Media Hating on Amazon

Continuing with this morning's theme...

I'm going to be honest, I order from Amazon all the time.  You may have noticed I link to their site and products all the time.  But there's been a lot of hating on Amazon in the media lately.  A few cases in point:

Amazon Backlash Continues to Build from Publishers Weekly

Amazon's Jungle Logic from the New York Times

These are both about the same thing...Amazon's price check app.  And the day (December 10) they gave big discounts for going into stores and using the app.  While the promotion apparently wasn't available for books, this is still a jerky thing for Amazon to do.

It's not enough to make me stop shopping at Amazon (for one thing, to my knowledge, there are no independent bookstores in my area and I don't know of another site online with a comparable number of reviews or a comparable selection including a pretty complete collection of used paperbacks).  I started buying there in the late 1990s when the only way to get something the bookstore didn't have was to do a special order at Barnes and Noble, then wait for a long time for it to come in.  (Side note: people apparently still do that, I see books like that behind the counter at B&N all the time.)  But it is Walmart-like behavior and it does cause some amount of moral conflict that I have to deal with.  (For the record, I haven't shopped at Walmart in several years, even though there are two supercenters within 15 minutes of where I live.)