Amazon workers to strike at multiple US warehouses during busy holiday season
reuters.com
reuters.com
Interesting to see discussion on Reddit from r/AmazonFC are pretty negative , wonder if these are genuine employees comment for PR team hired by Amazon
And, of course, some folks may have a good experience even while others do not.
I went on strike about ten years ago to protest mandatory overtime and lack of chemical PPE. the minute we authorized the strike, we had news channels from three states covering us and a billboard up the road that demanded an end to the strike by "concerned" truckers was erected in hours. Every day I could count on at least four emails from various sources, everything from "your union is cancelled" to "union declared illegal" and everything in between including offers to work for more pay but no contract. weekends were nearly a dozen phone calls, mostly robo, threatening pay cuts and layoffs and asking to cancel your healthcare and benefits.
we stuck out 19 days and won, and the very same news crews showed up again with no interviews from us, only management praising their great negotiation effort.
At one point, amazon had a literal program where warehouse workers could opt to sit at a desk and post propaganda comments instead of doing their normal manual labor job.
Amazon Teamsters in NYC have voted to authorize a strike
Amazon is amazingly well run.
And they sent me a 43" Samsung TV when I ordered a 42" LG OLED. How the hell can their many billions of dollars of IT investment not automatically scan the barcode on the box or weight the box or use computer vision and notice this error before they sent the wrong TV out?
Also, for this reason, it’s somewhat common to see them for sale at a steep discount in r/homelabsales. Only makes sense if you’re within driving distance, but hey – cheap rack.
The username above was GreedIsGood. I think they think the executives are doing the right thing.
Not at this time of the year. If something doesn't have a pre Christmas delivery, it won't be bought in many cases. Or even if it does, people may hear about the strike and not risk it.
Maybe the union needs to change tactics?
The only real solution is to become skilled workers. Which, almost ironically, is to do the thing the company threatens to do -- find a way to automate work like this, so the people working at the warehouse are robotics technicians etc.
but the point is it's not about worker skill when unions are at sufficient power levels
This is also why corporate monopolies are a fiasco and need to be prevented as well.
The general rule is "prevent any one group from consolidating too much power". If someone's solution is "let our group consolidate a huge amount of power" they're admitting they're the villains.
"Want a job? Can pass a background check? No interview. Apply today, start tomorrow."
This apparently happened somewhere in a rural area with a small local population. It's obviously not going to happen at a warehouse in, say, New Jersey.
And to the extent that it actually happens somewhere it's not like their response would be hard to predict. Calculate how much they would have to increase local wages to expand the candidate pool enough, see if this is less than it costs to move the warehouse somewhere with a larger pool of workers, if not then move the warehouse.
Notice that Amazon warehouse workers get paid more than minimum wage. This is why. Unskilled workers don't have zero leverage, they just don't have much.
All the best to the union, I sincerely hope they meet your demands.
"should be replaced with robots"
I also think it's funny we are having this discussion. When songwriters and other creators were complaining about piracy in the 2000s, the general response from the tech community was that this was the future and you didn't deserve to earn a living.
My response is the same.
I don't think it's worth considering the comparison.
But sure, maybe working at a distribution center pays well enough where you're located. Likely that's not the case where these strikes are happening. It's expensive out there.
Also, what you wrote gives the impression of "I've got mine already so I don't care what happens to you."
After that, we need to ask how much profit a person should be allowed to make on their labor.
Just so you know, all things I listed are things most people in Western Europe already have. Including employees of Amazon and McDonald's.
If I am a small shipping company, and all I need is someone to wrap boxes and store them, and the load isn't much, then should I be paying them full time for the job? Heck, should I pay them a living wage? No. I pay them the value of the job.
Obviously, we need a certain minimum wage because nobody deserves to get scammed and make 10 cents a day, but at the same time, this push for all these benefits isn't realistic. I wish it was, but it isn't.
Obviously, my example is different from Amazon, but this is more a business owner perspective.
Keep in mind, I'm not opposed to companies providing benefits, but I think regulating this would create more trouble than good.
On top of fair pay, companies owe their employees more. Businesses don't exist in a vacuum—they're tools we use to make life better for everyone. The entire economy is just a system we built to serve people, not the other way around.
Right now, companies often act like mini-dictatorships, where the tradeoff — giving up freedoms in exchange for money — ends up hurting society even if it props up the economy.
In short: if a company isn't contributing positively, it's failing at its purpose and should either disappear, or forced to fulfill its role.
If the workload is so low why don't you just do the work yourself?
In most of Europe workers wouldn't have to worry about any of that, everyone enjoys the basic package. So your competitors wouldn't be able to undercut you on price by not providing healthcare and thus force you to do the same.
Is it the best system for startups, corporate profits and the stock market? Obviously not but people are happier.
I wish all the benefits are possible, but it isn't feasible because different countries function differently, and I think your point explains it much better than I could have explained it.
America and Europe are different places, with different economies and as a result have different luxuries they can afford and costs they must bear. This means it is easier to offer benefits in Europe than America.
Each was offering only part-time hours (16-24h) but required "full-time availability".
That is not an fair exchange of effort.
Small business owners all too often (as much as they are also a valuable part of the community) think that they are entitled to far too much of their employees, and seem to think they have some inherent right to not just their business, but to their desired profit margins.
One local business here closed recently with this self-centered, presumptuous and tone-deaf message:
> It is so sad to see that our dream with all its potential has collapsed because the community was not willing to support it.
In theory, if one employer offers a job with great benefits, they will win over the employer with not as many benefits. Clearly, that wasn't happening in your example.
> Healthcare, decent sized apartment, 5 weeks of paid vacation, free or easily affordable pre school, overtime pay, decent schools and free college, is a good start.
This is literally the (by-law) standard of living for people with full time jobs with employment contracts[1] where I grew in Italy... that's not Silicon Valley, but one part of Italy that has been depressed for many years. (It's also the second top region in Italy by life expectation, that's between the 6th and 7th place in the world ranking by country) So much that in this very town Amazon is building a new warehouse that opens next year.
[1] Granted, permanent positions are rare; but permanent or temporary positions do offer this stuff by law. Fake contracts (partita IVA) and the gig economy exists there too.
Free college almost... public universities tuition fees are 500-4000 EUR per year, depending on the location and prestige.
But seriously, no US state is as poor as Italy, in GDP per capita terms (Mississippi 50K vs Italy 40K).
Here is one calculator: https://livingwage.mit.edu/pages/methodology
They're striking not for better wages, but so that some local or state politician wins an election in 2026.
Anyone thinking this is a one time thing and is going to blow over hasn't been paying attention.
There are very few jobs that actually pay well in America nowadays, and the ones that do tend to be congregated in few geographical areas and require extensive schooling.
The vast majority of Americans deserve more money.
Also check your priors, there are many musicians that do not complain about piracy and even partake in it (see Trent Reznor being part of oink/what, or Dead Kennedys encouraging people to record music on their tapes). I know many musicians that would upload their music on private trackers, regardless of what their label wanted or said.
This is pedantic but I strongly dislike when people say anyone deserves anything.
I support an equitable system that allows citizens to move up in economic class (which we don't currently have) but I don't subscribe to the idea that everyone inherently deserves anything.
Perhaps you could clarify - what do you mean by "everyone", and what do you mean by "anything?" Does everyone deserve UBI? Do workers deserve disposable income? Do the homeless deserve housing? Healthcare? Food? An attorney, if arrested? Do children deserve college? High school? Primary school? Orphanages?
You can't say that nobody inherently deserves anything, then say I'm intellectually dishonest when I take you at your word.
Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness whether they deserve it or not. Just like people have the right to free speech or a jury trial in front of their peers, whether they deserve it or not.
The distinction is important because whether someone deserves something is a normative statement while having the right is a descriptive statement.
What you deserve because of your right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is up for debate.
That's enough to thrive in lots of places in the USA, in some cases. Maybe not the most desirable places, though.
I find it insulting that you don't think Americans, especially those that work, don't deserve dignity through their labor in having a meaningful life. Especially when they work for one of the richest companies in the world.
You failing to come up with an answer at least readers will know that you don't have their good conscious in mind.
There are plenty of blue collar jobs that don't require schooling and can make a comfortable living. If you are talking about a job anyone with a pulse can get? This won't ever pay well.
"I know many musicians that would upload their music on private trackers, regardless of what their label wanted or said."
All the indy artists I knew ended up having to get out of the business because they couldn't sell their music anymore (people would just download it and expect it for free) and making money from live performances are mostly controlled by large corporations.
Piracy only hurt independent artists and forced all of them with talent to sign with large labels to make a decent living.
Again, with piracy, you want no protection for the artist (and even justify why taking their music, without asking, is fine). Yet, you want the unions to collude with the government to force corporations to halt all technological advances, so workers don't lose their jobs.
Doesn't make much sense here.
$20/hr is about $40k/yr. Using 30% towards housing, that means they can only denote $12/yr to housing, or $1k/month. At current interest rates, that translates to a $150,000 house.
What can you get for $150? There's nothing in any area I've looked that was actually habitable ever since the government's COVID debacle.
You're going to have a bad time if you plan your strike at the most opportune time for your company.
Whether or not striking is good for society is a separate discussion, but striking when you have the most leverage over your company makes the most sense for those striking to get what they want.
These people are just doing what they have to do to survive. If anything, going on strike a truly desparate move. Insinuating that they are childishing in doing so (as if they feel they "deserve a pony") on the other hand, seems simply -- snide.
These are two entirely unrelated issues.
If the world doesn't need a particular task to be done by humans, then the task should be performed by robots.
