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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

You're talking about a company that makes its money on volume. They have more than 600K employees and thin margins. It's not just a matter of converting profits into wages, they don't have that much in profits in proportion to the number of employees.

Take their average annual profit from retail divided by number of employees and see for yourself what the difference in hourly wage would be.

To pay significantly more they would have to raise prices, which they can't do because they're in competition with Walmart and everyone else.

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For context: if Amazon were to use all of its profits from FY18 (~$11B) to pay its ~650K workers more, it would come out to just under $17,000 per worker.

I knew I should have been more specific to begin with.

Last year was neither a typical year nor is that the profit from retail.

https://www.thestreet.com/opinion/amazon-is-losing-money-fro...

AWS makes good money, but you can't really expect them to use it all to subsidize retail (even more than they already do) forever.

Amazon has a profit of over $11 billion last year. They can definitely afford to pay their warehouse workers better.

When you eat out you can probably afford to tip better, why don't you? Do you hate restaurant workers?

I try to tip well. If you think I should tip better, make your case. If I disagree, I’ll make my case. I can guarantee you that if that happens, my argument won’t be that I’m tipping the market rate.

Waitresses make less than minimum wage, don't they deserve healthcare, to raise a family, to live in the center of some of the most expensive real estate in the world and have at least two weeks paid vacation per year? If you were to tip say $50 to $100 each time you ate out this could be a reality. How much would $50 be compared to your net worth, less than 1%? Greedy capitalist.

“If you were to tip say $50 to $100 each time you ate out this could be a reality.”

Exactly how often do you think I eat out?

Doesn't matter, like Amazon it doesn't matter that everyone else pays much less than you (market rate) instead you are personally responsible for the lives of anyone you pay for a service. If the amount you are willing to pay doesn't result in a great standard of living then you are at fault.

Doesn’t matter if your claim is actually correct or not? That’s a hell of an argument.

I’m responsible for the tips waiters receive from me. Amazon is responsible for the wages their workers receive from them. Makes sense to me.

>Doesn’t matter if your claim is actually correct or not? That’s a hell of an argument.

If you eat out once in a lifetime or every day an effective wage can still be calculated. In NY or CA you are talking something like 30 - 50 dollars a meal[0], even more if you want to provide healthcare and all the rest. Its likely you aren't leaving $20 - $50 bills on the table for your morning coffee so why don't you think baristas deserve a living wage? It would be such a small percentage of your net worth.

[0]https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/06/rent-is-affordable-to...

I don’t see what giving myself $50 for making coffee has to do with any of this.

Could you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? It leads to degraded discussion, we're trying for a bit better than that, and I'm sure you can make your substantive points without it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Did you actually try doing the math? $11 billion divided over 650k employees is roughly $17k which amounts to $75 per day assuming the employee works around 225 days a year which in turn amounts to less than $10 an hour assuming the employee works for 8 hours a day.

So you’re saying they could afford to give their workers a $5/hour raise and still retain a healthy profit? Why the snide question at the beginning, then?

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