I wonder if this was in the original plan for the Echo all along, or just evolved organically. It definitely has potential for being another well-paved road to total-surveillance hell.
I've got a drawer full of unused echos, chromecasts, etc. I haven't had a prime subscription for over 2 years now because every time I order something its a 50/50 that I will get a shitty ripoff from China. I am desperately looking to get off of their cloud offerings too.
I wish more would recognize the convenience of Amazon for the dystopia that it truly is and then act with their wallets. Shopping at 3 different online retailers vs 1 isn't that much of an added inconvenience, and I personally find that when you order direct from the manufacturer (when possible) that your success rate on getting high quality, non-fake stuff nears 100%. AWS is a harder sell because of how wide the feature set is, but there are options for any scale.
This isn't even scratching the surface on how they treat many of their employees. Who is working in an amazon warehouse right now and actually having a good time of it? Amazon could easily automate away many jobs they never wanted in the first place, but sacrificing lower-skilled humans do the last mile of messy pick & place turns out to be more friendly to margins.
> I haven't had a prime subscription for over 2 years now because every time I order something its a 50/50 that I will get a shitty ripoff from China.
Were you ordering expensive sneakers and purses regularly? You'd think if this was the experience of even a minor fraction of their customers (beyond the HN commenters who claim this is wide spread in every Amazon topic), they wouldn't be breaking record sales every quarter.
> This isn't even scratching the surface on how they treat many of their employees. Who is working in an amazon warehouse right now and actually having a good time of it?
Who is doing manual labor of any form and having a good time of it? Amazon to their credit gave a minimum wage of 15 USD to these workers, often ahead of the states they're located in, and the workers get full health care and benefits. I'm not saying they can't be paid more or shouldn't be paid more, but I'm going to acknowledge their agency. Over 800k of them picked Amazon over say Walmart or Costco or some other warehouse job.
> Amazon could easily automate away many jobs they never wanted in the first place, but sacrificing lower-skilled humans do the last mile of messy pick & place turns out to be more friendly to margins.
Companies hire people to do work if it's profitable is the essence of this objection? There are complex systems that lead people to accepting these jobs -- America's failing education system, the lack of upward mobility and opportunity for many citizens, lack of focus on trade / manufacturing jobs in school, etc.. You take the easy route of blaming a corporation doing corporation things.
I take your point.
That said, many (or even most?) people enjoy doing some amount of physical work. However, Taylorism and the industrial revolution tended to make physical work so repetitive that it become unsatisfying.
For example, in my experience, UPS drivers often like a job where they get to be outside and active. I don't have surveys at hand, but I would guess that skilled laborers like the work itself. Their bosses, sick time, injuries, probably not so much.
I would ask everyone to think about future scenarios where work can have more physical aspects -- there are advantages to long term happiness and productivity that I think get overlooked.
> Were you ordering expensive sneakers and purses regularly? You'd think if this was the experience of even a minor fraction of their customers (beyond the HN commenters who claim this is wide spread in every Amazon topic), they wouldn't be breaking record sales every quarter.
Come on, you know as well as I that there is not necessarily a correlation there: between record quarter sales and counterfeit products. I agree that claims of 50% counterfeit products is an exaggeration but to point to their quarterly sales is as refutation is silly.
Sales could be increasing for any number of reasons unrelated to customer satisfaction. Cusatomers could be unaware they are purchasing counterfeit products, etc.
At this point I already have so many devices in my house it won't matter if I add more. I gave up my privacy for convince a long time ago. Let me know if you'd like me to take those off your hands. :)
> Shopping at 3 different online retailers vs 1 isn't that much of an added inconvenience
I've tried ordering direct from the manufacturer. It's true that authenticity is higher, but everything else is worse. Do I have to pay shipping? How much will be it? I need to put in my credit card again, will it be safe? Will I get any cash back on my purchase? With Amazon, I already know, shipping is free, my 5% cash back card will be default and is secure. It literally takes me a less than 20 seconds to buy something on Amazon if I already know what I want.
> Who is working in an amazon warehouse right now and actually having a good time of it?
I know one person who works at an Amazon warehouse. She says it's the best job she's ever had. She's extremely grateful to be working right now in a good job with a flexible schedule, because she's a single mom in nursing school. Anecdata of course, she's just one person. But in my sample set of 1, there is 100% satisfaction.
Be careful though. I have found, like OP, that everything about Amazon has been getting worse over time.
Free shipping? Well, if you forget that your'e paying for Amazon Prime itself. Also, it seems less things I have been buying of late qualify for Amazon Prime. Is it a change in my spending habits or are Prime products as a percentage of all Amazon goods shrinking? I don't know.
As for the 5% cashback credit card — I have the same. But I am increasingly finding that prices at Amazon are not competitive when I look around. Storage bins at Lowes, a good deal more than 5% less than the same product at Amazon. An electric chainsaw, same brand model, more than 5% less at Home Depot than Amazon. I know it's anecdotal (and many other things are the same price when I shop around) but I am beginning to wonder if Amazon is getting their "free shipping" and 5% back in other ways....
Nominally, it does not compare, at least for things bought from Amazon. It's 3% in a category of your choice (gas, online shopping, dining, travel, drug stores, or home improvement/furnishings), 2% grocery stores and wholesale clubs, and 1% in everything else.
But those are all multiplied by 1.25, 1.50, or 1.75 if you have balances of at least $20k, $50k, or $100k, respectively, in certain BofA or Merrill Lynch accounts. What matters is the total in all our eligible BofA and Merrill accounts.
Transfer $100k worth of your mutual funds or your IRA to Merrill, pick "online shopping" as your 3% category, and with the multiplier you've got 5.25% cash back at Amazon. And at Newegg. And at online orders at Walmart, Best Buy, and so on. At some stores it counts as online if you order through their website or app for in-store pickup, too.
You can change the category once per calendar month, so if you are planning on a big purchase at, say Home Depot, just buy near the end of the month and switch the category to home improvement/furnishings before buying, and switch back to online when the month rolls over.
Buying things is a pain in the ass. In companies, purchasing is a full time job, trying to negotiate prices and discounts. and on the other hand you have sellers trying to maximize margin.
Buying things from stores used to contain a large amount of going place to place and comparing prices/features. Online it became easier to compare both but I have been finding it harder to find specs and sometimes pricing recently....
If you have control over both the marketplace and information, you have greater control over the transaction.
So how much would you pay warehouse workers and why do you think warehouse job in Amazon requires so kind of special treatment or salary?
The show The Patriot Act covered this exact sentiment in a good segment on Amazon.
My son got a free Echo and plugged it in in my house. When I saw it I was a little bugged but played around with it before putting it up. Now I fear my reaction will be more like, "Good God son, what have you done?"
Will Sidewalk share around these passwords? Will Amazon share them with authorized third parties eventually?
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
It'd be nice if it were not in the control of any corporation.
How can we make that happen?
If those of us who're privacy conscious stopped paying Amazon money, we could use that money to create/buy privacy-focused alternatives. I'm not talking about Amazon the shop (although that's a good avenue of attack too), I'm talking about AWS. Stop using AWS. Loudly take your money to another cloud supplier. Amazon competes on volume, so remove the volume. Leave them with warehouses of redundant servers until they have to sell them off. And then buy one.
You see where I am going? This will never work. David cannot win over Goliath every single time.
That’s why we need another giant, the government, to fight for us.
But we don’t want the government to interfere with capitalism, do we? We want to have our pie and eat it too.