Until that happens, the workers should be treated humanely.
The problem is, our society isn't ready for that shift, not even close. Employment opportunities for the low skilled have all but gone down the drain - there is a reason why Walmart, Amazon and the other usual suspects love to set up shop in devastated communities: they have a captive audience that has no other realistic opportunities for gainful employment and thus is much, much less likely to resist when faced with exploitative and/or abusive conditions.
Warehouse work and logistics in general is the last employment opportunity many of these people have, and while it being replaced by robots may be better for society as a whole (if one follows the belief that all work should be done by machines so that humans can follow their individual interests), just standing by idling around while the markets enforce the shift is going to be a political disaster.
While "robots" are a fairly recent concept, the advancement of human civilization has been predicated on ever increasing efficiencies of human labor.
Now the "robots" are replacing intellectual work, and humans have no where to go.
Agreed. But in general, the efficiency gains got redistributed to the people - usually, by (bloody) revolutions and strikes.
Across the Western world, we haven't seen any meaningful progress in that redistribution in a fucking century - the 40 hour work week got introduced around 1926 [1]. Instead, all we got was that women now get exploited by employment providers as well, so the pool of available labor power virtually doubled, driving down wages while over the last few decades housing costs exploded and the demand for labor went down, further driving down wages. It remains open if the rise of pacifism and "non-violent action" in general that has happened in parallel in the same timeframe was coincidence, causation or consequence.
We are in for a wild ride over the next years. Luigi will not be the last one of his kind, I think this was just the start...
Percentage of US labor force working in agriculture by decade: https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teacher-reso...
1950 was 15.2%, 1970 was 4.7%
People are allowed to move for work. I have. Shipyards are expanding in the Great Lakes region.
https://maritime-executive.com/article/navy-expands-shipbuil...
The shale gas revolution has created a lot of blue collar jobs. The chemicals industry is booming in Ohio.
https://www.jobsohio.com/news-events/news-press/energy-chemi...
So, yes, the shipyards need to be on the coast. But much of the material on the inside of the ship may be built elsewhere.
My buddy who is a union welder at a shipyard doesn't have to piss in a bottle to make his quota. His job is fucking fantastic, thanks to the union, and the hardest part of it is navigating controls around what the navy allows civvies to touch.
It's predominantly a lot of professional work by tradies, NOT grunt work. Use the proper PPE and you probably won't even have any lasting injuries or bodily damage. Take your time and follow the rules and you won't even be the cause of death for a hundred sailors like with the Thresher.
Well, that and using the proper PPE so that you probably won't even have any lasting injuries or bodily damage and taking your time/following the rules so that you probably won't even be the cause of death for a hundred sailors or coworkers.
Compare that to putting the wrong shipping label on the package. I'd rather piss in a bottle than be a welder, to be honest.
Get your AI-boosting company to spend some of its money buying lawmakers and telling them to make UBI happen.
We heard this same argument about automation in food service. Remember when Miso/Flippy was going to put all those $20/hour fast food workers out on the street? Turns out hiking prices was way easier.
Have you been to a fast food joint lately? Even at peak traffic they have maybe three people working when they used to have 7-10. Now you walk in and you have to order from the kiosk, which is literally the iPhone app on a vertical touch screen. You don't even talk to a human until they hand you the food.
Replacing the actual burger-fliping workers, or order-assembling workers is much harder. An adequate robot, even if built with today's technologies, will likely never pay for itself.
Maybe your area suffers from that, but mine doesn't.
Almost none of it is automation. McDonalds invested in a fully automated fry machine but they basically don't get deployed because thanks to COVID "labor shortages", they all figured out a much better strategy:
Just have fewer employees and make them do more work. It doesn't matter how much people bitch about wait times and product quality on twitter, they still buy. Americans love to bitch about things on the internet, but they still wait in the drive through line for tens of minutes for "fast food" that is demonstrably worse than it was five years ago.
Americans have comprehensively demonstrated that they are unwilling or unable to just, not fucking buy stuff. Despite all the rhetoric about the economy suffering before the election, even here on HN (which coincidentally disappeared the day after the election, how about that...) we are seeing record breaking holiday consumer spending. It's fucking insane how willing Americans are to just throw money at companies that are outright hostile to them. I cannot fathom the unwillingness to not buy stuff that the average American has.
Quality, service, value, all of it will continue to degrade until US consumers finally figure out that you have an OPTION to, you know, not buy worthless trash. When PepsiCo basically doubled their prices in the past couple years, for products that are literally colored water and automatically cooked potato chips, which had near zero increase in cost of inputs, PepsiCo called it "inflation". In France, the news ran articles about clear price gouging by PepsiCo. In the US, Americans blamed it on Biden, somehow, including Americans who literally grow and sell the potatoes PepsiCo buys and therefore KNOW that PepsiCo did not pay more for those inputs, and KNOW that Biden has zero input on the prices anyone in the chain charge. It's insane to me how unwilling my fellow countrymen are to just consider they might be taken advantage of by business.
Lots of Amazon's stock would be easier, but Amazon also has a greater range of sizes.
I think we should be a bit more aware about the impact of ordering everything through Amazon. Not only regarding delivery, but also the message it sends to local stores.
There is no such thing as "employee tax". Usually, what exists is a scheme for some of the employee's salary to be paid in the form of retirement schemes, health care, etc. It's not a tax to subsidize unrelated things. Likewise, the income tax is not there to pay for the company's use of collective amenities, it's there to pay for the citizen's use.
In the end, if your company doesn't pay all the stuff that other companies do, it's freeloading, and the society would most likely be better off with another company getting the business.
I didn't say it was to subsidize unrelated things; in fact it's more the other way round, where state pensions, and state employee pensions, public healthcare etc are just paid for, and the money comes from whence it comes.
The Amazon HQ is great for Seattle and Luxembourg, but money spent there is gone from my local (or even national) community.
But for me it is an ideological thing - I absolutely loathe Amazon and it’s practices; I just have to visualise how I insert my money into Bezos gaping asshole and my desire to shop at Amazon is rapidly diminishing.
But I think ordering stuff when you are able bodied is immoral as well - not super immoral but you should always feel a little bit bad if you order stuff that you could’ve picked up yourself.
Also the distances in my country are tiny, if you live in the outback with 200km to the next neighbour it’s a different story
You buy it cheaper but you are generating a debt, it's like buying on credit: somewhere someone is being exploited or a natural resource is being overexploited, and you will pay for it in the future, with a poorer environment socially, economically and naturally.
Everything comes back. I once read that I don't know which tribe made decisions that were good for the next 7 generations, well, buying on amazon is a decision that is not good even for the current generation, you will probably see the consequences in your own or your children's life.
You do realize that an electric Amazon van delivering hundreds of packages to your neighborhood pollutes a lot less than you taking your G-wagon to the local store, right?
> but also the message it sends to local stores
"You're obsolete", which is true? Local stores are usually more expensive, carry less inventory, require you to go there or charge delivery fees, have inexistent or predatory return policies, etc. It's simply a worse experience in every way.
There was a time where this was compensated by the vendors having wide knowledge about the subject that they were selling items for, but it's not the case anymore, so really, what's left to local stores?
I don't know why people have this tendency to romanticize outdated and objectively worse in every way things just for the sake of "tradition".
You are correct, but I don't like this idiom. Your point would come across better if it wasn't delivered in a patronisation sandwich.
The US suburbs don't really have what I would call "local stores," just big, well known corporate stores. So, when making the choice of where to buy Product X, my options are giving my money to Best Buy, Walmart, Ikea, Kroger, etc...or Jeff Bezos, whose online empire offers slightly more convenience than the others because I don't have to drive if I can wait a day or two.
There's no family-owned businesses to hurt here because they were all chased out by the Big Box stores years ago. Heck, I remember when they filled in the pond I learned to fish in as a kid just to put up that Walmart. Sure, Amazon can be held up as contributing toward the death of the small business, but those wheels were spinning long before Bezos was selling books out of a garage or whatever mythology we want to accept.
I don't like Amazon. I don't like the idea of one entity having that much influence and control over my consumer habits. I don't like that the business model is just drop-shipping in a trenchcoat of digital services. I don't like that their workers are basically treated as third-world labor.
But I do have to admit that they have won the game and as a result, I have to use them. I wish it were otherwise, but we're past the point of no return, on that. We all gave them permission for this to happen by patronizing it for years, even down to the mistreated workers who keep applying for those jobs knowing full well Amazon's employment reputation. Amazon did not kill small business. Consumers did, ever suckered by savings and convenience.
Try ordering direct from the manufacturer's website. A surprising-to-me number of companies have set this up, and it's what I often do if I know what I want and Newegg isn't selling it for a reasonable price (or at all).
It makes a ton of sense that it WOULD happen sometimes, but I've yet to see it.
I'm not sure how you imagine that ordering direct from a manufacturer works, but I'm certain that most of them have their goods in big warehouses and use major delivery services to get those goods to you, much like they would get those goods to an ordinary store.
Goods are going to be shipped, flown, and trucked around. Until we invent macro-scale teleportation, there's no reasonable way to stop doing that entirely.
It's quite an evil genius policy on the side of Amazon.
The laws of our economy are not there to serve a few large companies. They are there to serve us, people, most of all. Do you think that markets will collapse if we had more fair rules for big companies?
Not nonsense of course but if what Amazon is doing is breaking any of the antitrust laws we have in place there is a machinery for that already - the government can take this up if they feel like Amazon is breaking antitrust laws. The problem is - whatever "issue" someone has with something amazon is doing it inevitably ends up here on HN as "oh that should be illegal..." you start putting every little thing you don't like into some federal laws and pretty soon you are China... it is a fine line to walk on...
