1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
Then it comes time for me to buy something. I needed a new pair of size 14 sneakers. I drove to Adidas, Footlocker, dicks, and a few other stores but I just couldn’t justify $100 sneakers that didn’t look like prison issued.
Opened my Amazon app in my car after leaving the crowded mall, and find what appear to be a decent pair of shoes. FakeSpot agreed with the reviews, and I bought then for $35. They will arrive tomorrow.
That kind of convenience is terribly addicting. I haven’t figured out the solution, but I remember what it was like when Walmart came to town, put others out of business, mistreated employees, etc. We were unable to stop it then, how the heck are we going to stop it now?
So aside from “just stop buying from Amazon” what can we do ?
The "just stop buying amazon" arguments never made sense to me in the first place, because most people who use it are the ones budget-stretched in the first place. A lot of rural communities have no other viable options for some items as well.
It will take massive government action and that's it. There's no other way we can fix this problem. Wages are suppressed because it's _legal enough_ to suppress them. Labor fines basically become a cost of doing business.
After the union busting that went on during the Alabama Amazon unionization votes, after all of these labor complaints against Amazon coming under media attention and not a single thing being done about it, it's clear that there is truly nothing that will stop it except a general strike.
https://www.inc.com/thomas-koulopoulos/100-years-ago-we-fear...
"It wasn't until the middle of the twentieth century that the tipping point came along for the driverless elevator as the result of a strike by the elevator operators' union in New York City in 1945.
The strike was devastating, costing the city an estimated one hundred million dollars. Suddenly, there was an economic incentive to go back to the automatic elevator. Over the next decade there was a massive effort to build trust in automatic elevators, which resulted in the elimination of tens of thousands of elevator operator jobs."
If Amazon is close enough to automating these jobs, then it will likely just automate it and fire whoever it can. If not, then you're likely making the path towards that faster.
I don't see any way for the employees to win this beyond buying a bit more time. Unless the employees, the government, and Amazon, find a way for them to get a profession in which they have more leverage thanks to the *high individual value* they provide, rather than being a temp for future robots.
One solution can be for a union, government, Amazon etc, is to put aside money for a fund that will invest in training these employees so they could one day not depend on these kind of low-leverage jobs.
While everyone was predicting that the dirty jobs would get automated, instead its a lot of midlevel jobs are getting automated, but we still don't have a robot that can take out the trash.
I am willing to bet my house thay we can automate away the CEO but not the janitor, and it will be hilarious.
Management is just analysis of data, we can do that. But the physical works requires dexterity and robotics that still escapes us.
Unions have negotiated with companies that outsource or automate its members' jobs to secure compensation for the workers who were affected.
However, I think this is a problem that requires a larger solution. There needs to be compensation plans for workers as they're automated away or outsourced. Perhaps it can be a buyout, or a shared ownership scheme where workers get shares in the company or the automation itself that pay dividends. Or a tax on automation or outsourcing that gets returned to workers.
We're heading towards a world where most work is done by machines, and only a handful of people will own, control and profit from them. I think a tax and a shared ownership model would help prevent a world where workers and their progeny are relegated to peasantry.
They will do this anyway. The reason it mattered for elevator operators is that you had to convince a bunch of end users that it was reasonable to self-operate the elevator after they had been trained for years to have an attendant, and you probably had to modify the deployed elevators all over the city--which weren't owned by and one party but had been installed by various buildings--to have additional safety features. Amazon can replace out how Amazon works internally and I would have no clue.
> I don't see any way for the employees to win this beyond buying a bit more time.
Why can't the government increase minimum wages? If those jobs are likely to get automated away then that's going to happen either way At least let them make decent wages _while_ they have a job.
It should be done today and held in escrow for when it happens.
They're always pushing for automation as fast as they possibly can.
Cool story about the elevator. :)
I sometimes fantasize about what it would be like to live in a mild-to-moderately isolated community - moving to Hawaii, northern Alaska, some random island. It's fascinating reading blogs by people who live there, and many of them have a "So You Want to Move to _____" type of post. In virtually all of them, there is some comment along the lines of "It's really hard to find all the things you're used to buying out here, but at least Amazon delivers to us." One of those that I was reading about Hawaii said the big island only has a few big box stores but Amazon can deliver in two to three days.
Just thought that was an interesting tidbit.
Source: Grew up in one of those shitholes, actively rooting for sea level rise wipe it off the map, there is nothing of value there.
