I have a friend at Amazon and they say absenteeism among employees is through the roof. They can neither hire nor keep the employees they do have.
Long term is probably a combination of autonomous robots, self-driving vehicles, and delivery drones. The current crisis might even accelerate its development and deployment.
Nobody in that area is robust enough for a once in a century pandemic.
Under the circumstances there’s probably no legal obstacle to them doing so. A pandemic looks, walks and quacks like force majeure.
So you're saying their deal is "pay us $120/year but we make no commitment to provide anything in exchange?"
Now that’s kind of different from the PR fallout. Amazon is risking a mass walkout of their customers over this; it just depends on whether or not customers see this as a reasonable response to a crazy circumstance, or a greedy move on Amazon’s part to maintain profitability over their commitments to customers.
I was under the impression that one party cannot unilaterally modify the terms of a contract without offering consideration to the other party, and the consideration can't be "we will continue to perform according to the terms of the contract".
For a "customer obsession strategy," this one should hurt their bottom line, either with cancellation of prime subscriptions or lost sales. I am not saying amazon should be penalized or taken to court. This is just the biggest vulnerability I have seen out of the Amazon machine, and I think its very interesting.
Because of this, I very much doubt that Amazon will mind losing money on Prime member shipping during this pandemic. I wouldn't be shocked if some of the current management made noises in that direction and that was part of what got Jeff to take the reins again.
In today’s plight, it’s the sheer scale of money Amazon might lose fulfilling its backlog of orders, and potentially why its delaying shipping with the “essential items” reasoning, that’s of particular interest.
What makes things different about COVID-19 is how people are responding to it in the hope of saving vast numbers of lives.
We are still in the early days of this pandemic. The history of COVID-19 is still being written. No one knows how long we're in for or what the final death count will be.
The only recourse we have to reduce R is stay the hell away from each other. No business really plans on that.
It’s kind of hard to plan around the “what if we can’t get more workers” scenario.
They can solve this problem by paying more, although wage increases are hard to turn back time on. Maybe they should consider "hazard pay" during the pandemic.
There are a few exceptions under the CARES act if you can't work because of something directly related to COVID, e.g., if you're a parent who has to take care of children because schools are closed. Being afraid you might catch the coronavirus at work is not a valid reason and would not make you eligible for unemployment payments.
Even among parents, I doubt that all of them would leap at the "opportunity" to quit their job just so they can take home slightly more money for a period of four months (which is all the CARES act covers). Surely most people must realize jobs are going to be extremely scarce four months from now, so if you have a job right now you probably should think very hard before throwing it away.
You're right, they can't.
However, the 26 million Americans who have been laid off from other jobs have negative incentive to sign up for a new job with Amazon because the benefits are tied to staying unemployed. That exacerbates the problem for Amazon.
Again, that is gross income NOT net income. That number is pre-tax income, unemployment is taxed just like income at a job. You can choose when filing to defer paying those taxes until when you file, but you do still need to pay them when you file for taxes come April for the previous year. So when you file you'll end up owing money and have to pay the income taxes you never paid. You're definitely still not coming out ahead.
So again, the additional 600 as part of the CARES act ends at the end of July. And you have to have to wait one week where you're unemployed - receiving no income - to be able to file. So you also lose one week of earnings no matter what. I don't think most people are coming out ahead on this by far.. it seems maybe a very small majority might briefly come out ahead but they seriously risk it all being canceled out if they're unemployed still past July.
There’s certainly a fine line between being bad at your job and actual misconduct, so if someone were so inclined they could probably just be a bad worker long enough to get fired without any specific alleged misconduct. Personally, I’d just quit if that pathway were on my mind, but I understand how people could decided to do this.