> The laws of our economy are not there to serve a few large companies. They are there to serve us, people, most of all.
In some theory maybe - not in any reality... this sounds more like the way China is organized, not United States :) I personally wish this was true...
> Do you think that markets will collapse if we had more fair rules for big companies?
This depends - who is making the rules?! This is always easier said than done - you think that whatever "rules" you put in place is what "everyone/majority/..." wants but of course you'd be wrong. And again - who is making the rules? The politicians who spent over 70% of their fundraising for their next election... and during those fundraisers the donors are ... well not me and you but Amazon, NRA... and they will get their way... The system is stacked against you and you can talk fantasy like "oh the economy should work for the little guy..." or reality...
And if you want to do business (at all) you have to abide by the local laws. In an ideal democratic world, those laws would be set by the people and for the people.
Can you make an argument outlining how Amazon's anti-competitive rules help the society, and why their behavior should be tolerated in an ideal democratic society?
which law is amazon breaking and if there isn't one (there isn't, otherwise there would be lawsuits we are all aware of) what's the law going to look like?
> Can you make an argument outlining how Amazon's anti-competitive rules help the society, and why their behavior should be tolerated in an ideal democratic society?
not sure what "democracy" has to do with anything? we don't really have a system in place where we go to a referendum and make decisions like this. whether or not amazon's anti-competitive rules help the society or not is on the society to decide. you have a choice whether to use amazon services and if you are so anti-amazon no one is forcing you to use their services. if amazon is doing something is illegal based on today's laws there is a machinery to bring lawsuits against (by the government itself or otherwise).
A law would be fairly simple — it would forbid a marketplace or retailer from influencing the price of goods sold outside their marketplace/shop.
There are already laws regulating pricing in some places, e.g. selling below the manufacturer's recommended retail price, or preventing selling products below cost to attract customers.
There's this from California: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32866055 (I haven't read it, I'm not that interested.)
I sure have
> A law would be fairly simple — it would forbid a marketplace or retailer from influencing the price of goods sold outside their marketplace/shop.
This type of law would make no sense, you are basically saying "I can price gouge the customers on your platform while providing the same product cheaper on mine." That is a F'ed up as it gets...
> e.g. selling below the manufacturer's recommended retail price
This is completely a different thing - if Amazon is actually telling retailers "hey, you want to sell this for $100 but you can't, you need to lower this price" that should 100% be illegal - Amazon should not be telling anyone what the price of their product should be. But that is 1000000% different from Amazon telling same companies "you cannot use our platform to price gouge people and sell your shit for more than you are selling elsewhere."
You're badly misrepresenting the situation, to the point that I have to wonder whether you're just being dishonest. Many (likely most, but I don't have the data) 3rd party sellers aren't price gouging customers on Amazon, they're simply trying to pass Amazon's significant fees onto the customers.
They're being prohibited from doing so which reduces price transparency and competition which as you surely know, are both required for a market to be efficient.
This is a move that I would expect to disgust free market capitalism maximalists on some level, regardless of what one may think about Amazon's "right" to do whatever it wants.
I asked you whether you believed that society would democratically support Amazon's actions to determine whether you're making those arguments because you genuinely believe this behavior makes average people's lives better, or whether you're just arguing some abstract extremist neoliberal talking points of freedom for the sake of freedom, no matter what it costs us.
Like I'm at a point where I order like 5-10 products a year from amazon, mostly cause I can't get them elsewhere for reasonable prices. Everything else I buy in other online stores or physically.
I live in the center of London and out of the 200 non-household goods orders I have on Amazon this year I don't think I would have been able to find even 20% of them in local stores.
Actually even when I do go in a store and find an item I need, I scan the barcode on the Amazon app and saw that it's usually a LOT cheaper on Amazon (like, 30% cheaper for the exact same tool).
Add to that what I mention in my previous comment about return policies, travel time, etc. and there's absolutely no reason not to order on Amazon, even if you're in the ideal place to go to local stores.
I have ordered from online retailers in Denmark, and I've made 2 orders from AliExpress, and a few more from eBay.
Can you give five items you can't buy in central London, but can buy from Amazon?
Of those, I probably have a good portion which is household goods as I mentioned, like soap in bulk, soda cans in bulk, etc. which is cheaper than any other option (especially because I don't have a car in London).
Then I have around 170 orders which are items I got for free through the Vine program (https://www.amazon.co.uk/vine/about). And probably around 30 orders that are free books (https://www.amazon.co.uk/firstreads).
If I ignore all of those, and take only recent orders that I paid for, here are 5 items that I can't buy, or at least wouldn't know where to even begin looking for, in central London:
- A luggage and suitcase scale
- A monitor arm
- A good shower filter for hard water (not the crap that doesn't actually filter anything which you can easily find anywhere)
- A label printer
- A moth repellent for wardrobes
But anyway, shops selling luggage are common. They probably sell scales too. Argos, Tesco and Ryman have them.
Electronics shops like Currys have monitor arms, as well as office supply shops.
I won't guess what a good shower filter is.
Office supply and electronics shops also have label printers.
Moth repellent is available from large supermarkets, DIY stores and hardware shops.
All of these are also available online from British companies that pay their fair share of taxes.
What is it that you buy online or offline? I just can't imagine making a purchase every other day, especially if you aren't including groceries...
I just don't buy anything in brick and mortar shops, except food and drinks. Just out of convenience and price, not for ideological reasons or anything.
The number of orders is also inflated by things I listed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42463417 and by the fact that one project can be many orders. I built a NAS, and it was split over 10 orders, basically one per component when the price was right.
Amazon does more than most of those to let you buy from small producers, which also feature in their catalog. The volume SMBs ship on Amazon was in the double digit billions per year when I worked there — and is probably higher now.
Now, back to my regular Amazon criticism!
At one point in time, Wal-mart's big thing was they sold Made in America. Then they pivoted to cheap junk, their pivot occurred as jobs moved from the US to Mexico and China.
That was the point when it became unfashionable to shop at Wal-mart; as recorded by the finest news network : https://theonion.com/hostages-trapped-inside-walmart-insisti...
Consumers weren't completely suckered by savings and convenience; although that was some of it, they were trying to make their ever smaller budgets stretch further.
The overheads of physical retail stores makes it all but impossible for them to compete with online shopping. I’d love to “support local” but I don’t have the expendable income to spend double/more on everything.
What we ideally need is more “local online businesses”, but that seems to be very rare outside of niche hobby/craft type stuff.
I do not patronize Amazon. But f I did, I would pick a margin - let's say 20% - and resolve to buy locally when the price is at least that close to the online price.
Focusing on the price is a complete misunderstanding. Just looking at my recent amazon purchases. I have bought 3mm and 2mm thick brass sheets, 0.8mm endmills, a set of dwarven miner minis, and a highlander cow shaped slipper. I have no clue which shop would even hope to have these things. I could get on my bike and go to all the hardware shops around me in the hopes that maybe they have endmills, or all the department stores and walk up and down to see if they have the slippers I'm thinking about. And I would be still without brass sheets and dwarven miners.
Or I can from the comfort of wherever I am browse a wild selection of things and get them for reasonable price. I bought the miner minis while physically situated in a coffee shop waiting for my friend to return from the washroom. Just because I happened to have a minute to think about what I need for our next DnD session. That is insanely convenient.
Not many people will choose that.
Businesses that should be able to sustain themselves are things that have additional experiences and services. Food, coffee, sports shops with fittings or lessons, bike shops with repair rooms, art galleries that are fun to browse, clothing stores that you can touch and try on, stuff crafted locally that is tangibly better than something mass produced, etc.
Your list is good, but how many are vulnerable to competition from online ?
As a purely-theoretical thought experiment, this may be true.
As a blanket statement about prices in the real world, this is not correct.
There are many stores around me here in San Francisco who absolutely do have prices that are close to (and sometimes lower than) "e-tailer" prices. If stores in SF can meet or beat "e-tailer" prices, I find it hard to believe that stores in Bum-fuck Nowhere, USA can't ever do the same.
Xyltech is also in Houston, and they don't have a typical retail operation, but you can place an order and pick it up.
Polymaker has a Houston warehouse, and while you can't pick it up, a number of SKUs actually ship from there.
Often I buy bulk purchases of Sunlu from Aliexpress. Usually takes about 8 days to get to me, but at around $11/KG for PLA+, it's a great price.
Every local business should be a "local online business" as you suggest. But most business owners don't give a fuck and are happy to see Amazon crush them. Why?
I used to try to support local business, but frankly it's such a waste of time to go looking for products that they never have in stock, ward off annoying salesmen who never have a clue if you actually need help, and dealing with bad return policies. The price difference is but icing on the cake.
Is it because you want a distributed network of inventory across the country near you in case of emergency?
Is it because you like talking to someone when doing purchases?
Is it because you think someone is doing a societal good by parking money in inventory they brought near you?
Is it because you just don't like someone doing it more efficiently and getting "too" rich? ie dislike of big corporations?
Like I feel like I should want to support local business but it is way less efficient and I can't really convince myself that I'm not just repeating something my parents also said.
Although I should stress I like the idea of buying local. If the money goes off to some exotic foreign place it is less likely that I will get my hands on it later on. Better to live in a wealthy community than a poor one, etc. Local capital is local prosperity.
It takes knowing what market segment you are selling to to know what to stock.
It takes business connections to but the stock.
This is more important for businesses that produce and capture a larger amount of value, like locally owned restaurants vs corporate owned chains, but any little bit helps at least a little.