I'm not an Amazon defender by any means, but doesn't Amazon pay the best in terms of comparable work which is why the warehouse jobs are so competitive to get? Or is that just Amazon PR to stave off regulations
Among all Amazon workers, the median pay is $28,446 a year ($13.68 an hour), a figure the company revealed this year for the first time because of a new regulatory requirement. That’s a worldwide figure that includes full and part-time workers. Glassdoor, an employment site, says average pay at U.S. fulfillment centers has been $13 an hour, according to nearly 900 people who submitted their data to the site.
Amazon’s pay is significantly above the $10.28 an hour that the typical retail worker makes, but it’s less than the $15.53 that a median warehouse employee is paid, according to Labor Department data.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/amazons-15-m...
Article is from 2018, but is about a wage increase to $15/hr.
I'm sure the competitiveness varies wildly in different areas though.
Generally the conveyor doesn't go faster when you get faster. The warehouse robots are just working on queuing theory. However fast you go, they'll just schedule more shit to come to you.
Is it? Amazon employees (presumably) have the same options as everyone else. Many of those options are, generally speaking, cheaper than Amazon. Whatever your feelings about Amazon in general, fact that Amazon’s supposedly cash-strapped employees choose to pay a premium for convenience is not evidence of Amazon’s malevolence.
My aunt went to be a manager at the Walmart while everything else in town slowly went out of business. They carried sewing supplies until Franklin's went under and then they got rid of that section.
It's the same story with louder music.
This is all bullshit. Walmart is still the cheaper price for groceries and most general goods (at least in my experience living somewhere rural). Amazon is purely convenience at an OK price.
There's a huge useful area between giving Amazon less power and giving them no power. Amazon is always the 4th place I look for something. Most of the time I never even have to go there. And things like their little tantrum where they stopped selling a bunch of Apple products just made that easier for me.
Also remember the audience. Most of the people who can't afford to shop anywhere but Amazon also can't afford to hang out on hacker news. Most of the people here can do better.
I also ask that Because I think humans are losing. The big one will be autonomous trucking. Once that hits, I think we’re going to see massive layoffs and unemployment, as robotics replaces humans.
They've become the new Walmart, they killed off all other options so now its the only place left for a lot of people.
Is it that difficult to imagine the amount of value it created for those communities, too?
I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this point.
This is a problem inherent to neoliberalism, you’re right, I’m just not sure I’d agree that it requires a nation state level shift in politics to make Amazon pay their fare share in taxes and wages.
Unfortunately, that cuts both ways. There are a lot of ways to be exploitive, to your and your customers' benefits, when you're a $113 B revenue/quarter company, that simply aren't available when you're a startup.
Hell, Walmart pioneered the "How'd you like to sell in our stores?" + "You need to reduce prices, or it'd be a shame if we, your biggest customer, had to drop you" two step. And Amazon pioneered hyperscale logistics efficiencies. Both of which only work if you're giant.
If we want a return to competition of yore, I think it's only going to happen if we (a) prevent "extra-large" companies from having in-house logistics & (b) prevent predatory contracts and pricing when a size disparity exists (e.g. Walmart/supplier).
And given both of these are pretty fundamental to the way many companies work, I'm not even sure they'd be feasible.
Actually, I believe that was Walmart as well: >TIMMER: I used to ask my class, I’m talking 1985, “Where is the world’s largest supercomputer?” And the correct answer was, “It’s at the Pentagon.” Okay. “Where is the world’s second largest supercomputer?” Bentonville, Ark. Home of Walmart. They used that computer to track every single item on every single Walmart shelf. That information technology is what revolutionized food marketing. And it was pretty much invented by Walmart.
Source: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/farms-race/#:%7E:text=where...
Amazon has only recently pioneered last mile logistics. It still isnt that great. I’m in a large metro area and 25-50% of my packages do not meet the prime delivery dates. I’d argue Walmart is still the king of logistics, for now.
I think we're beyond that now. I really do.
We thought we were going to get Weyland-Yutani, but I think we're going to end up with Bezos-Walton instead.
The only government responses we need here are better labor laws and maybe a few tax code changes.
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-15-minimum-wage-lobby...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/09/amazon-...
I frequently encounter armchair economists on the Internet making sweeping claims about various, but it is frustrating. It takes basically no effort to think up something plausible. But to take even the first step towards empirically verifying a given hypothesis is an enormous amount of work. Without even a rough empirical foundation, how valuable are these armchair theories?
