@literorrery @mawr So I guess I'm the one who gets to devil's advocate for Amazon now. :\

I would be stunned (and INCREDIBLY chagrined) if that was anything other than the butchers at that one Whole Foods trying to be clever.

Now, the motivations behind that are probably an interesting question; how much is "this is a cute thing to do" and how much is "please be kind to us, new megacorp overlords"

@indi @mawr That's totally fair. Rememberm I worked at Amazon, and there's a big remove between "working for the company" and "endorsing what the company does."

@literorrery Yeah, the unpacked version of that thought in my head is "Amazon does not have a history of being quite that petty and self-aggrandizing, and I certainly hope that has not changed"

@indi So... my experience with them as an independent bookseller on Amazon is that they have been kind of petty or gross on a couple of things that are important to me, but I'll fully grant you that they're not this level of tacky.

@literorrery Yeah, 'tacky' is the word I was looking for, thank you. :)

I can't in good conscience call them non-petty, considering the whole 'no Amazon Video on Apple TV' nonsense.

@indi I remember when they scrubbed a couple of keywords from the "book title" field to try to make a complaint about Amazon selling bigfoot porn go away. They've got a really schizoid relationship with sex and LGBTQ media content in general, and I worry about the damage a privately-owned supply chain is doing in general to genuinely independent operators. But that's not an Amazon problem; it's a capitalism problem.

@indi Like, you can find a Hello Kitty branded vibrator by searching for it, but they work pretty hard to stop literature containing a same-sex romance from showing up in general search, and anything tagged as gay lit doesn't show up in their sales rankings. I get why, but I think I'm allowed to be grumpy about that, even if I'm never going to be on the ranked lists.

@literorrery Yeah agreed, I'm pretty grumpy about that too.