(Of course if you're a rootless corporate mercenary who goes wherever work takes you, with no long-term stake in the place you live, then it doesn't matter at all.)
Money sent off to Detroit or Japan for your car is as good as lost to your community, but as I said even a small amount of money spent locally will help your local community a small amount, which is more than none. Even eating at a locally owned McDonald's franchise is slightly better than eating at a corporate owned store. That difference is probably too small to be worth looking up who owns a McDonalds, but if the choice is between McDonalds or some local diner then it doesn't require any time spent looking it up.
I think you'd be surprised to realize how much that's not actually the case.
If you google the "Preston model", you'll find a lot of material waxing lyrical about the government of a lone city in England that actually dared to follow that principle in their procurement strategies. They are doing well, but the fact that it feels revolutionary for mainstream sensibilities shows that those principles are still very unknown to most.
(I should add: the principle of locality is not always a good thing, because there are scoundrels everywhere. Again in England, the regeneration of massive swaths of land previously used for steelmaking is being done through well-connected local businessmen and corrupted politicians, and it is a shameful rip-off for the taxpayer. If a national government had done that, the relevant minister would have faced the sack; but it's ”old boys” from the area, the national press is not interested, and so it's just business as usual.)
That money comes from many communities and is distributed to a handful; and I think it would be interesting to quantify the loss of economic activity from Amazon moving money out of a community.
It's likely that a mega retailer like Walmart generates this margin in their supply chain, bulk land/space and pays out, in total more via wages and benefits (particular possible with the scale of healthcare costs and benefits programs like scholarships)
If a global business decides to just toss all the plastic it uses it in its backyard you'll never notice because it's 2000 miles away. If Amazon decides to treat their workers unfairly, you'll never notice. But you'll notice if a local business does it because you'll be walking in there every day. There's a level of accountability.
Regarding me not noticing crimes, I think we have police and regulations for that.
(1) That is because technology also takes away components of life that one can enjoy without being rich such as accesss to nature and local food production.
(2) The global economy is only so "good" because it takes advantage of the commons in poorer places. We simply should not have the capability to do that. You only benefit off the suffering of others.
I do not think your second point stands. Almost the entire world is financially better off than it was in the past. Lots of third world economies are visibly richer than they were a few decades ago. Whose suffering are they benefitting from?
Because they lack wisdom and human beings en masse operate on instinct, not wisdom.
> Almost the entire world is financially better off than it was in the past. Lots of third world economies are visibly richer than they were a few decades ago. Whose suffering are they benefitting from?
The classic reply of the economist. It's because the industrial world measures better off with variables like "life expectancy" and "money".
But a longer life does not a better life make, nor does money always equate to better off.
For example: if I could live next to a beautiful national park and walk there every day, that would be more valuable to me than a million dollars but living in a huge city. How does the prevailing evaluative mechanism account for that?
I'd take arguments with objective metrics over handwavy arguments involving vibes, because with the latter you can make whatever argument you want with them and it's impossible to refute.
>For example: if I could live next to a beautiful national park and walk there every day, that would be more valuable to me than a million dollars but living in a huge city. How does the prevailing evaluative mechanism account for that?
You can ask for how much people are willing to pay for access to such a scenery and put a dollar value on it, or try to infer it based on housing price patterns (eg. house next to national park vs equally rural house next to corn fields).
You can define other concrete metrics. Distance to wild nature for example. That's concrete.
But there's also people like me, who say that sounds great but don't really mean it, because it's cringe to admit that you care about money.
Also, there has been a visible improvement in living standards in third world countries. More money does not mean people have a better life in a rich country because there are diminishing returns on having more money. In a country where most people are a lot poorer and desperately need more money, more money does mean better off.
I am pretty sure people who can afford a proper house instead of a slum stack, or have a proper toilet, etc. are better off. As I said, there are visible improvements in the lives of the very poor.
"For example: if I could live next to a beautiful national park and walk there every day, that would be more valuable to me than a million dollars but living in a huge city."
That is your preference. Many people prefer living in a big city.
Also, what about how good your conditions of life are next to the beautiful national park? A nice house in a big city with good food and leisure time vs a shack in the beautiful place, hard work to grow a barely adequate amount of food?
Vice president Vance marrying a woman from India was a look into the future. The rich elite know what's happening.
I will take technology and some globalism any day. My 2c.
Wisdom combined with restricted technology would be ideal, such as with the Amish. They have their problems but they show that a technologically restricted society is best. Note: I am not arguing for NO technology, but severely restricted technology.
And anytime a self-appointed elite start doing "what is best for the people" against their will, police repression and labor camps are also on the menu. Nah, I will take my freedom, including the freedom to make mistakes.
Because 1 billion years from now, even if humanity is back to before the wheel technology plants will have disappeared and the oceans evaporated due to the sun.
If we want Earth originated life to have a chance to go over this bump something will have to go forward.
But isn’t the entire universe also going to meet its end as well, in an anticlimactic heat death? To overcome that, a civilization would have to reach universe-level Kardashev-like energy utilization capability, which would necessarily consume every particle in the universe, including themselves. It seems infeasible and unwise.
Maybe it would lead to the next big bang… but that still is a death and rebirth.
I think ultimately folks that support post-earth transhumanism operate on a notion that they themselves or their direct descendants that they will know and love in their own lifetimes will benefit from this space-colonial survivalist utopia. But IMO the reality is that if it is even possible, it would only happen long, long after they and everyone they could know or imagine are dead. It would likelier be accomplished by a society and civilization that they would hate and believe should be exterminated, due to the tradeoffs that would have to be made to accomplish it.
It’s essentially an individual’s desire to live forever and avoid death, projected onto the human race. I’m not convinced it would actually be nice to live forever. Better to focus on how to make the short time we have be as good as possible. IMO the idea of eternal life leads to all sorts of perversions of the now in exchange for an assumed eternal afterward.
Get off and go where? Anywhere we could go is a million times worse for human habitation than post-demise Earth.
But I can imagine scenarios where we have to leave earth with intergenerational ships and only then acquire the ability to terraform, harness a star’s energy or travel at light speed.
People living poor don't like it. They may have accepted it, and may have learned to deal with it, but they don't tend to like it. They want out, and generally jump at the chance to do so.
People in richer communities may have fantasies about "living closer to nature," but that doesn't usually involve things like shooing rats off your kids at night, or having your house collapse, when there's a 3.0 earthquake.
People in poorer communities may have unreasonable expectations of what having money will bring, and we often see poor people that get rich quick (think Lotto "winners"), having pretty miserable lives.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.
The downside is that she has a 1 1/2 hour commute. Not because of distance but because of congestion. She is willing to take public transit, except it takes roughly twice as long to take the train, then a bus, then another bus, then a third bus, and not be able to do errands during the day or on the way home.
life is all about trade-offs.
But my opponent, to whom I responded, wants to "severely restrict technology". And this is what I have beef with. Those folks tend to be from rich countries and want to freeze things at their current, comfortable for them, level. They do not want to give up the running water, swear off vaccines and antibiotics or go through dental work without painkillers. Which is where a large part of the world would be stuck under this "technology restriction".
Economies of scale and local advantages make the world better off. There’s no advantage to growing bananas in greenhouses in Iowa when you can grow wheat and trade with Panama.
Isn't this basically collectivization, which empirically has been shown to a massive failure? Without a monetary incentive, it's hard to get people to actually do stuff rather than lying on their couch and watching tiktok.
So no, in this case local production is simply worse for the commons. More broadly things that cost dramatically more are generally worse for the environment in subtle ways.
On the other hand even occasional imports supports global trade and a dramatically higher standard living. The option to decarbonize global trade is exists, ‘local’ is more feel good nonsense than an actual path forward.
That is to say everything isn't objectively always 100% better with globalization and specialization at least not until come up with faster methods of shipping.
You can grow bananas in Alaska, but you can’t simply plant them outside. Thus my example assumes greenhouses built to a large enough scale to handle trees which is a major economic and environmental cost.
Comparative advantage applies to a huge range of things not just bananas. You could mine cobalt basically anywhere at extreme expense, but everyone is better off when that happens in locations that naturally have extremely high concentrations of cobalt.
The dominance of the economy by a few big companies also has the same effect - elimination of competition.
That's what "too big to fail" corporations can get you: failed products, anti-competitive environment, regulatory capture, no responsibility.
Getting fined for a few (hundred) million dollars is not responsibility, it's chump change for multi-trillion dollar corporations.
Most of the cheap stuff we buy is from other countries, they don't have the same regulations and protections that we have, hence part(not all) of the reason they are cheap.
Take a look at the cheap chargers on Amazon for example, marked as UL listed but you open them up and you see a circuit that is liable to start a fire. Someone reports it, the vendor vanishes and then there are 5 more listings under different names. See also the lead paint on toys scandal and poison pet food/treat scandals.
This is true for the extreme minority of products that ARE produced locally.
If you buy a screwdriver from the privately-owned DYI shop around the corner it will have been produced in the same Chinese factory and shipped by the same boats and trucks as the one you'll buy from Amazon.
You're not at all supporting local sustainability, you're just paying more to add one more middleman.
It allows whoever is willing to understand the peoples of the world share way more than what makes them different. Globalization, specially through the internet, but trade as whole, is my personal bet on what could "end all wars". In fact it is the first necessary step for the philosophical parts of the communist manifesto that are salvageable, the parts about the global coalition of common peoples working on shared goals and with similar baseline prosperity.