A little dated now but the Economist had a little mini-article about Amazon and wages. Really highlights how difficult it is to draw any definitive causal links, as well as trade offs (like benefits and unemployment): https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/01/20/what-amaz...
What I'm getting at is, small towns and the like tend to be dominated by petty landlords and what have you. Or someone wealthier elsewhere that can fund endeavors there because they can't where they live. The unfortunate aspect is like the events George Orwell stated. Lots of rundown or lesser paying places.
The notion that consolidation of markets is somehow bad because it drives down people's autonomy has been around for ages and all we've seen time and time again that it actually benefits people more often than it doesn't. You don't have to worry about crop yields, you worry about a boring office job. You don't have to worry about house maintenance, just who to call to fix these complex things. It allows for people to specialize in fields instead of making a population of "Jack of All Trades." The latter make for a better system when you're predominantly agrarian. The former is better when you've got a system so complex that you need people to hyper specialize in something specific so they don't have to worry about other minutia work.
Any evidence for this? Especially in COVID times when there's massive unemployment checks programs, if that were remotely true nobody would be working for Amazon right now.
https://www.ridester.com/how-much-do-amazon-drivers-make/#:~.... https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Amazon-Flex/salaries/Independent-...
There are many things Amazon could improve but unfortunately this is the most blatantly incorrect argument that is repeated the most.
I never saw the definitive source on this, but around the time when the unionization vote was happening, people claiming experience in the logistics industry described Amazon as a place with low starting wages, but aggressive bonus structure for high performers. They also offered health benefits on day 1, which is unheard of in logistics.
Other warehouses in the area might have different compensation schemes, and people would generally gravitate to the one that suited their work style better.
The unionization vote seemed like it corroborated this thesis - it wasn’t even 52/48, but something definitive, like 70/30 against the union.
Perhaps someone is aware of the data that incorporates take-home compensation with benefits and all, not the base rates advertised in job ads.
It could be random and it will still work. You want to pay a few people fairly so the others fight with them for that positions. Workers fighting workers is the goal of this incentives, it had nothing too do with performance.
I don't think Amazon "underpays" per say - but the working conditions described seem quite poor.
In your example of sneakers, Adidas/Footlocker/Dicks are not the places to go for me. Here in California there is a store called Big5 Sporting Goods that consistently has incredible prices (on sale or not). In the past decade I've pretty much never bought shoes anywhere else; most sneakers or hiking shoes I've bought are under $35 and they are the most comfortable shoes I've tried anywhere. There may be a similar store in whatever state you're in.
For clothes and some home goods items, similarly I wouldn't go to brand name stores at the malls; Ross and Marshall always have the best deals. For random home goods, Daiso (an Asian/Japanese brand store) which, fortunately for myself, has a lot of stores in California, has tons of super affordable options, as it's basically a Japanese dollar store. Then there are random things that Target has the best deals for; and other random things that Walmart has the best deals for (I know, buying from Walmart is not much better than buying on Amazon).
My main point is, you don't always have to resort to Amazon for budget, you just have to do enough research work to find out where else to go.
One thing I have noticed and don't really understand: Sellers who's products are more expensive on their own site than on their Amazon page. I could understand parity, but I don't understand it being more expensive to purchase from them directly.
First, I'd like to separate AWS from Amazon the Bazaar. It's just too much control over _both_ the Internet (including all other e-commerce) and retail merchandise commerce.
It's like they own the railroads, the ports, the trucks, and the stores -- we've seen the Robber Baron movie already.
But both AMZN "bazaar" and AWS are novel concepts invented by AMZN, and they have worked really hard to make them reality on such unbelievable scales.
Nobody thought of AWS for decades, until AMZN faced the systems problem and came up with cloud computing via AWS.
I understand taking action on AMZN acquisitions since they are reducing competition illegally. But AWS is an absolutely novel idea by them, and in my opinion, we have no right to take any action there. Also there is a LOT of competition in cloud computing by AZURE and GCP
There are other problems: 1) Search is just terrible. Often I have to search in Google to find the product I'm looking for at Amazon. The "other people bought/looked at these items" functionality which partially made up for bad search has been pushed out in favor of sponsored products (i.e. ads).
2) Shipping is only fast and cheap if you get Prime, which basically means paying for your shipping in advance and buying constantly at Amazon to amortize your initial investment.
