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Comment by e40 | Hacker News Reader

I've never done that, but it was clear from observation that it was true. Here's what amazes me, that people like Bezos exist. I mean, treating people that work at Amazon (especially the warehouses!) like the employees of I-N-O, Amazon could be an even more valuable company. Instead of being an employer of last resort (I would take any job before I worked there), they could be the "it" place to work. Instead, Bezos allows people to be treated like complete shit.

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Unfortunately it's a different ballgame with warehouse work like at AMZ. There is no customer facing service aspect, and very little quality difference between employees. What quality concerns there are can probably be traced back to an individual employee very easily; returns due to poor packaging or wrong item can easily be pinned on the culprit.

It's unfortunate, but not all manual/hard jobs are valued equally and often because they are simply not of equal value. Item pickers are going to eventually go the way of cotton pickers in developed countries. One of my best friends works for a startup developing AI controlled robotic pickers. There is a ways to go and it'll start with human augmented AI's but eventually AI's will be picking, sorting, and packing everything.

> There is no customer facing service aspect, and very little quality difference between employees. What quality concerns there are can probably be traced back to an individual employee very easily; returns due to poor packaging or wrong item can easily be pinned on the culprit.

I disagree; a counter argument would be Costco. Almost all of Costco has very little service interaction with their union employees. They have warehouses, distribution, and procurement that has little consumer interaction. It is difficult to find people to point what is what in aisle numbers and the lines in checkout can be very long. As far as I know all of the people who work in these facilities are union and they pay living wages and benefits.

The nice service workers who handle out free samples are contractors, not union employees the last time I checked.

I can't find any source that says Costco employees are in a union. It seems that a portion of them are, but the vast majority are not in any union:

https://teamster.org/content/costco-workers-stand-together

As of two years ago, less than 8% of Costco’s workforce was unionized.

(Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/costco-wholesale-teamsters/u...)

Last time I heard that figure it had been asked why they weren’t and most replied they didn’t see a need - the company treats them well enough already.

Which could easily be due to a kind of Stockholm syndrome

Costco is known to be a pretty good employer.

Hmmm but that trend would likely hold true across the US, unless you think Costco has some specific brain-washing process :)

But as far as I know Costco is on the top ( or close ) of the list when it comes to employee happiness.

Right, but you can't just switch business models and expect things to keep running.

Sam's club couldn't just crank the pay of everyone and expect to remain profitable.

I just finished reading The Everything Store a few weeks ago, an eye-opening book that deep dives into the history of both Amazon and Bezos. I don't think there's any chance that Bezos and crew haven't done the math on this part of their business. They have an extremely detailed understanding of what makes Amazon tick, and cutting costs is an absolutely crucial part of that equation.

Ethically, I agree with you. They shouldn't treat their employees like shit. Some things are worth more than money.

But financially, it's 100% untrue that Amazon would be more valuable if they focused on employee happiness over cutting costs. It's not an accident that Amazon generates more revenue than any other Internet company in existence.

>But financially, it's 100% untrue that Amazon would be more valuable if they focused on employee happiness over cutting costs. It's not an accident that Amazon generates more revenue than any other Internet company in existence.

Or it very well could be (an accident). Survivorship bias and all...

That's a possibility, yes, but I think Amazon's success is too extreme a case for an accident to be the most likely explanation. If it was merely a "decent" success or a "pretty good" success, then yeah, but it's many orders of magnitude beyond that, in a very cutthroat industry. To get to this point, the company has had to consistently make aggressive, unintuitive, massively beneficial decisions, many dozens of times per year over several decades.

Imagine Lebron James — Could he just be lucky every play he goes out onto the court? It's possible. But I'd say the more likely explanation is he knows what he's doing. He's got a fundamental understanding, an underlying theory, and a set of skills that map well to reality and give him an edge that contributes to his success. So does Amazon.

"Amazon generates more revenue than any other Internet company in existence."

Isn't that because Amazon is (practically) the only one selling actual "stuff" that always has a value?

Everyone else is (big # of users) * (small profit/user by selling ads or whatever), Amazon is (big # of users) * (big profit/user and also selling data).

How long-term is Amazon's vision for their warehouse employees? Feels like for them it's a temporary band-aid measure until Kiva Robotics and drone delivery tech are mature.

have you ever talked with people that works at Amazon, or its many other companies? I've been a contractor for one of them for many years, and they take care of me with prompt payment, lots of communication and clear expectations up front.

In the Czech Republic, it is "the" place to work for unskilled employees.

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