermarket deals mailer in a desperate bid to actually make money online, there’s been no dearth of coverage of Amazon’s many, many sins. A shortlist: Amazon employees have been denied the right to regularly drink water on the job, forced to work in stifling warehouses without air conditioning, ended up sleeping under bridges due to corporate scheduling issues, collapsed on the job from exhaustion, and had to go on food stamps due to low wages, despite working for Jeffy B. in a full or part time capacity.

So, despite the undeniable allure of saving 5 percent on a “high end” selfie stick, it might be best to sit this Prime Day out. Sure, you’d be missing out on a stemless wine glass with “I love to wrap both my HANDS around it and SWALLOW” engraved on it (at 20 percent off, no less), but you also wouldn’t be a scab.

What matters more, saving $7 on a spice rack or your soul?