3) Because Amazon no longer actually controls its own catalog, duplicate listings, misleading listings, merged listings that amalgamate multiple different editions of the same book, etc. abound. e.g. search for "Norton Anthology of English Literature". Instead of a neatly sorted list by volume/edition/condition, you get a whole mess of duplicate/overlapping listings, and also misleading garbage like this (shows 3 books but you only get 1 of them): https://www.amazon.com/Norton-Anthology-English-Literature-P....
I'm shifting towards just using Amazon as a 'wishlist' shopping cart and then finding the actual thing to buy elsewhere.
That's your one job. Ship me the thing in new condition, and you can't even do that. How much is that even saving them on packaging? A nickel? It's disrespectful and greedy, and it's a sign of how awful they really are. You can sell things cheap and be efficient without being trashy.
They don't seem to be damaged in transit, usually it looks like they have been dropped or badly stored.
I always price check Amazon too, quite often it is not the cheapest, and you can get caught out on shipping costs as you say.
How do you lose a page from inside of a box/envelope?
Amazon is still one of few companies that has a completely seamless, no-BS return policy, for example.
The "sensible" alternative is to shop direct from small businesses, which I do sometimes, but see [2] from above.
also no fee - the fact i can buy worry free knowing if its not as described/trash/broken i can just send it back at no cost is why i use them. don't know any other online store like that
I recently had an AWS issue. Emailed our rep. Next day I was on the phone with like 8 Amazon people, high up enough to make things happen and low enough to make things happen.
It was pretty wild and yes, for all their faults, the are the most customer focused company I’ve ever worked with.
Amazon is famous for their fake returns that get put back into inventory without being inspected.
Amazon is famous for their fly-by-night third party operators who do all sorts of crazy shit to the customer, but then Amazon claims it’s not their fault. And then Amazon also refuses to tell you who the actual third party was that did the crime.
Amazon is famous for not giving you an adequate solution to a problem that they caused.
Amazon could solve a lot of problems just by never co-mingling inventory from one seller with that from another seller — or with FBA inventory.
Let each seller sink or swim on their own, and let their information be fully exposed to the customer.
Order a three pack of cat litter and get only two packs in the box because one never got included in the first place or the box was opened during transit and the re-taped closed with obviously non-Amazon tape? Gotta ship that box back with two bags of cat litter in it, before you can get a replacement box of three bags of cat litter.
Guess how many times that kind of crap has already happened to me?
Why can’t I just send the pictures of the box and then they send me the third bag of cat litter that got stolen?
I’m tempted to ship them back the bags of cat litter after they’ve been used, so that they can inspect other outputs too….
Amazon's scale brings welcome visibility to the problem, and offers employees the chance to unionize, but I'm puzzled by upper-class culture's seemingly new discovery that commodity retail is a shitty job.
As you say, it’s a matter of scale. Shitty jobs have always existed, they will continue to do so. Is a job in home removals - a gruelling, backbreaking task - truly better than that of an Amazon courier, engineer, or warehouse employee? If we want to be particularly extreme, we can swap removals for mining, farm work, or heavy manufacturing.
In the long run, damaged joints n’all, I expect that the average ‘shitty job’ of today - in developed nations - is still an improvement on what came before.
Yes, a lot of this comes down to outsourcing risk and danger (e.g. from manufacturing). I’m interested in hearing opinions on this - it’s a working idea.
The notion of a baseline of satisfaction required for consentual opting-in to monopolies seems to have produced this perpetual equilibrium where even if people don't like a service they still throw up their hands and use it because everyone else happens to use it since it is the one and only place that this one crucial discussion about X or Y is taking place in the entire world, and the subject matter has nothing to do with the platform itself, but that platform was the one that happened to win out, because it was superior.
It's caused me to think that just because you are fixing bugs or legitimately making improvements to a product, or have big dreams and an idea that actually does change the world, it doesn't mean that you are necessarily mean that you are doing the world a favor overall. The people in control or the incentives could rule what actually happens.
And the scariest thing is, people don't want to outlaw or regulate innovation or growth. People are fine with Amazon improving its marketplace to the point where there are no other marketplaces left offering a comparable set of products. A lot of people seem to be fine with letting social media grow to dominate our lives if it's reframed as "making it easier to keep in touch with your distant relatives."
Now it really is easier to keep in touch with your relatives than ever. And now, social media is also starting to dominate our lives.
