Hacker News Reader

Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

> the people who are forced to work in Amazon's warehouses with terrible working conditions don't have that luxury.

Who is forced to work in Amazon's warehouses? Is Amazon rounding up people with guns everyday to make them work there?

You live in a small town with small businesses that are undercut by Amazon's price and scale. Those businesses slowly die out as everyone in your region switches to ordering online (primarily from Amazon). Amazon opens a warehouse in the region to meet the demand and is now the largest employer around.

This exact transformation already happened with Wal-Mart in the 80s and 90s. Obviously no one is literally forcing workers to go to Amazon's warehouses but you can see how in essence this leaves them with no choice (i.e. forced).

Do you have any evidence that Amazon has decreased overall employment? To me it is totally plausible that with the convenience of online shopping they have increased the overall “retail pie” and have not taken away from local businesses. So I would prefer when you make claims about how small business are dying out because of Amazon you provide evidence

I should have prefixed that this is drawing heavily on what I remember reading about Walmart and their effect on rural/suburban economies when they expanded. In that sense it is conjecture on my part as I'm not drawing on any studies about Amazon in particular. I only wanted to show how large corporations that compete directly with small retail employers can get an unfair advantage against their labour force.

Your theory could obviously be valid as well.

My life was transformed with the growth of WalMart and Amazon.

The quality, variety, convenience and price of goods available to me all improved. The Mom and Pop who had been financing their lifestyle on the backs of the rural poor were forced out of business. I feel a little bad for them, but it seems wrong to elevate them over the rest of the population.

I don't think anyone here will disagree with you. They're just saying that this new system brings its own problems. Namely heightened labor monopsony. That doesn't mean we have to go back to mom and pop systems, but it probably does mean we should work on solving the new problems.

As Colin says, I don't disagree. I don't think twice about ordering an item on Amazon for $2 that a hardware store downstairs sells for $5. I understand why the store's margins need to be that high but I also need to make sound financial decisions and don't make enough to subsidize anyone else. At the end of the day I'm still contributing to Amazon's growth at the expense of a more fragmented market of small businesses.

I stopped shopping at Wal-Mart around 2009 and haven't bought anything of Amazon's website since 2016 (I still bought Whole Foods and Woot for a bit, but I've cut those out too).

Newegg is a better place for parts, why use the Amazon stores for B&H and Adorama when you can .. just go to the websites for B&H and Adorama?!

I wrote this a while back. Amazon's has turned into a platform that's basically killed all the other parts sites and competition we use to have:

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/the-death-of-the-mom-and-pop-...

Most of the world's natural resources and land have already been claimed. This means that most people have no choice but to work for the people who control those resources and land.

Not only that, land that once belonged to the people was privatized during the Industrial Revolution in order to create a landless class of people that needed to work in the new factories in order to eat. It was hard to convince people to work in them otherwise.

Land belonging to the people is a horrible system that creates huge inefficiencies due to moral hazard. If you look at the agricultural revolution in Europe, a major reason for increased crop yields was private property. Incentives matter.

I don't think that makes it just that people have no opportunity to work for themselves or be payed a fair wage working for someone else.

You point to efficiency, but to achieve that efficiency, people were driven off of land that their families had lived on for millennia in order to create a class of people that were desperate enough to risk their lives and limbs, and their children's lives and limbs, in dangerous factories for wages they couldn't sustain themselves with.

Millions of people went from self-sufficiency to being desperately poor and without homes because their land was privatized by governments that were in cahoots with industrialists.

Please. It's the only option available to a lot of people anymore especially with COVID shutdowns but it's part of a larger shift to a knowledge-economy. There aren't many jobs for unskilled workers anymore and getting skills is too expensive for the poor. Ignoring that reality is ridiculous and only proves you don't argue in good faith.

Getting the credentials is too expensive. Skills are nearly free. Most industries run on credentials. It's an important distinction.

They'll get there, be patient.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com