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Comment by zaptheimpaler | Hacker News Reader

There's a much bigger debate brewing around what the purpose of a company really should be.

Turns out that focusing only on the cost to the customer means the majority of people work shitty jobs just so they can buy slightly cheaper stuff from other people working shitty jobs. You have to wonder, maybe what's best for people is to pay slightly more for everything and get better jobs all around instead. Even if purchasing power goes down as a result, a slightly more enjoyable 8 hours could well be worth the tradeoff because we spend most of our waking hours working.

If the decreased efficiency anx higher costs were born by the company (i. e mgmt and shareholders) instead of consumers, costs wouldn't necessarily need to go up either.

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How is that slightly more money people are paying for goods going to do anything if people are just paying more for goods? There's one consumer at the end, there are thousands of laborers contributing between extraction of raw materials and delivery of finished product. It seems that in order for appreciably more to be paid for labor, the cost of goods would skyrocket and people would have to learn to have less stuff.

> If the decreased efficiency anx higher costs were born by the company (i. e mgmt and shareholders) instead of consumers, costs wouldn't necessarily need to go up either.

Doubtful. There's not much juice to squeeze from mgmt and labor. Have you looked at returns relative to investment recently?

right... think of a supply chain where each one of the steps is 10% less efficient than it used to be... doesn't take large n for 1.1^n to be approximately infinity

I would agree that I'd enjoy my job more if I got paid more, but it sounds like you're trying to say this will result in jobs that are just over all better. Why wouldn't it mean the exact same "shitty jobs" but with better pay?

Management in any business wants employees to be as efficient as possible to squeeze the max output per dollar paid out. Exceptions exist, but that is roughly the incentive structure created by how companies are valued by markets. If productivity wasn’t the only goal, jobs could get easier in many ways - devs might get longer time to work on a feature, warehouse workers might get less aggressive targets on how many boxes are shipped per day, employees might get more vacation or longer breaks or 4 day work weeks.

> If productivity wasn’t the only goal

I think I missed where you explained how to do this.

> If productivity wasn’t the only goal, jobs could get easier in many ways - devs might get longer time to work on a feature, warehouse workers might get less aggressive targets on how many boxes are shipped per day, employees might get more vacation or longer breaks or 4 day work weeks.

then the company would produce less, so they would have less product to sell, leading to a decrease in revenue and therefore a decrease in wages. I'm not sure why this would be a good idea.

Jobs are "shitty" only in relation to what the worker can purchase with the wages they receive. As consumer prices go down, the purchasing power of the average salary increases, and jobs become less shitty.

It's through this dynamic that wages have grown 20 fold, in inflation adjusted terms, since 1820. Companies finding ways to reduce costs is how that happened.

So Amazon reducing consumer prices is in effect a wage hike for everyone.

And this same dynamic explains why wage growth has slowed since 1970. Social welfare spending has increased on average 4.8 percent per year between 1972 and 2011:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-is-driving-growth-...

This was one of the most rapid expansions of social democratic policies in human history. This transformation from a more market-oriented economy to a more politically directed one had the predictable effect of reducing labor productivity growth, which evidence shows was the primary cause of the slowdown in wage growth:

http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2014/12/22-source...

In other words, we need MORE profit-motivated capital investments and companies like Amazon flourishing, not less. The seemingly miracalous advancement of income and quality of life since 1800 was because of breakneck rates of industralization. Change, in this context, is good, and anti-capitalist policies that reduce the expansion of capital are bad.

This is fine if you're spending all your money on junk ordered through the mail, which admittedly is a perk. Not so great for paying rent, attending college, or going to the hospital.

Pushing back comparisons to the 16th, 17th, or 18th century will produce a flattering comparison, and people should be aware of how much things have improved since then, but in a conversation about Amazon it's not relevant. Companies like Amazon and Walmart have led to monopsony (buyer advantage) dynamics that have gutten communities, stifled innovation, and led to stagnant wages. The issue is that these companies wind up not just competing on their own comparative strengths, but take advantage of their size and market advantage. I notice you're not singing the praises of, for example, Spectrum (formely Time Warner), because the obvious market power and complete lack of competence or innovation in that sector is hard to talk around. Amazon's Bezos is actually pretty savvy, and Amazon leads to some lower prices for consumers and occasional innovation, so the damage to competition in various markets is easier to ignore. But these companies are dangerous, in that they can turn market power and cash in hand into political power, and they do. Size matters.

>>This is fine if you're spending all your money on junk ordered through the mail, which admittedly is a perk. Not so great for paying rent, attending college, or going to the hospital.

It's not all "junk" on Amazon. Trivializing the range of products that have become more affordable thanks to Amazon, as "junk", is a massive case of taking for granted what you have.

If you're low income, and the knob on your washing machine breaks, you can get a replacement part for $20 and a minimal cost in time/effort, where in the past you would simply forego getting it, because it would involve a huge amount of time/effort, and $80, which you don't have.

If you're not wealthy, and want to start a web business, AWS's EC2 instances make it far more convenient and low cost than it was in the past. This makes entrepreneurship accessible to far more people.

I would go as far as calling your characterization of what they sell as "junk" as being disingenuous. It's deliberately trivializing what these retailers offer in order to maintain your canned anti-corporate-giant narrative.

Especially when you consider that Walmart sells groceries too. Are you going to claim affordable groceries are "junk" too, or resort to another feat of mental gymnastics to discount the benefit it confers to people?

>>Companies like Amazon and Walmart have led to monopsony (buyer advantage) dynamics that have gutten communities, stifled innovation, and led to stagnant wages.

Neither Amazon nor Walmart have monopsonies. They both face intense competition, particularly Amazon. In fact, they both compete against each other in the ecommerce market!

They both have successfully improved supply chain efficiency through technonological innovation which has enabled them to reduce the cost to consumers.

Like I just explained: lower consumer prices is effectively a wage hike. When people need to spend less on consumer items, they can afford to buy more consumer items, or they have more left over for what you allege is the only things that matter: "paying rent, attending college, or going to the hospital".

>>The issue is that these companies wind up not just competing on their own comparative strengths, but take advantage of their size and market advantage.

Yes, they take advantage of economies of scale, and that does have the potential to lead to sub-optimal outcomes in the long run, where competitors with better technology and processes cannot effectively compete due to lack of scale.

But it can't be denied that right now, Amazon is successfully increasing the efficiency of the supply chain through infrastructure build out and technological innovation, and that this efficiency is resulting in lower consumer prices, which in turn is increasing the effective wages of workers. You yourself seemed to have acknowledged this earlier, but then found a way to dismiss its relevance to quality of life by characterizing what they sell as "junk".

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