Recently I wanted to buy 10-ish dead tree books in English and get them shipped to an eastern EU country. Going through the first 20~ DDG results of online stores exactly zero would ship them here. Also, the local bookstores would have only few books in English, mostly the 'bestseller'-type stuff.
Amazon was the only place that would have them available and would ship them here..
So basically I would try going to target first, then Amazon. Or Newegg or B&H first, then Amazon. There are other retailers of course but those tend to have operational competence, which is hard because Amazon raised the bar.
I also like Target's pickup option - it's even better than Amazon sometimes because it'll often be ready for me in like 15-30m and driving/biking over there is like a 10m exercise.
Shouldn't you wait to see what kind of cheapo $35 shoe arrives tomorrow, one you never got to try on, before you celebrate?
Taxes might help. If you tax a company for their immoral behavior, the cost of their goods go up and consumers might make different decisions. But in a democratic society the people who create taxes are elected by voters who want their lives to be easy.
Maybe the best thing would be to throw out democracy and be ruled by philosopher kings who can make these decisions for us. I only say that half-jokingly.
Cigarettes are terrible addicting too and people quit them all the time.
As far as I can see, the low cost of the American lifestyle is largely subsidized by shifting the price onto others. Whether that's Amazon keeping prices low by exploiting labor in the west or Chinese manufacturers keeping prices low by exploiting labor in China or meat manufacturers keeping prices low by running factory farms, at the end of the day, the ethical choice is always going to have a higher price attached because you're eating the cost so others don't have to. The only solution is to put your money where your mouth is.
Others say legislation, but that's a transient solution at best. If the lobbyists don't get to twist the legislation in the first place, they'll just keep lobbying until they get their way. They have the money and organization to make it happen.
Lower the barriers to entry for business. It is not easy to comply with regulations and reporting.
A scrappy startup can replace Amazon if they can focus on things that are not burdensome and arbitrary, like rent + insurance + tax reporting + legal.
If "rent + insurance" are unnecessary overheads, you might as well say employee protections are completely useless regulations too.
Lobby your congressperson to break up Amazon and all the other big tech companies. Prevent them from bundling, vertically integrating, and using loss leading products to make all competitors not competitive.
Make their delivery network its own company who takes orders from other suppliers. Make their storefront and warehouses its own entity. Make their media organization stand on its own. People smarter than me can figure this out.
Make policy that punishes national and international companies and favors local businesses, and keeps the taxbase local rather than in Delaware.
Ultimately there's little that one can do with this hyper concentrated economy other than push for and join the political wave against concentration.
Also, apple isn't allowed to both make phones and software for phones?
I have found Amazon to be not the best with clothing/shoes unless you're buying the same shoes over and over - the pricing in that case is often not competitive either.
It's very convenient to buy from Amazon, but it's hardly a hardship to not do so.
There are two issues here: One is that you want to boycott a company that treats its employees bad, and two is that you buying local makes money circulate in the local economy.
Make sure to decouple those.
I like to play a game of "how is this retail employee going to lie to me today" when I walk in any brick and mortar establishment. Its entertainment.
That’s easy. Just ask them how their day is going.
14 and 15 are sometimes available.
Anything larger is a specialty store... except New Balance will always have up to 18 in some styles.
Now, width is another matter entirely.
(Well except for the MEA Carriers)
They're terrible because they're only there to fill a public good
The issue, as you imply, isn't only that Amazon is very good but the experience at many physical retailers is very poor. It is difficult to simplify this down to one thing imo.
Managers in physical retail are unusually bad. Retail used to be ludicrously profitable, so most companies have a dense layer of MBAs who have no real idea how to adapt or innovate.
I recently read The Secret Life of Groceries (not great tbh, but did cover some useful themes) and towards the end of the book (paraphrasing), it is framed as grocers all "compete" to be the best version of the same thing. They strip all the difference out of their product, usually compete solely on price, and (ofc) someone eventually comes in and undercuts them. That is a failure of incentives and management.
This varies by industry, and is not limited to incentives/management. One reason for the lack of innovation in sports apparel is that there are basically two suppliers, and one of them is moving heavily into DTC. Every sportswear shop is just a Nike distributor, so there is no real differentiation there (the only innovation in the sector has been distributors moving up the chain like Sports Direct and Decathlon in Europe). So the reason why you can't find shoes cheaper is actually because of Nike, not distributors (and those distributors lack any capacity to innovate, management is mostly composed of MBAs who likely have worked at Nike or Adidas at some point).
