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Comment by atonse | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me or is Amazon turning out to be even more evil than Walmart ever was?

It's just cuz they're an "innovative" tech company, that we let them get away with it?

Warehouses are dirty, dangerous, and filthy. Every one has expectations for speed. People are a liability, not an asset.

I knew two people who worked at an Amazon warehouse. They both said it was pretty chill and easy. It's a matter of perspective and contrast.

Warehouses were always terrible, borderline cruel at some places. Amazon didn't invent them.

I thought labor conditions at Costco were supposed to be pretty good.

Costco is not a warehouse job. It's a fancy, high end grocery store made to look like a warehouse.

Hmm, I’ve seen quite a few warehouses and they’ve mostly been clean, decent places to work. Not the highest skill or wage work, but certainly not terrible or cruel. But, they weren’t major shipping depots for Amazon either. Mostly small/mid-sized.

In one, a subcontractor doing installations for DTV, the warehouse staff workload was pretty light. Sure, they’d hump a bit in the morning and evening to the installers checked out and back in, but the rest of the day was light.

Certainly no overtime. And CALOSHA is quite strict in their rules. I don’t recall a single injury in the warehouse.

Now the installers generally worked quite hard - the good ones completing installations 3-4 per day.

The workloads vary by time and domain. Amazon has huge volume, huge peaks, and everything is an individual item. The work environment has to be crazy to keep up to the goal.

I think the closest I have seen is the office supply chain. When you buy a notebook in a shop like office depot, there is a warehouse upstream that can the same order, it will package the notebook and deliver it the next day to the shop to refill. It's similar to Amazon in that they deliver small items of minimal value, one by one.

Bulk warehouses and specialized products should have better conditions because they can have higher margin and/or less units of volume to manage.

warehouse work has never been glamorous. it is grunt work. in a digital age where throughput gets measured and people become numbers in a chart it is easy to lose track of what reasonable is. what works elsewhere may not be appropriate.

Amazon gets called out because they are the biggest not because they are the worst. Same reason large fast good gets called out but local diners get a pass. the drudgery and low pay may be the same but the name recognition is not.

On a side note, As for Wal Mart, they were called out for similar reasons but also both are called out because setting wage floors especially through the of min wage laws in the US affect government payouts for unionized contracts.

Also for Wal Mart and other low paying/low benefit service jobs, the oft repeated theory that American taxpayers essentially subsidize it (and the profits that accrue to management/shareholders) and federal benefits such as medicaid/welfare/food stamps make it possible employers to pay such low wages. https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/15/...

Were they ever very innovative? Their initial success was pretty much based on having a bunch of investment capital and using it to kill their competition and grab market share without making profits for many years. Is it really very difficult to become an 'innovative' giant corporation when you've captured a huge part of the market like that?

Things like Prime free delivery at that scale, fulfillment services, AWS were all innovative (even though I'm sure none of them were the first-ever.)

For me, their innovation was that they were the first online retailer that inspired rock solid confidence in their delivery. If I order something on Amazon, it’s at my door in two days. Every time. I don’t need to check my shipping status, and with their pricing model obscuring shipping costs, I don’t need to think about the practicalities of shipping at all.

As the article demonstrates, this luxury comes with a high social cost.

From about 100 packages, I've had a handful come past the "guaranteed date", one that was entirely wrong (someone else's items), and worst of all, one that was missing an item that took a huge argument with a CSR to get a refund over.

I wouldn't call them rock solid. Even if they were, it's not something that has to, or justifies, mistreating employees.

They did "invent" and patent [1] the 1-click buying button. The patent has expired, however, they also had a trademark on the phrase "1-Click".

{1] https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC...

Buying stuff from pretty much any other online retailer is still a frustrating and bad experience. E.g. Williams Sonoma will accept an order then just never ship it and when you call asking what's up the rep shrugs. I'm struggling to name one other retailer that nails service like Amazon. Perhaps Apple, but I buy something from them perhaps every two years.

It's easier to ignore because you don't have to walk into a physical store and see the effects. Instead you see a nice webpage that can ship things to your house in hours.

NPR podcast episode touching this question:

https://cpa.ds.npr.org/kuow/audio/2017/11/PRIMED_Episode4_0.... (Is Amazon your guilty pleasure?)

https://www.npr.org/podcasts/557820907/prime-d

And this radiolab episode: http://www.radiolab.org/story/brown-box/

By "let them get away with it", do you mean handed them your money in exchange for goods? This isn't their fault....just saying.

"is turning out"? It's been a long time...

Good point. It's just that things keep getting worse and worse.

And we are enablers of this BS (I sure am.)

To be fair, it's a systemic problem with the economic system - it's always a race for more efficiency which often comes at the legal limit (or even worse) of exploitation. It's very hard to solve systemic problems through individual choices - unless that choice comes from very high up (ie; the working conditions at Etsy before it went public).

About the only bright part of Amazon at this point is that they clearly hope to eliminate these jobs entirely through automation - of course then we have the social issue to deal with of how we make sure the benefits of automation transfer to society as a whole and not just the shareholders of Amazon.

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