Buy European

Today at work, my colleagues were discussing alternatives to buying stuff from amazon. I was really surprised, because they usually don't seem too involved in this kind of stuff. I think we're going in the right direction.

In the last couple year or so, I have noticed what may be the beginning of shift but by large most people still are simply buying whatever they want/need, and if at all possible they will buy it at the lowest price (aka Amazon) and who would blame them seeing how everything is becoming stupidly crazy expensive? Even subscriptions are out of control, it's absurd.

The less impactful motivation around here being 'by local/EU don't buy GAFAM/US' thing. People don't seem to care much, if at all. Thing may change if price keep rising but I really would not bet on that. You would have told me in 2007 (first iPhone released) people would queue to pay 1500€+ for a... phone...

What I've noticed on the other hand is more and more people (my age and younger) wanting to refocus their live on things that matter (a job that would mean something, more time with their loved ones), and with the advent of AI I've seen a lot of people wanting to find things to do with their own hands. But that's local out of necessity you can hardly be a craftsman (or at least earn a living being one) with your customers living over one side of the planet and your source material being on the other side ;)

So far I've heard quite a few people say we should focus more on getting the stuff we depend on from Europe, but I'm not sure if these people were still as supportive if it meant that they have to pay a little bit more.

It's been in the newspapers and even on TV in some countries in Europe. I have family who suddenly popped up on Signal because "we have friends who decided to use less American products, so they left WhatsApp". It was a surprise to me too.

Looks to me like it's a online people thing. Haven't noticed anything IRL.

As a general idea: Very much, pretty much everyone around agrees that it's a good thing and 'we' should do it. When the choise would be slightly inconvenient for them personally: Not so much.

And obviously there's the few who actually use signal and fediverse, drop meta/google/twitter and make active choises when shopping for things, but there's not too many of them. Here in Finland we have markings on food which are domestically produced, but as very few pineapples or olives grow around here I don't think too many pays attention on where the products come from. And then there's chain labels like Coop which often label country of origin as 'EU and non-EU countries' anyways.

And I'm not any different, even if I consider to have pretty decent knowledge on things. On groceries things like Coca-Cola are produced locally even if the mothership gets their cut and with corporations like Nestle it's just pretty much a lost cause trying to keep up what brands are "bad" by some metric.

At least on digital world it's a bit easier, but there's still things like whatsapp and instagram which are important enough due to their massive user base that they just can't be ignored for various reasons. And with electronics I try to avoid at least the cheapest Chinese crap, both for quality and security (yeah, I know, not using Huawei phone to use Meta apps is a bit hypocrite). But I also try to stay away from Google services (but I'm not going to root my phone just for that), run Linux almost everywhere (but that's what I've been doing for 20+years anyways, it's not about country of origin), use Amazon only if there isn't alternative (or the alternative is so much more expensive that it just doesn't make sense in personal scale) and so on.

Maybe it does something, maybe it doesn't. I just try to throw my pennies in a hat whenever possible to keep things around locally. I live in a small rural town and if I need a can of paint or a single bolt I need to drive ~50km round trip to get anything. Should someone open a hardware store in here I would be the first customer just to show support. But I'm not made out of money either and have my limitations in life, so if the local business is too slow, too expensive, too rude or whatever else I'm not going to feel too bad when they go down. And that's the general idea I try to apply even more broad scope, whenever there's a "local" viable alternative I try to prefer that, just to keep competition alive and have more european base values around, but I'm not going to make my life unnecessary complicated because of that either.

@Blaze Here in Romania we tend to be quite nationalistic, so, ironically, people are really buying from EU.