Amazon Doesn’t Consider the Race of Its Customers. Should It? | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Doesn’t Consider the Race of Its Customers. Should It?

bloomberg.com

22 pointsohjeez37 comments

The article answers its own question. Amazon decides which neighborhoods get Prime Same Day service by the number of Prime subscribers in that neighborhood. Predominantly African-American neighborhoods have fewer Prime subscribers, so they don't get Prime Same Day; presumably it would be even less profitable to serve those neighborhoods than it is to offer Prime Same Day to neighborhoods with high concentrations of Prime subscribers.

The article feels to me like a stretch. It isn't up to Amazon to solve racial and income inequalities in the US. And, by all accounts, Prime Same Day isn't a money-maker for Amazon. So the writers of this article are asking Amazon to lose even more money in an effort to offer same-day deliveries to underserved neighborhoods. It's a valid ask, but I won't be too outraged if Amazon continues on its present course.

Of course, there was that bit recently where some arm of the US gov't said that discriminating based on criminal record might be illegal because minorities have proportionately more criminal records, making discrimination based on criminal record, racism. So I no longer know which way is up in regards to this stuff.

I think the overall point should be that no way is clearly up -- it seems obvious that corporations shouldn't be forced to act unprofitably, but not only does that often reinforce systemic racism (in this case), you end up with e.g. insurers shouldn't have to cover preexisting conditions, felons should be permanently out of a job (and thus essentially forced back into crime), et cetera. Or should that be the government's role, and how do we reconcile that with the common wisdom that private enterprise is more efficient (or desirable)?

These are complex, subtle issues. The most important thing is to distrust anyone telling you that the answer is "obvious", which so far is most of this HN thread.

Black people are more likely to be convicted of drug crimes even when they use drugs at the same rates as white people. Similar for traffic crimes.

Many crimes are poverty-related theft for subsistence, which rich people never need to be tempted with (as they get handouts from their parents) aren't particularly relevant if someone gets a job that eliminates poverty. And childhood poverty is correlated to race.

So yeah, screening by criminal record is intertwined with structural racism.

>>Many crimes are poverty-related theft for subsistence

Is poverty an acceptable justification for crimes? If yes, there are many issues: how much poor one should be to justify this? how much rich the other person (whom the poor one robbed) should be to justify this? What are the acceptable reasons why the poor one remained poor in the first place? what kind of reasons/ways how the rich become rich due to/using are acceptable to make the rich person a right target for the society to accept his/her being robbed by a poor is justifiable? What about the poor ones giving birth to children when they know they cannot afford things, and then they rob others to justify that they did this for their children and did so out of poverty? and so on.

There are many, many such issues. I am not saying that there are not any racism related issues but just trying to hide everything behind racism and/or trying to sideline such issues is not going to help either the black people or in general the USA.

edit: added more examples.

"White areas get organic grocers and designer boutiques" - no faster way to get out of poverty than shopping at Whole Foods

The basics at WF's are reasonably priced. I want to hate stores, but the CEO did a good job lowering prices on certain items. 1/2 gallon milk is $2.29. Some bread is reasonable. Their store brand (nature someting) is a good deal. They got a $2.49 bottle of wine that's a lost leader.

Everything else is priced for Thurston Howell III.

Been a bit since I bought a gallon of milk, but I distinctly remember it being <$3. How is $2.29 for a half gallon a reasonable price?

But then again, I also balk at paying >$1 for a loaf of bread so maybe I'm just a cheapskate.

Prices very significantly depending upon where you are.

Across the whole country, $2.29 is fairly average for a half-gallon, but in Detroit the average is about $1.50.

I'm disappointed though not surprised by comments suggesting that Amazon only pay attention to their bottom line. Why shouldn't they do more for racial inequality? That's just as meaningful as $$. Powerful corporations are more and more like governments -- they should be looking out for us, and we should be asking them to.

Why not raise our standards?

Because it's nonsense. I was raised in an upper middle class but community but even today Amazon doesn't do same day delivery to my neighborhood because I lived out in the country. We had to drive 10 miles to be able to buy anything.

The nearest Whole Foods is 51 miles away.

Still, there's a difference between not delivering to a place that's out in the boonies with a low population, and not delivering to a place that is literally completely surrounded by places you do deliver to.

Because that's not how the economy works. Companies are designed to make money, and "solving the inequality" only costs them money, hurting their employees, their investors, and their other customers (services may decrease if stretched too thin). Stop worrying about making a social justice war about everything, and do your job well.

You're proposing that Amazon's employees, customers, and shareholders pay out of their pockets to fund your social engineering project.

