Is there? Amazon's retail business runs on a razor-thin profit margin, and in fact Amazon was famous for not being profitable until a few years ago.

Then consumers will switch to purchasing from Walmart.com at a lower price. Voluntarily paying people more is not a long term solution. The long term solution is to invest in education and help foster environments where people are investing in themselves and are able to be creative and increase the size of the economic pie. But that would require policies that help provide a stable home, and worst of all, redistribution of resources.

I feel like most companies at some point do that.

Then they enter into optimization mode, and each level of management needs to show better numbers on their reports, so they have two routes, suck value out of the product or suck value out of the work force.

The beauty of the market is a legitimate complaint can be rephrased as a business plan. Think: Target versus Walmart.