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chiefalchemist

This is:

- 25% PR

- 25% free advertising for their openings (i.e., Amazon pays well)

- 25% necessity (we're at full-employment)

- and 25% ROI (they've figured less turnover and better quality employees are worth the investment)

The question is: how will this effect other companies in the markets where Amazon employs a measurable number of people.

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And 100% "Get out of Bernie Sanders' crosshairs before he regulates us to do this"

I don't think he's getting enough credit for this.

I thought it was funny that Bezos, who isn't a super frequent tweeter, responded to Bernie Sanders' congratulations to him on the same day that this was announced.

[1] https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/1047152109508997121

No democrat is getting any substantive bill through Congress and signed into law until 2020. I don't think they're afraid of Bernie.

Midterms will be here in a month. "Bernicrats" (Left progressive Democrats) have been doing extremely well in recent elections and polling.

If you're not afraid as a Republican or a corporation, you haven't been paying attention.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-18/internal-... (Internal RNC Poll: Complacent Trump Voters May Cost GOP Control of Congress)

http://time.com/5411948/national-voter-registration-drive-re... (A Record 800,000 People Registered to Vote on National Voter Registration Day)

https://abc13.com/politics/texas-sets-new-voter-registration... (Texas sets new voter registration record, with 15.6 million registered ahead of election)

https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2018/10/02/ca-voter-registra... (California Voter Registration Tops 19 Million In New Record)

I saw it as an issue that both progressives and conservatives would eventually agree upon. Amazon is an extremely easy target to focus upon when it came to wage issues.

It doesn't really matter who owns the White House in 2020. This issue wasn't going to go away.

You're not wrong, but you do realize that the outcome of a midterm election won't affect the president's authority to sign or veto bills?

Trump is already going after Bezos because of Washington Post and is still pushing a populist platform so there's no reason to believe that he would get in a way of a bill that targets Amazon.

If you allow a populist sentiment freight train to build against you, you have already lost.

I do. Midterms is a tee up for regime change in 2020. Gotta play the long game.

We have all been paying attention; which is why a dude who never even won an election as a dog catcher is now President of this still great Nation.

And the dude who lost because of a corrupt DNC just forced the wealthiest company in the world to raise the pay of hundreds of thousands of its employees (while also incentiving Amazon to force wages up for workers at other companies) with a marketing campaign. Interesting times.

And the non-dog catcher has sent the stock market into the stratosphere.

Yes the DNC was corrupted; yet all we hear on some cable stations is how the non-dog catcher is a Russian plant.

Interesting times indeed.

It's not just about signed laws. It's about pressure from many angles. I doubt Bezos liked Bernie's bill that was literally called Stop BEZOS. I doubt Bezos enjoys continuous media coverage saying Amazon workers need food stamps to survive. I doubt Bezos wants to be shamed in public by activists while eating out or something. All these add up.

2020 is not far away, especially in time scales of US Politics and mega corporations like Amazon... 2 years may as well be tomorrow.

> No democrat is getting any substantive bill through Congress and signed into law until 2020

Not sure whether you meant 2019 or 2021, but 2020 is a fairly nonsensical date given when Congressional and Presidential terms start, unless you assume that Trump would become malleable in a lame duck session after losing reelection or something of like that not tied to term starts.

Assuming a Democratic majority in at least one House of Congress resulting from the 2018 midterm election next month, 2019 would be more likely than 2020 or 2021, because necessary funding bills are a powerful lever for substantive non-appropriations legislation.

Anecdotally, most 30 - 35 y/o and unders I know have Prime or live in a household with Prime. Mind you, not all in that demo are pro-Bernie but that target certainly skews that way.

Bernie vs Amazon? I can't imagine Bernie having a chance. Prime will trump Bernie.

People can use a service and then vote to regulate that service, believe it or not.

Yes they can. Yes they do. None the less, Bernie will have to fight the fight of his life to beat Amazon. Demonizing "free shipping" is no easy task.

Well also because they are going to automate all those warehouse jobs anyway, and brick and mortar competitors cannot automate retail workers, and this will hurt them even more in the future.

>brick and mortar competitors cannot automate retail workers

Actually, Amazon is looking to do just that with Amazon Go: smart speculation is that they plan on developing it to the point where they can license and sell it to other retailers in much the same way they did with their cloud services.

> - 25% PR - 25% free advertising for their openings (i.e., Amazon pays well) - 25% necessity (we're at full-employment) -- and 25% ROI (they've figured less turnover and better quality employees are worth the investment)

On the other hand, their stock is currently down by ~$30/share (~1.5%) following the announcement.

So, time to buy?

You joke but probably yes. Amazon can afford to raise wages because it's still slowly strangling old-world retail and absorbing the business they used to do. The raises don't change that.

The wage increase also means more money to spend at...wait for it...Amazon. There's just no way this #15 p/o was pulled out of thin air. They have more data than God, as well as the tools and people to analyze it.

Despite all the bravado, Wall Street are a bunch of pussies. __Any__ change makes them nervous. They have a natural predisposition to over-react. Let's give it a couple days or a couple weeks. Once WS makes up and realizes their options are limited, that Amazon still have plenty of upside, the money will come crawling back, as its done before.

And they are preventing a union.

Why do you keep putting a - in front of your percents? Is it a -25% PR hit?

Attempt at a bullet list.

  - indenting by 2 sort of works
  - until the lines get long and don’t wrap

https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

You're clearly right. I added newlines so the list works.

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