How about this instead: You get together with a bunch of your social justice-y friends, pool a few hundred million dollars, then offer it to Amazon, on the condition that they start serving these neighborhoods.

Everyone wins! The only difference is that now you are the one who has to pay for your virtue-signaling social crusade. But you're cool with that right?

Hmm. Amazon puts a few pennies extra onto my items, and poor communities get access to a service that's much cheaper than shopping at a convenience store? Freeing up their capital to spend elsewhere in the economy, like on products and services my company offers?

Where do I sign up?

Great! Hey lusen - you've got a guy here willing to pay a few pennies to the social justice virtue signaling fund!

This guy really puts his money where is mouth is!

Just find a billion more people at his level of commitment and you'll be golden.

Sarcasm aside, what's a few pennies per sale on $105bn in sales?

Because Amazon's profit is only a few pennies per sale.

You're basically asking Amazon to double their profit margin by raising prices, and then give away half of it to fix social injustice?

A huge percentage (perhaps the entirety?) of their margins?

Virtue-signaller, know thyself.

Inigo Montoya

How about Amazon just focus on maximizing profit within the boundary of the law of the given area?

That would be racist.

No.

That was easy. Next question?

add a link to the [Betteridge's law of headlines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines) for people who don't know better

Not only that, the article doesn't even consider the question posed in the title.

They're also pretty bad at rolling out their services to countries outside of the US. In Canada we've been told that we're getting Amazon's MP3 music store for years, but it still hasn't come, let alone any Amazon video. I'm actually somewhat surprised that we got Kindle books, although that was years after the US. You can forget things like the Echo at all.

Amazon Prime is just shipping in Canada. Where I live, I'd get shipments about a day sooner than free shipping so it's not worth it for me.

Amazon is also pretty bad with services in Europe. Amazon Germany is used to try out new services and was also the test region for Prime years before Amazon US got it. The Prime advertisement and nag screens are so annoying on Amazon Germany, so many now many use Amazon UK and US which have a far better user experience and things are cheaper as well. The packages come from the same warehouses anyway. And Amazon Germany's warehouse label now all packages with a Prime package. And the package come on the next day. (Due to introducing Prime as testing object in Germany many years ago, the delivered slowed down from 2-3 days to 4-6 days for any non-Prime member) Maybe it's the fault of their chaos. No wonder the Amazon Germany webshop is running on an years old software version, with good but long gone features like sorting items by lower prize or popularity, but otherwise rotten experience. It used to run on the 1999-ish version until 2006 or so, basically unchanged. The US version got several new relaunches back then. If an Amazon exec reads this, please do your A/B tests and product testing somewhere else and scrap the old forked codebase of Amazon Germany.

AMZN can take a clue from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2325502/Map-shows-wo...

Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11541612 (4 days ago)

My god, how could anyone be expected to overcome poverty and inequality without same-day prime delivery? Sure there's still two-day prime delivery that the majority of Amazon Prime members of all races have, but clearly that's no different than the grim inequality of segregated water fountains and poll taxes.

The implied conclusion is that a business should do something that loses them revenue if the alternative is a vague insinuation of structural racism. By this same logic, luxury car dealerships should build their showrooms in inner-city ghettos and rural areas because everyone has a right to test drive a Ferrari, economics be damned.

That's a bit of a reductio ad absurdum. Same-day Prime service is a bit of a luxury now, but so was internet access twenty years ago. Widespread internet access has had many positive economic effects in poor communities. Better Prime access may do to the same, as the article says, by increasing the range of available goods and reducing their prices - both positive effects in poor communities.

This is equivalent to an article arguing that 50 mb/s internet isn't fast enough and every community should be offered 100 mb/s internet, even if doing so causes large net losses to the providers.

They don't produce any evidence that the difference between one day and two day shipping has a negative impact on people's ability to increase the amount of available goods and obtain them at lower prices. Is there some mysterious perishable, necessary good that can only be ordered 24 hours in advance that unlocks upward mobility?

Great response Dr_tldr. One day vs two day shipping should not even be an issue to whine about. Tomorrow these socialist-minded activists may demand many such things (same day delivery, 1gbps internet and so on) in the name of social good and these they demand invariably at the cost of other businesses and other people. They should do that on their own. Besides, anything given for free isn't much appreciated by the receivers too.

Even the government should be cautious, as too much of tax money spent on "such social" projects is not much good for the society as a whole. UK welfare system is a good example how bad such "social" projects can be for the society.

Betteridge's law.

And an incredibly lazy iteration of it, at that. Business Week was much better reading before Bloomberg bought it.

Clearly Amazon.com is racist.

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