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Comment by mikeyouse | Hacker News Reader

"Afford" is a very relative term. They don't want to be responsible for that many FTEs but with $48 billion in gross margin and $2.5 billion in net income, they can certainly afford to employ a few thousand seasonal workers year round.

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> a few thousand seasonal workers year round.

You're vastly underestimating what sort of effects "peak season" has. UPS hires 95,000 temporary employees each year; FedEx hires 50,000. Amazon hires 120,000. Retail scales up similarly, but I'm less familiar with the industry.

"A few thousand" is how much single distribution centers scale up employment.

I think you're vastly underestimating how much money Amazon makes.

So Amazon currently hires 120,000 people at $12/hr for 10 weeks for a total cost of somewhere near $576M. This counts as COGS and is included in their gross margin. If we just multiply that figure by (52 / 10) and subtract out the $576M, we can see that it would decrease their annual Gross Margin by $2.5B. Add on an additional 30% of the combined $3B in salary expense since I doubt the temp workers get benefits, and you'd be looking at a total of ~$3.4 billion.

So in 2016, this would've changed their gross income from $47.7 (35% GM) billion to $44.3 billion (32.5% GM).

That $3.4 billion puts their net income negative for the year negative.

Right, but net income is a fiction to begin with. It has almost nothing to do with a company's actual health. Last year was the first year that Amazon ever showed a NI over a few hundred million (for most of their life, it's been negative).

https://a16z.com/2014/09/05/why-amazon-has-no-profits-and-wh...

That's true. Amazon has "frugality" as a core cultural value - a valid definition of "can't afford it" for them is "just don't want to pay for it."

In my experience, this doesn't make them that different from virtually any corporation. I don't think I've ever worked for one where getting money for literally anything wasn't a constant uphill battle (which incidentally is why so many consumer electronics feel cheap as shit; they are).

> In my experience, this doesn't make them that different from virtually any corporation.

For that matter, not any different from a typical person. Expenses that you would be better off not incurring are, by definition, frivolous. In the case of Amazon, frivolous spending at any level changes the price at which they can achieve a fair margin and reduces customer satisfaction.

Except Corporations take it to a uniquely stupid level; things like refusing to pay adequately for internal support, security, auditing, i.e. anything that doesn't have a direct impact on customers.

Who are you to say what is the right amount to pay for security? Do you know how much life insurance I should have?

Every year I need to have usually a 2 hour meeting with my superiors to argue for renewing our antivirus for our Windows infrastructure.

Their constant argument every time is "we have no viruses, why do we spend money on this" and I have to tell them every single time "that you're paying for it is WHY we don't have viruses." They have no idea what viruses are, what malware is, what ransomware is and despite being hired to maintain infrastructure, I must continuously explain my decisions to people who do not maintain infrastructure and wouldn't know how with a gun to their head. This, to me, is stupid.

> They have no idea what viruses are, what malware is, what ransomware is and despite being hired to maintain infrastructure, I must continuously explain my decisions to people who do not maintain infrastructure and wouldn't know how with a gun to their head

Nobody hires someone outside their domain of expertise and then leaves them to do whatever. Your constantly justifying your recommendations is, like it or not, a critical part of your job.

I don't disagree in principle, but it would be nice if I could just do it once, instead of yearly, to the same people, with the same responses. Or at the least have it socially acceptable to script the conversation with a chat bot.

Indeed. Unfortunately, this is the problem universal to everything infrastructural - people don't value it when it works.

Fair enough, but at the end of the day you do convince them, which is why they pay for you. ;- )

If they can't, then that's the end of that. If they just don't want to, they can be strongarmed.

Are you suggesting they should be strong-armed into employing underutilized employees? Perhaps we could do that for the finance industry too. Really, by that logic, any company making money should be strong armed into excess hiring. I suppose they could also push for increased wages instead, which seems more tenable once you get close to full employment.

Isn't that true for all of us?

Your saying they should employ a "few thousand workers" unnecessarily from January - October for moral reasons

I wonder if you would still act so idealistically if you held stock in the company..

I wasn't saying they should employ them for moral reasons, I was saying that they absolutely could afford to do so.

Side note; I do hold stock in the company, and because I'm not an asshole, I do think they should rely less on temp labor and they should improve working conditions for their existing warehouse workers. Even if it reduces my capital gains by some fraction of a percent.

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