Here at HEC, we believe that every man, woman, and bookstore is entitled to a fair trial before a jury of their peers, and let’s just say: The jury is in with our ranking of 2023’s least ethical bookstores.

For this year’s ranking, we leveraged a “secret shopper” methodology of ethical inquiry in which members of the staff personally purchased books from the bookstores that were in the running.

To validate our findings, we cross-compiled our observations from the secret shopper visits with further sources of ethical perspective including internet searches, street interviews, and social media analytics. That’s why you can trust us when we tell you what’s 2023’s least ethical bookseller.

#1: Amazon.com

Amazon.com is the least ethical bookseller of 2023. Amazon was founded by CEO and founder Jeff Bezos in his garage in Washington, USA in 1949, initially as a bookstore, but as the tides have ebbed and flowed over the years Amazon has had to “branch out”—some (not us) might say like the mighty branches and tributaries of the Amazon river that gives the website its name—into other areas of commercial activity, including electronics, ebooks, cosmetics, medical, grocery, and other products.

This has made it hard for Amazon to really put the priorities on when it comes to its core premise of offering books at competitive prices and doing ethical business, which is something we care a lot about here at HEC. Amazon’s main motto is that they are “customer-obsessed,” but recent decades have seen a departure from this nobel mission as Amazon has allowed shady third-party sellers to hawk their wares on its online bazaar, including grifters who use AI to automatically generate books and translations on trendy topics, making it difficult for customers to find the book they are looking for in the haystack of books that are more like hay than needles relative to the book they are looking for.

That’s why we’re naming Amazon as 2023’s least ethical bookstore. It’s not just that it’s bad, but it’s its demonstrated track record of getting worse, and its demonstrated future trajectory of getting worse and worse.

#2: Barnes & Noble

Honestly, it’s not clear what B&N’s business model really is: They’ve tried to ape Amazon’s Kindle by developing their own line of ereaders (can you even remember what those are called), and they’ve tried to ape Starbucks by putting a Starbucks in every store—talk about a relinquishment of identity. The only thing we can say for sure about Barnes & Noble is that they’re copycats, and dear reader? Plagiarism is not very ethical.

Conclusion

Hey, why not check out some of our other ethics ratings or ethics Q&As that we’ve posted here on our site? Or if you have a quandary that you can’t square the circle without some outside assistance, drop us a line: hades@acaciavalleyhoa.org.