Regarding human-supremacist view, I hadn't seen that expression before but if I interpret it correctly, I would say that describes a great big majority of the world population and I believe anyone would have a really hard time making this case to anyone on the street. I respect the moral purity in a way, but I think it's wildly impractical to call people around you human-supremacists, when like I said we are still not totally in agreement that things like wars should not happen. We say we do but there's never not been wars in our history. I don't know man, I feel like you're too deep in this rabbithole of morality to be able to have a normal discussion about getting a lightbulb at the local store when you start calling other people human-supremacists. But I do enjoy the banter!
My goal is not to get most people to like me, or agree with my views. I fully acknowledge that I am a fundamentalist in the sense that I have a few axioms (all life is equal and technology must be regressed) and I have a zero compromise policy on that. Of course, unfortunately, to make a living I must participate in some of our atrocities.
I don't think it's necessary either, that I conform and discuss as others. There is no shortage of conformists. Either our destructive ways will stop, in which case I am working to bring them down through my writing, or I will fail. It's something I believe in and nothing will change that.
You have probably never in your whole life been to a forest that's more than a few hundred years old. Even the Amazon was largely managed by humans with fire prior to about the 15th-16th century.
> technology must be regressed
This is a morally deranged axiom. The life-giving benefits of so many technologies can't be overstated.
Also accountability is the same there, shops just buy their material regardless of working conditions and whatsoever. At least companies can be regulated based off of that.
The error is too systematic to say "just produce local".
Those financial institutions hire local people. Other local businesses use the same financial institutions.
It's not about "simple economics". This isn't a supply and demand curve. It's about what a higher cash flow/economic output can mean for the subjective quality of life in a community:
- More jobs - Higher wages - Improved public services (schools, roads, healthcare) - Increased property values
Tons of people in these comments talking about the shitty rural experience while seeming to miss the irony in "big cities are so much better" -- big cities started as small cities.
Your plastic example is a reasonable example, but I could also counter that if plastic is the problem then locally isn't necessarily more sustainable. Local farmers can also wrap their products in plastic. In the end, the plastic is there to increase the shelf life. Even most local products will need to have a shelf life of a few weeks. It's unreasonable to demand farmers stop batching their produce and instead demand they carry a few apples to the market each day.
Buying from local stores pays the salaries of local salesmen, that is a benefit for the community. But wouldn't the community benefit better if they did a job that was needed instead?
Yup. If you go to a souvenir store in a remote town (say Kiruna, Sweden), you will typically find local themed products manufactured in China.
local production happens in China though. if you live anywhere else, most of the stuff you can buy off Amazon was made in China. the local shops will ultimately buy it from China too.
Global trade is one of the best things to happen to the world, it has improved the lives of many. All your advocating for is going back to a time which you did not live it but you romanticize. I suspect it was not as romantic as you make it out to be.
Yes. That generates sales taxes. That generates property taxes. That pays for insurance. That pays for upkeep which is hopefully provided by a local contractor. Where this cycle repeats.
> and getting "too" rich? ie dislike of big corporations?
Yes. The money actually doesn't bother me, it's the access to unrestrained political influence it buys you, and big corporations monopolize labor pools and result in worse outcomes for working conditions and wages. Where this story starts.
You're correct that monopoly leads to a degradation of products and services, but that's a flaw in capitalism (specifically the myth of the self-regulating free market ideal that eschews proper regulation in favor of the "invisible hand.")
It sure seems to me as if there were a few additional downsides in those communist countries that I don't see to anywhere near the same degree in the US.
A few reasons:
- market diversity matters, and we have a more functional market with many smaller actors
- similarly, a smaller local actor is more accountable for their behavior
- efficiency comes mostly from cutting things, some of which mattered (eg, individual buyers at companies do more due diligence on the product than Amazon)
- it’s better that every community have a local moderately rich person than one super rich person nationally, eg, in terms of charity to your community
- politics remains local and hence tractable
- smaller organizations have less of a “frozen middle”, which creates numerous problems with national scale organizations
There’s probably more reasons if I really stopped to think about it.
Because they don't have the same unlimited inventory capacity, local stores have to put at least some effort into selling products with some base level of quality and focusing on the products most likely to sell in each category. Local stores are by no means perfect here, but they're vastly better than Amazon in this regard. And it's especially important because finding good independent product reviews on the internet these days is also a challenge, and even where they exist they're not reviewing whatever no-name Chinese brand Amazon is selling anyways.
Shopping from retailers that employ actual buyers feels like a real upgrade.
Local stores supply the cheapest crappiest version of something, but sell it at full price. This maximizes their profit.
Online, I can actually see from the reviews which product is best, and buy that one.
I spend the same, but get a much higher quality product.
There are so many products only sold on Amazon that have 20,000 reviews because they're so much better than anything you can buy locally.
I'm not talking the random Chinese brands with 50 reviews -- I'm talking the #1 best selling item in each product category.
[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Extender-Antennas-Repeater-Wireless...
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Extender-Antennas-Repeater-Wireless...
But if you visit the page for the product's category:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/bestsellers/computers/430578031/...
You see the #1 option has 36K+ reviews. Looks pretty solid to me.
Yes, you can purchase pages and change the product, it's a known scam that I agree Amazon should crack down on. That still doesn't change the fact that there are super-popular items that are usually way better than what you can purchase locally.
An even better way to do it is don’t use Amazon for discovery, and only buy stuff you’ve researched off the site. But walking into Amazon to buy something is just as likely to land you with crap as going into your local shop and doing so.
However, now "local store" includes the giants like Walmart, etc.
Ironically, it's the big chains that seem to be the best on this. They have some curation and their pricing is usually a little higher than What I'll see on Amazon but isn't outrageous.
The big exception is anything edible, such as groceries. Anything edible on Amazon is going to be wildly overpriced. For edible items I definitely go to big chains that are local
For some value of "more efficiently". I mean if the most efficient way to work is to have delivery drivers pee in a bottle and warehouse workers develop RSIs, who am I to complain? Someone else's dignity is a small price to pay in order to get a 3% rebate on some commodity.
At least in the USA we have some semblance of a Labor Department etc...
I mitigated it by having my first smartphone last 12 years, and I am now using the company-provided one in order to avoid a second buy. Not ideal, I’ll admit. I hope that, by the time I need a change, I can use a pinephone and convince my company that I only need a rsa otp or a yubikey.
But is that really related to the thread?
> At least in the USA we have some semblance of a Labor Department etc...
Any local alternative to amazon will also have it, and less execs/lawyers whose only job is to make them irrelevant.
When you buy from a non local business, that money leaves your towns microeconomy.
It’s part of why dollar stores destroy low income areas.
Amazon is a big employer in a lot of local communities.
When you shop at locally-owned stores the money goes to a local small business owner, truly staying local.
Look up how walmart used to destroy small town economies by bankrupting all the local businesses and converting all those previously middle-class shop owners into minimum wage jobs at walmart.
Incorrect. Bezos only owns 8.8% of Amazon.
Most of the profit is distributed to a wide variety of shareholders in the form of rising share prices, reflected in things like retirement accounts. In other words, a lot of that profit goes to grandmas across the country with their money in a Vanguard retirement fund. Including grandmas in your local community.
And you really think the local shopowner kept all the profit in their community? E.g. they didn't send their kids to college in another state? Or build a house with materials sourced from all over the country?
It's a whole lot more complicated than you seem to think.
Imagine spending money and having that money allow people in your local community to afford college.
Then imagine thinking that’s a bad thing.
Obviously it’s complicated, but the gist is longer money stays in a local area, the better off that area is going to be.
It’s better for money to leave my town so that my neighbor’s kid could go to college than it is for me to get two day shipping on a new game console.
A pathological case could be made that every dollar that you keep in town is a dollar someone spends outside of the town. That’s a valid argument in theory, but in reality that doesn’t happen.
People go to local businesses and spend money. Local bars, specialty markets, farmers markets, etc.
That said, I do mostly agree with you. Where we might differ is that I don't accept paying significant markup to shop local. If an item I want is available locally and is close to the same price as online, I will go local every time for exactly the reasons you mention: to help the local economy. But I have a low tolerance for The outrageous markup that most Small shops insist on applying. In my opinion, those shops probably should go out of business by being non-competitive. That would open up some room for a less greedy retailer to come and be more of a service to the local community.
While arguably not ideal I would also argue that is still better than the same profits being captured by an increasingly centralized corporation many states or countries away.
Local millionaires using a bank will incentivize that bank keeping branches open in town, which can help other locals more easily maintain savings accounts. I personally make a point to use at least one locally incorporated bank for similar reasons.
Even something frivolous like a local millionaire buying a powerboat stimulates the economy because the infrastructure that is required to maintain that keeps a demand for other jobs open and keeps money flowing.
Now I’m not saying powerboats are intrinsically good. All I’m saying is that if someone is going to buy one with the profit captured from running a business selling eg home goods, it’s better for a local economy for a local to do it vs a Bay Area Bezos a thousand miles away.
You seem to have missed my point entirely. I'm not saying that's a bad thing -- but I'm saying that by your logic, you seem to think it is.
You're looking at money like it's some kind of zero-sum thing that ought to be hoarded by every local community. You say:
> but the gist is longer money stays in a local area, the better off that area is going to be
That is contrary to all standard economic theories of free trade. The entire engine of economic growth is that when communities trade between each other, everyone's standard of living goes up.
The economy theory you seem to be promoting is what is known as mercantilism [1], which has been thoroughly discredited.
Circulating money broadly is a good thing. You don't need to worry about it leaving your local area, because it comes back according to whatever goods and services you produce! You don't need to hoard it locally.
> it comes back according to whatever goods and services you produce
Extractive industry like Amazon kill the local producers and siphon the money out of smaller areas and concentrate it in richer areas. When there are no local producers or wealth left, what is there to circulate or trade?
