Amazon, Those Bastards! Support Family Shops and Land Bezos on the Moon
Amazon, Those Bastards! Support Family Shops and Land Bezos on the Moon
Go ahead — type “Smoke herbs” into the Google search bar. We’ll wait.
Usually, Bear Blend comes up around 2nd place, thanks to you reading articles like these. We owe you one! We’ll buy you a shot, smoke you down, slap the proverbial High 5 shit out of you.
Who usually comes up #1?
Amazon.
Those bastards!
It’s not that we mind playing second fiddle, honestly. But Amazon is buying up the Internet and running small, family-owned businesses like Yours Truly out of town.
In fact, one of every two dollars spent online goes to Amazon. They’ve practically got an iron-gloved fist stuck up the entire Internet’s wazoo.
The House Subcommittee on Antitrust has determined Amazon holds monopoly power over small and medium-sized businesses.
Amazon’s monopoly deity-ship over online sales has washed out over 136,000 brick-and-mortar shops, and those shitty-paying Amazon jobs replace only about half of the 1.7 million retail jobs lost in its wake, according to this 2022 report.
And that’s to say nothing of small online shops like ours just trying to make a living and feed our families while spreading the gospel of organic herbs.
Up the Wazoo by the Bezos P-Rocket
But wait, you say: Isn’t Bear Blend offered for sale on Amazon?
Technically, yes, but the Amazon marketplace is little more than advertising for us at the end of the day. Nearly 50% of each sale is washed out by Amazon fees, so buying from Amazon doesn’t really help us pay our bills or workers. And we have to pay shipping since we’re not on Prime.
But the plot thickens. Back in the day, we were on Amazon Prime, until Amazon’s Capitalist bitch sister of an algorithm kicked us off.
Because some of our smokable herbal blends contain Damiana, which it turns out is heavily regulated in the state of Louisiana (we are no longer able to offer many of our products in the state of Louisiana), Amazon determined our product to be a synthetic cannabanoid.
What the hell were they smoking? Probably crack laced with truckstop synthetic THC and that shit you feed to fish.
Bear Blend is obviously not synthetic marijuana. Sure, we pair great with Cannabis and the tobacco-less spliff is a real thing, but our smokable blends won’t get you high. They might relax you, mellow your soul, help you sleep, maybe even rev your libido under the sheets, but you’ll still need to add your own Cheech Marin to our Tommy Chong if you plan to levitate 7 feet high off your double chamber glass Graphix bong.
We tried telling Amazon that – and their reps agreed. “It’s the algorithm,” they said. “It’s Satan, but there’s nothing we can do about it. You can’t second guess computer equations and math.”
Amazon: the Modern Robber Barons of the Online Shopping World

If you’re looking to be greener and ethical with your online dollar, there are plenty of reasons not to shop at Amazon.
They’re anti-union and have a long history of violating labor laws to suppress workers’ rights. Their workers get hurt twice as often as others in similar industries (more than 24,000 injuries in 2020). And they’re terrible for the environment. Back in 2020, when all global emissions were falling, Amazon facilities managed to grow their pollution by almost 20%.
In a conversation with the Sun Magazine, Stacy Mitchell, author of the book, the Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses, explains what small businesses face in competition to Amazon:
“As search traffic migrates to Amazon, independent businesses face a Faustian bargain: Do they continue to hang their shingle on a road that is increasingly less traveled or do they become an Amazon seller? It’s no easy decision, because once you become a third-party seller, 15 percent of your revenue typically goes to Amazon — more if you use their warehouse and fulfillment services. Amazon also uses the data that it gleans from monitoring your sales to compete against you by offering the same items.”
Amazon may seem to work with third-party sellers, but they have a long history of stealing those companies’ data to create their own products and push out the little guy. Many retailers can only compete by selling as a third-party site on Amazon. The warehouse monopoly steals their ideas and then runs them out of business simply because they can.
Launched in 1999, Zappos’ online shoe store was a serious competitor to Amazon. When the online conglomerate tried to buy Zappos, the store refused to sell. So Amazon tried to drive the company out of business by selling shoes for less than it paid for them and offering free shipping. Zappos did not have the resources to lose money on a price war, so it eventually had to sell. The company still exists today, but only as a subsidiary of Amazon.
Ditto for Diapers.com., the online diaper delivery service. Amazon began selling their diapers at a loss to bleed the company dry, and then later bought it.
Mitchell compares Amazon’s monopolization of online shopping to the 19th-century robber barons:
“During the Gilded Age, toward the end of the nineteenth century, these industrialists gained control of a technology that was opening up a new way of doing business: the railroad. They used their command of the rails to disadvantage their competitors.
“It’s striking how similar this history is to what Amazon has done: a new technology comes along that gives people a novel way to bring their wares to market, but a single company gains control over it and uses that power to undermine competitors and create a monopoly.”
Nature and herbs thrive through local and small economies. Shop local. Buy smokable herbs directly from the source.
So yes, shout it from the mountaintops: “Amazon, those bastards!” Do us and every other Mom & Pop shop a favor. Buy local. Shop small businesses from their very own websites. Buy smokable herbs directly from us, and tell Jeff Bezos to fly his penis rocket into the gravity soul-sucking black hole of some other planet’s moon.

Mathew Gallagher
Wordsmith Specialist
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Thank you for sharing, I appreciate the insight. May we have the clarity to live consciously.