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Comment by tw04 | Hacker News Reader

I guess I'm curious how you came to the conclusion they're major employers where their warehouses are. As far as I can tell each warehouse is about 1,000 full-time jobs. If I look at a list of warehouse locations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amazon.com_locations

They're pretty much universally a rounding error for total population and jobs in their respective metro areas.

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That's tens of millions of dollars in salaries injected into the local economy from one employer, not to mention the other additions like local taxes and utility spending. 1000 jobs is significant.

Wait, WHAT? The average Amazon warehouse worker makes $13/hr. That's ~$27,000/yr BEFORE taxes. In other words: any employee making that salary and actually trying to raise a family is collecting more from the government than they're paying in. They aren't contributing anything to the local economy, they're draining it just like Walmart.

How does an Amazon warehouse drain money from a local economy? Purchases at Wal-mart export your money outside of a local economy, but the presence of an Amazon warehouse doesn't really change the number of purchases you'll be making at Amazon in your town.

So we wait until 990 of those jobs are lost to automation ... then we order pitchforks from Amazon ?

Then Amazon can locate its facilities even farther from population centers where there is no municipal or even county government to speak of.

1,000 full time employees is pretty big these days. The highly touted Carrier deal amounted to maybe 700 jobs. Elizabeth Warren made an announcement about the big new Amazon distribution center in Fall River. It's supposedly Amazon's biggest, and I recall it was about 1,000 jobs. So they are doing more with the same headcount.

1,000 jobs is about what the American economy creates every two hours. Politicians tout these deals because they know that most voters are clueless about the magnitudes involved.

You can't directly compare 1000 jobs in the entirety of the US and 1000 jobs in a small town with nothing else going on.

I can when national-level politicians are devoting time to them and then bragging about it.

That's true but my point was that jobs are no longer created in fleets of tens of thousands at one throw. Even the largest distribution facility of the world's eighth largest retailer has 1,000 jobs in a facility that probably operates two or three shifts weekdays and weekends. That's a very lean crew on each shift.

It's about name recognition, not job count. Amazon is seen as a cutting edge, high-tech employer. It looks goods when politicians say "Welcoming $COOL_COMPANY_X into our area!", it helps people feel important. It doesn't really matter whether they're bring 50 jobs or 5000; what matters is people can say "Yeah, Amazon is just up the street".

Fall River is also extremely economically depressed. I thought that was a typical case but the list of locations suggests maybe that's not entirely true.

Pretty smart on Amazon's part. Locate in depressed areas: the work doesn't require any real skills, the wages, working hours and conditions can be poor because there's no other real competition for employment, and dispite all that the local politicans love you for being an improvement on what they had before.

It's a tried and true formula.

Massachusetts isn't as big a boomtown as some areas, but population grew about 4% in a region better known for losing population. Fall River isn't as much a backwater as it used to be.

Do you mean Fall River? I'm certainly not arguing that Massachusetts, as a whole, is economically depressed.

Fall River may get commuter rail. Then cheap rents will be over there and in New Bedford, which are both on the ocean. To get really economically depressed areas, you have to go to Springfield, which is still our meth lab capital.

The whole state is a backwater. The part inside 495 just happens to be dying more slowly because they've got higher education medical and some tech industry.

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