Amazon is an Internet-myelinated version of the Wal-Mart effect, with more packaging waste.
If that were true, then sure it would be a problem. But I don't know of many communities in the US where there are literally no jobs, nothing being produced at all. Where economic activity is zero.
Some jobs go away and new ones arise. And remote work makes it easier than ever for jobs to move from cities to smaller areas.
Can you really show that Amazon has had a net effect of shifting wealth "out of smaller areas" and into richer ones? Especially when you consider the amount of money it saves people in smaller areas, which makes them more wealthy than they would be otherwise?
I’m saying that as a single pragmatic person in the current world we live in, it’s better to spend your money locally.
We don’t live in a world where any community is self sufficient, money comes and goes, but for many towns, it just goes.
As you said, this stuff is complicated.
An individual choosing to spend money at local businesses is not what makes a mercantile economic system.
I have to say though I have evolved a bit in this perspective as I've come to realize that these small business owners can be every bit as greedy or even more. Especially there are a lot who are just fundamentally incompetent at business and try to make up the difference by extracting it from their employees, willfully ignoring labor laws in ways a large company would not dare. A large company is a big target surrounded by people who want a piece of the action and often must tread carefully as a result.
I've personally never worked in such a position, but I have heard absolutely crazy stories from people who have, things like demanding that commission only sales people come in hours early to do unpaid work like cleaning unrelated to their job title, "fining" people $75 for checking their phone while "on the clock" (again in a commission only job), constantly helping themselves to their employees paycheck finding things to "charge" them for, and just generally being a menace and treating employees like they personally owned them. Their ego and sense of entitlement go completely wild. The owners I have known personally will brag about cheating on their taxes while railing against the government, running an atrociously inefficient business that they talk about as if it's some sort of charity. In many cities there's a whole good old boy network type system in place that's no less corrupt and ugly than whatever you want to say about companies like Amazon.
What you want to support are:
- local retailers offer better jobs, and often better benefits. The work you do stocking at Menards is much better than sorting boxes at Amazon
- support local repair vs repurchasing. This cuts down on the upstream demand and does wonders for local small-business economies. And again, provides better jobs than sorting boxes.
- Efficiency is great! But what is Amazon efficient at? They have maximized the speed and convenience of delivery. Once stated that way it's obvious there must be tradeoffs. One of those tradeoffs is the shit work. In one dist center, a guys entire job was to wheel odd shaped boxes from one side of a warehouse to another. Whenever you order a big or weirdly shaped box, that guy moved it. Even he hates that job. It's meaningless, non social, provides no transferrable skills.
- ultimately what your parents were talking about is how one chooses to shape their local economy and jobs market. I want to buy from companies that I would want my friends and family to work for.
But yeah, I buy from Amazon all the time too.
Is this backed by empirical evidence? I've also heard that small local companies have worse labor conditions, because they're small and fly under the radar compared to multinationals. One incident of an Amazon delivery driver peeing in bottles (even if they're technically working for a local subcontractor) is enough to show up on the New York Times. The same isn't going to be true for some local firm. Moreover, it's possible that "local retailers" targets a more upmarket segment compared to national chains. When I think "local retailers", I think small boutique shops in gentrifying neighborhoods. Obviously those stores will have better working conditions than Amazon, but it's not as if we got rid of Amazon, it'll get replaced by boutique shops, or that most people would be better served by them.
I had in my head things like Target, Best Buy, or more social, occasional-customer-interaction-based work. It's just those mega corps are local. Also the large retailers like Home Depot, Menards, etc. At least those aren't as soulless and monotonous. By "local" I meant "brick and mortar" etc.
But I'm out of the edit window so, best to ignore it.
Historically, in the US, these shops and restaurants often depended on underpaid (often children of the owner) labor, offered no benefits, and had no safety net in case of owner or business failure.
On average, today, starting wages at McDonalds, Walmart, or your "local" Amazon warehouse are 25-50% higher than local restaurants and retailers for rural America (which more typically pay minimum wage). And benefits, a local mom and pop is less likely to account for paid sick/vacation days, retirement savings, healthcare coverage, and workplace insurance (in some cases, a disability or workplace injury would make the business unprofitable + less oversight).
But you're right I suppose, if your choice is employee number 3 at a tiny thrift store for half the pay, I'd choose Amazon too. But I'd probably want my kids to work at Target stocking shelves rather than Amazon hauling boxes.
That’s such an odd way to paint it.
When people live in a system with millions of quettallionaires and the bilion left are mere millionaires where 1 unit of currency is enough to buy the best meal in town with all towns in the world equally provided in services, the system won’t see much strikes happening soon.
When people live in a system where a small cake is growing at a slow rate and a few hundreds people are cornering always more of it at an accelerating rate, all the more when the extraction rate of the cake is known to exceed the cake regeneration rate, the system is well on its road for repeated strikes or even bloody social movements.
Ok, these allegories are two possible points in a spectrum. Which scenario is most likely to be closest to the world as its perceived by most people out there?
People don’t love or hate big corporations and riches out of the blue. If there are given room out of the vivid feeling that their life is a day to day struggle to survive, most people can perfectly demonstrate nuances in their judgment.
The local store pays their taxes — local and national taxes. Amazon is big enough to evade these, or where possible, pay small amounts only in Luxembourg, Delaware etc.
That is exactly the kind of creative accounting unavailable to a small business.
* Inefficiency
* Lack of options
* Stupid business practices uncritically continued
See https://asteriskmag.com/issues/07/want-growth-kill-small-bus...
On the globalist/efficient extreme in the USA, for example, you have the problems of:
* Economic dependence on large, national players that can leave at any time
* Business proprietors feel no social responsibility to your community because they do not live there and interact with locals
* Little power in deciding what products businesses offer
* Profits enriching another place rather than your own place
I don't want either of these.
I feel like they are riding on old momentum by now. The experience shopping there is terrible.
- for over a year part-time on weekends
- four-day full-time in-between jobs recently
https://www.reddit.com/r/EDC/comments/dmnuts/53mamazon_fulfi...
Once, when polled by HR, I noted that it should be more efficient for many different people in a given neighborhood to place orders, and for one delivery truck to run through it dropping off packages even if somewhat fuel-inefficient, than for that myriad of consumers to make separate trips even if using fuel-efficient vehicles.
Stores should not try to "out-Amazon" Amazon --- I buy my groceries from a store which is 1 mile away, and usually stop on the way home from work --- if I need something over the weekend or on a telework day which won't wait, I walk or ride my bike unless there is some other errand which needs to be made. Similarly, I prefer to shop the local hardware store (bike-distance) for hardware and tools (when suitable ones are available, if not, then it's Harry Epstein, or Jim Bode, or a trip to Woodcraft, or an on-line order).
Folks forget what life was like before Amazon --- there were occasions when I drove all around multiple towns looking for one connector because I didn't want a project to wait for a special order and 6--8 weeks delivery --- my kids were amazed when we came across my copy of the book: _U.S. Mail Order Shopper's Guide: A Subject Guide Listing 3,667 Unique Mail Order Catalogs_ by Susan Spitzer
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4313476-u-s-mail-order-s...
I almost never have to resort to Amazon any more.
Rightly or wrongly, I worry less about the security implementations of hardware point-of-sale terminals than the security implementations of small websites.
I mostly prefer Apple Pay for in-person transactions because of anonymity — my understanding is that it makes it harder for companies (other than Apple) to track my purchases.
> Do those technologies prevent the merchant from getting raw CC info?
They do:
https://www.worldpay.com/en/insights/articles/how-does-a-chi...
> An enabled EMV terminal reads and verifies the card information contained in the embedded chip when inserted into the slot of the payment terminal. Like using the magnetic stripe, card data is then processed for payment authorization; the key difference is that the chip card generates a one-time code for each transaction while a traditional magnetic stripe card does not.
So, the merchant doesn't get the raw CC number; they get a transaction token.
This doesn't prevent someone from reading the CC account number off of the physical card, but unlike swiping a stripe, the act of purchasing via an EMV token means that the CC account number doesn't enter the system.
And no, my post is not an "ad" *eyeroll*. There seem to be several competitors active in a maturing ecosystem. I don't have experience with them them to the level that I'd feel comfortable citing them, but I regret not mentioning them if it would have made the point more effectively. If PayPal, or Google Pay, or some other provider has served that role for you, I'm glad.
Right, but if you want something in 2-3 days (which amazon provides), you need to make a dedicated trip. Even if timing wasn't a factor, at best doing a consolidated errand run allows you to visit a handful of stores, whereas an amazon delivery van delivers to dozens of houses in your neighborhood in one trip.
In order to get that amazing fast delivery time, Amazon had to create their own system. The creation of that system, created a large amount of Carbon emissions at it's onset just with the requisite vehicles require to make it happen. It also set off an arms race between logistics enterprises to try and deliver the same performance, leading to further emissions.
>The primary function of Amazon Air is to transport Amazon packages from distant fulfillment centers that are outside of Amazon's local ground linehaul network for a specific area.
They have their own air cargo service for shipping packages between Distribution centers. They wouldn't invest in that unless they had enough volume to make it profitable.
I get that it is easy and convenient but please don't try to claim that it is ecological.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Air
https://www.businesstechweekly.com/online-sales-and-growth/s...
https://www.warehousingandfulfillment.com/warehousing-and-fu...
You have a a large fleet of 18 wheelers, delivery vans and forklifts. Then the warehouses that go into making the supply chain work.
The only way it works out is if people buy much less, which given prices would be much higher, they likely would.
Your one person is a truck delivering to 100 homes ignores the fact that at least 80% of the people in those homes have a car that they use everyday, often passing a grocery store and most other local shops.
I have a longer reply talking about the Carbon usage below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42463832
Still don’t get the Whole Foods return ability when not shopping from Amazon, but not punching in my credit card number to random sites has been enough to get me to move 50% of my shopping to retailers direct.
Regarding credit cards, I started using privacy dot com for virtual, merchant-locked cards. It protects against (rare) card details leaks, but, of course, does not give you any points or cashback.
What's ironic is we still make purchases on Amazon that don't require their fast shipping. We're just conditioned to expect it. I'm thinking TVs, books, project supplies, art, etc.
Realizing this was what made me quit Prime years ago, and eventually drive down my Amazon purchases to just a handful of times a year. For the most part, there's really not much of a difference if I get a book tomorrow vs. four days from now, or if I get it from Amazon or from the nearby Target. But there's a lot of infrastructure built up to satisfy this admittedly frivolous expectation of fast delivery.
Are there cases when rapid delivery is necessary and valuable? Absolutely. Are those cases the norm? Not in my life, by an overwhelming margin.
I quit Prime after Amazon replaced "two-day shipping" with "it'll get there when it gets there".
The same is true with two-day Prime. Even if you get to the item, all of a sudden, it's gone.
I think their argument is that it's "Prime" shipping (not two-day), so if their eco-get-it-in-a-week-option is available, that's still a variant of Prime.
For a lot of other stuff, it feels like they've lost their edge on price and shipping.
Often my main reason for using Amazon is that it reduces the friction associated with buying for more retailers. For example worrying about data breaches, being put on spam email lists, etc.
My Prime membership ended 3 years ago. These days I just put items in the cart, and place order whenever it reaches $35. If I need an item in a hurry -- which rarely happens -- I go to a store to buy it.
This barely affected me, and I ended up with much fewer impulse purchases.
What's funny though is that the "standard" delivery often takes 5 calendar days. But AliExpress shipments can take as few as 8 calendar days. I ended up spending even less -- well, if the items are manufactured in China, why not just order on AliExpress where you get the same/similar items and pay less.
I think the biggest issue is just the uncertainty. I've been ordering at other places lately and it's just ... frustrating that I have no idea if it'll take them a day or three days to process before shipping.
Yes. Simple as. But a lot of people don't, so it's nice that there's options.
I rarely buy big-ticket items, and these can definitely wait.
Yep, I've come to see it as a general rule that, if the item on Amazon is sold under one of those all-caps gibberish brand names, the same exact item is almost always on AliExpress for 30-50% less.
I care about knowing when it's going to arrive. I don't necessarily need next day delivery, but if something says 2-3 day delivery that doesn't mean it will arrive in 3 days, it means it will arrive 3 days after it's shipped. Which for some major UK retailers can be 3-5 days. All of a sudden your delivery window is 2-8 days.
Also, much of the stuff I buy off Amazon is the sort of "crap" you make a single trip to the dollar store for - lightbulbs, wood filler, bin liners. They're the sort of things that I kind of need when I need them, or shortly after. My parents are the sort of people who will spend 20 minutes doing a quick round trip to the nearest dollar store/supermarket to get one thing, twice a week. I order it on amazon, and know it'll be there by the weekend for me to do whatever I need to do with it.
Yes, people often care about delivery time.
Most of the time, if I'm buying something, it is because I need it for a project, trip, or event. If I could buy it at a store today I would.
Usually I'm not in a huge hurry, and I would happily wait a few days extra if it means workers don't have to pee in a bottle during their night shift. However, a "3-5 days" delivery means there's a pretty decent chance I won't be home and have to go to the other side of town to pick it up - and that's incredibly annoying. So I end up choosing next-day delivery and order it when I know I'll be home the next day.
Why can't I just place an order on Monday with a guaranteed delivery on Saturday? Ordering on Friday with a guaranteed delivery on Saturday is already possible, so what's stopping them?
Most websites won't even give you a realistic shipping time (major brands might but the long-tail of online merchants don't). They might say "2-3 day shipping" but that's how long it takes after they ship it, sometimes it can take up a week before they actually ship it. It means than if I buy from anyone but a massive retailer I am rolling the dice on if I'll get something in 2 days or 2+ weeks. Some things can wait 2 weeks but when I'm moving between my house and my parent's house (I visit often) it's really hard to remember "2 weeks before I move locations I need to start directing packages at the other location". The two locations are 3hrs+ apart so I can't just pop over and pick up something sent to the other place.
Anybody else? I have no idea how long it'll take them to process my order, how long it takes for it to be processed by DHL/DPD/GLS and how long the actual delivery will take.
One of those things shipped the next day and is currently reported to be arriving tomorrow, which happens to match the stated delivery date.
The other two have yet to ship, but their delivery date has slipped to "December 21 - 24".
Realistically, they look unlikely to arrive before Christmas, and Amazon seems to feel no need to honor their contract.
Interestingly, the "shipped" status is matched to a tracking update that says "package left the shipper facility" with no time or location information. All further updates have a location and a timestamp. (Everything is shipped by Amazon.)
A long time ago I assumed that Amazon removed shipping speed options from their ordering process because, if you itemize shipping separately from the cost of the good, the customer can demand a refund on shipping when you don't provide what you sold.
My current theory is that it's a side effect of deciding they needed to provide shipping in-house instead of buying it from reliable sources. They replaced shipping they could control with shipping they couldn't control, and so they stopped letting you specify the shipping speed you needed. But for some reason they continued advertising shipping speeds they knew they couldn't provide.
Then again I don't have a business that relies on things getting to me fast. I'm just a guy who buys crap online for myself and my family. If I'm getting a book or some electronic doodad it rarely matters to me if I get it tomorrow or in 10 days.
For most Amazon non-business shoppers is getting stuff delivered quickly really an important consideration? I've always assumed that fast shipping, and the importance that Amazon places on it, was at least partly because of their desire for rapid cash flow. That fast shipping was more instituted because of Amazon's accounting needs than because most customers actually needed it. Maybe I'm wrong. It would be nice to hear people's informed opinions on this.
Personally, I feel similarly to you, that most of the time the difference between one day and 1-3 weeks shipping is negligible. However, I think that relies on certain assumptions; I buy most consumable items (food, sponges, soap, etc) in person and almost always have enough to last another month or without buying more. Not everyone does that, some are JITing their daily needs and/or don't have enough free time and energy to make sure everything is always set well in advance (think working single mom, kid needs dress shirt tomorrow for whatever).
I ordered a pair of shoes from a major UK high street store earlier this year who advertised 3 day shipping. Fine, I'm going away next weekend. Except, it turns out their guarantee is from dispatch, which is 3-5 days. It was listed in the small print on the order page, but even the order page still had the "Free 3 day shipping" banner on it. Unsurprisingly, they took 5 days to dispatch, and 3 days to deliver. I actually ended up going into the store to buy them, and returning them when I got home.
Amazon, for all it's faults, if they say next day, it's almost certainly going to arrive next day.
And you still get free shipping over $35 which covers most anything else.
Prime is too heavily tied to video now, which is a $0 value for me.
In the UK, the only place that I've found beats Amazon for delivery is Argos. For some utterly insane reason, they do their own delivery logistics from my nearest store and it can only be a fleet of vans sitting waiting for an online order to come in. I've _regularly_ had orders delivered in about 15 minutes from them (which is about how long it takes to drive to the nearest store).
There is on browser thought. It doesn’t work on mobile so I usually wait until at computer which is better anyway.
I just don't ever have the problems with Amazon that people complain about online.
It has made life worse in small but tangible, concrete ways. I don't need it that fast, probably neither do you. You can blame enforcement or the individual drivers or whatever but I think that's a cop out. Amazon demands efficiency of its drivers, this is what efficiency looks like.
I was even able to get another 30% off an already sale price for a Kindle because my old one (>5 years) died, and they couldn't fix it.
Not justifying any particular actions on their part, but their customer service has been above and beyond and other major retailer I've interacted with.
Amazon earned my business back in the day, but they don't seem very interested in it anymore.
Hah, I have the opposite experience. My shampoo bottle leaked and filled a bubble wrap. Amazon said, "We'll send a replacement, but you need to return this." After discussing it, I went to the UPS Store for the return. UPS, reasonably, refused to accept it.
Had to debate this for far too long with another customer service person before they would agree that "We don't really want a ziploc bag of shampoo back".
This is probably by design, but I don’t return a whole lot.
Unless Mr. Bezos has been putting on a disguise, and secret-shoppering his own company, I have a suspicion he has no idea how much his Leadership Principles have been eroded in the last few years. I don't think metrics will tell you that, when your staff has been conditioned to desperately make their metrics look good. The short-term quantitative metrics will be hit, at least on paper, and everything else will be neglected or outright cannibalized.
But that's increasingly offset by an inability to find quality products.
You not only have to consider the money spent on shipping it back to them at their own cost but also then deciding whether the product is still in good enough condition to be resold or most likely it would just go wholesale directly to a business that sells returns at a cheaper price and they handle that checking / repackaging. That by itself still probably costs money to handle. At Amazon scale, all of that together is a lot of money.
If the amount of profit they made from selling to you is offset by all those costs, why not let the customer keep it and get free goodwill and repeat business?
Makes dumping what would otherwise be useful goods into landfills 10x easier*
I grew up in a place and time where scams were everywhere. I now invest in garage stage startups, and endlessly amused.
Not sure about OP, but for me it's about convenience. My pet peeve is credit card forms. Do you know what % of websites I've used that have at least minorly broken credit card forms? It's literally 99%.
Random common issues that are annoying but can be fixed:
- autocomplete doesn't work at all
- autocomplete only fills in half the fields
- autocomplete only fills in 1 field at a time
- autocomplete doesn't interact correctly with the rich widgets they provided for date picking or zip code
- autocomplete doesn't play well with js validation, which is only on callbacks for typing. Now I have to go backspace and re-insert the last character of every field so it doesn't think it's blank
- my town name has a ' in it. complete fucking crapshoot on whether sites DEMAND or HATE the '.
Common issues that are complete fucking messes that can't be fixed:
- javascript between fields fights over edits between them and I can't get the form simultaneously filled out correctly
- rendering issues on mobile leaving fields not visible
- autocomplete doesn't work and I've for some reason forgotten my CVV again and don't want to go get my wallet
I could go on and on. It's amazing how hard it is to get this right and how obviously nobody tests the flow where PEOPLE GIVE THEM MONEY which as I understand it is the primary purpose of these places.
Maybe it's just me, but why would you want too have autocomplete for CC forms enabled? Personally, on these very rare consciously chosen occasions where I decide to give my CC number to another entity, I prefer to copy it from my banking site and never save it anywhere, neither locally nor in a cloud.
It's the same reason I use a password manager, it's convenient and 2fa exists.
Every single site I've bought from has the same boring and functional checkout experience, whether it's Stripe Checkout, Google Wallet, or Shopify. They're practically all the same, and they all work fine.
No
It's enough of a pain in the ass that most people would rather not deal with it at all. An extra layer of security to help it not happen is a very nice benefit.
No, but you're still paying for it.
Let's say you're a small EU-based merchant accepting payment for international orders via Stripe. An incoming iDEAL payment costs €0.30 / transaction. An incoming credit card payment? €0.25 / transaction, plus 2.5% of the transaction value. On top of that, you as merchant are charged €20 for every chargeback! And those additional costs are of course passed on to the customers because they will raise all prices by 2.5% to make up for it.
There is no free lunch. You are implicitly buying fraud insurance on every order and paying 2.5% for it.
Free returns aren't free. We need to de-normalize this practice of people buying so much junk just to immediately return it.
One of the things you lose from online shopping is sizing. Shoes run in different sizes, lengths, widths. How do you suggest you order shoes to find the right size if shopping online?
Don't shop for shoes online? Unless you're happy with most of those shoes you tried on but returned going to the landfill.
Physical stores increasingly cater to the average. They would rather stock 20 different items in 5 sizes than 10 different items in 10 sizes. All of the long-tail stuff is only available online, so you are forced to buy online.
If you think retailers are dumping every pair of shoes they get returned, you’re wrong by the way.
No, because I don't buy the cheap no-name junk off Amazon. It's pretty rare for me to encounter returns for stuff like that, because I already try and avoid supporting the e-waste game from the get-go. But I would say if you honestly tried to get a good and it wasn't what was advertised that's a good reason for a return.
But acting like the majority of returns are things which weren't as advertised is ignoring reality. Look no further than sibling comments here where that user openly acknowledges buying more than needed regularly and returns the rest. They're not alone with this; tons of people behave in this way. Buy something, decide later they didn't really want it/need it, return it. Decent chance it went to the trash. It's not worth it for the retailer to actually inspect and restock it.
> If you think retailers are dumping every pair of shoes they get returned, you’re wrong by the way.
Not all of them, just most of them.
Buying a dozen shirts and returning 10 of them because in the end you just didn't like the fit, you probably sent 5-7 otherwise fine articles of clothing straight to the landfill. Maybe a few of those will make it to some "donation" scheme, which will probably send half of those "donation" bound goods to the landfill. Then the last few will get put on a boat in a giant pile of goods, dropped off to some poor part of the world, and have a 50/50 chance of being worn by someone there or just become another piece of trash floating around.
Buying five pairs of shoes and returning four of them probably sent 2-3 pairs to the landfill. The rest are probably following that same flow above.
For lots of categories of goods like apparel, yes. Its far cheaper for them to trash the item than spend all that money on the reverse logistics of actually analyzing the item. Other categories are probably more like 20-30%.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1yqcagavfY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG8idKaX9KI
If you're thinking the vast majority of your returns are getting restocked you're woefully uninformed.
And if Amazon can't get it to work with their already centralized logistics, smaller retailers probably have an even harder time with the reverse logistics.
> Do you think Office [0] are chucking 4 pairs of New Balance trainers in the trash? No.
Sure. If it costs them more to handle the return than what their margin on the goods would be, why would they reprocess it? Of that original sale say a $100, they probably only got $5-10 or so of original profit. And that was with the optimized supply chain getting it in to the original warehouse. So now they have to figure out the return shipping to the processing center, pay for inspections on the item, probably pay to re-ship to a warehouse, pay to re-stock it, and then for a lot of items list it as open box (if its anything that could have been plugged in to the wall it cannot be sold as new in the US), and then have all the regular costs of selling the item again.
Or they just eat the loss and increase prices a few percent and send it to "energy recovery". Or they "donate" it and claim they gave $100 worth of goods to charity. Or they sell the lots of returned goods for a few bucks a pound at the place where the returns were originally mailed to.
It feels like this is part of a larger dynamic where companies are basically arbitraging consumers' feeling bad about waste and environmental destruction to increase their own bottom line. Like Target is abjectly terrible at packing items in boxes, such that things often get crushed in shipping. So then you're left with the dynamic of either complaining and accepting that return/resend creates a bunch more waste, or just shrugging off the damage they've caused (willfully, at this point). Now that I've seen the pattern, I just call that bluff too.
I bought something for $2k, it was bad, shipped it back, and "we never received it".
UPS had collected signature, went to correct place.
Tried to resolve it amicably, they dragged their feet, and finally I asked amex for a chargeback. and... some deadline was elapsed and they wouldn't refund.
long story short, with amazon, every single problem was resolved, with very little friction.
That said, amazon is horrible for name brands. They have basically pushed value of brands to zero. Everything comes from UPPERCASENONSENSE brand, searches seem to be 99% sponsored results, many 5.0-star reviews seem to be fake. ugh.
The logical connection is as follows: Bezos decided to optimize everything to its limits, including human behavior, to the very limits of law. To literally track every movement of employees and abusing the power the company holds over them. This is an ongoing process that we are all painfully aware of. Because of that, there is a growing negative feeling towards them that causes people not to give them their money. That's why instead of unions we are talking about boycotting Amazon.
If you read about Amazon mistreating workers to the point that they strike, you can feel good by saying, "I won't support that company!"
The general term is "solidarity", and it's a mix of empathy and action and encouragement for others to do the same.
I'm willing to accept inconvenience if it means strong workers' rights.
> Keep saying that when a vacation get ruined because your connections got messed up and your out thousands of dollars.
Travel Insurance?
The merits of unions, not always but their goals are, multiple. a/ compensation and working conditions leverage in negotiations b/ structure that can directly address all sort of issues the employer don't care about and isn't obliged to deal with.
That it makes your service experience particularly painful is exactly the goal, bad (or better, no) customers experience hurts the employer, guaranteed.
Disclosure: raised in France.
Unions are at war using any effective and legal weapons they can find. The same stands for "the capital".
Sure, probably. The jobs that can be automated will eventually be automated. But while they're still needed, I'd hope they have some basic protections and decent wages.
If my online shopping costs go up 0.5% but now a thousand workers don't have to have the mental stress of "I really need a pee break, can my metrics take the few minute hit this week or will I lose my job and go homeless?", I'll take that trade in a heartbeat.
Their margin on that retail item is probably 30-40% of the cost of that product though. Let's assume the workers' benefits and wages in question here are 35% of Amazon's costs. If there was a 20% increase of that labor cost, that's going from 35% to 42% of the total share of costs, or an increase of 7% of the total costs. But that's 7% of the 30-40% of their markup. For a product with a 40% markup and they were to just pass that entire cost along to the consumer, it's a 1.6% increase in price.
So like in this hypothetical, which is not anywhere near real numbers for Amazon, we could give these workers a 20% benefit bump for increasing prices 1.6%.
Are you suggesting the warehouse worker's benefits and pay is really 25-50%+ of the final purchase price of the good?? That'd be an extraordinarily high amount of cost.
The largest categories of employees tend to dominate most companies' cost structures. I would like to run some numbers to see what the likely distribution is here, but the annual filings are quite sparse (in terms of income statement details), and I don't have the time to do an extensive analysis.
> Amazon estimates the price of labour, labour-related productivity costs and cost inflation was $2bn in Q3
https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/29/amazon_q3_2021/
It cost $2b-4b in labor to do ~$65.55b in sales. Their labor cost of revenue was 3-6%. Pretty far from 50%, wouldn't you say?
I don't mind waiting an extra for my stuff to arrive.
It's important to support other smaller retailers.
Amazon already started with enshittyfying some of their services.
There are some audible-only titles, which is frustrating.
As of December 10, 2024, we have received more than 2 million "thank yous,” concluding the promotion offering $5 per "thank you" to eligible drivers. You can continue to thank your drivers and we will share your appreciation with them.
"As of December 10, 2024, we have received more than 2 million "thank yous,” concluding the promotion offering $5 per "thank you" to eligible drivers. You can continue to thank your drivers and we will share your appreciation with them."
https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=18271648011&pd_rd_w=v1...
As a result I think I place a pretty low value on events centred around gift giving -- and yet I live in a society, etc.
Now I'm just holding my usual orders until after Christmas to avoid having stuff lost in the big rush.
Better to go with a digital gift card if you haven't received everything for now.