But the solution is counter-intuitive: keep buying from Amazon. There is nothing structural or inevitable about Amazon's success (compare them with the large Chinese retailers, they actually look quite blundering and incompetent, they have made mistakes in distribution already that are going to choke them). Physical retail needs more innovation which can only come through firms dying, and entrepreneurs thinking about what consumers want (this happened with WMT, there was consolidation then competition as WMT got overrun by MBAs and they lost their edge...Tesco in the UK is a very extreme example of this too).
I wouldn't be pessimistic either: the distinction between online and offline retail really doesn't exist. Look at restaurants like CMG, they are taking most of their orders online...but that doesn't change the product. It is the same with retail: taking an order online doesn't change the fact that the retailer is holding some product somewhere, and is distributing that to you (this is the mistake that Nike is making, they are going into DTC thinking they just can just cut everyone out, and jam up prices...it is MBA, day one strategy, and idiotically wrong). The real difference with offline retail is actually the cost of property, which is going to narrow over time. Ofc, this isn't universal...some verticals like hardware stores are ready-to-go already, others like clothing probably aren't (there isn't much value-add at consumer contact, and they pay v high rents)...but the innovation will come. I don't think physical retail is dead at all though. If anything the weakness of physical retail is that MBAs stripped all the life out of it which left them open to competition from online. Online is just delivering the message that consumers have had enough.
EDIT: I will add that personally I think a lot of the stuff on Amazon is terrible. A lot of retailers in the 2000s were just innovating by going deeper into China, and closer to factories. Amazon just took that to it's logical conclusion. It works for some products, not for everything. Branded stuff also tends to be fake.
Could you elaborate?
What mistakes did they do in distribution?
I am just seeing them out-compete everyone. With their own dedicated shipping they can grab that essential percentage point of margins that makes them either rich or gives them the ability to be the best price in town.
The weakness of retail is that it has a low barrier to entry and does not provide much more utility compared to competitors. Quality control and branding and the internet make obtaining information about good products and being able to trust them much easier than in decades long ago.
Some retail companies with upper middle class clientele can afford a little bit of extra margin, but it is a small portion of the population with that kind of disposable income. You put a Target/Costco/Nordstrom/Home Depot/Best Buy/IKEA/Apple/Trader Joes somewhere, and a handful of other stores and you basically have it all covered.
Maybe someone can make an Amazon competitor that is just a decent shopping app. I don't care if your store only has shoes, if I see it and think "oh, this is another one of those non-shitty-web-app stores" I'm likely to come back.
Regulation can only go so far, it can help build and stabilize a healthy ecosystem but it can't help with a fully consolidated business like with a decade of experience in killing competition.
There's a good case to be made that they should get the standard oil treatment.
There are also discount/used clothing stores like TJ Maxx which have cheaper clothes.
Relatively speaking, it's not difficult to buy things not from Amazon.
a) break Amazon into many independent companies based on these already-established groups and
b) bar forever (or for some time) these groups from merging with each other.
The initial conditions (terms of the break-up: e.g., how much cash each entity would get) would determine whether, when cast out onto the street, each might survive.
Product Makers will at some point realize they can sell direct and do it without AMZN. e.g. Nike, Apple
Competitors- Dick's, Best Buy will give product makers ultimatums- if we get undercut by AMZn, we're not going to sell your stuff- so you decide. Its nice to be able to buy and pickup curbside same day
Customers- I already find Amzn beating prices on eBay about 25% of the time. eBay shipping times are improving too
It's a comedy of uncreative errors that leads us to zero in store competition with Amazon. Target isn't bad!
eBay is even worse!
Zeroth, lots of eBay resellers drop-ship from or resell directly from Amazon. There are plenty of bots looking for arbitrage opportunities between Amazon, brick-and-mortar, and OEM.
First, there's absolutely zero guarantee that you'll get what you bought. The chances of you getting a box of rocks is significantly greater on eBay than on Amazon (unless you use Amazon Marketplace, in which the chances of this happening are _still_ lower).
Second, returns and disputes are generally settled C2C (consumer-to-consumer). Which means you're completely at the mercy of the seller (or the buyer, if you're selling). PayPal acts as a mediator, but they are really easy to game.
Ever heard of the US Postal Investigations Service? Or the FBI IC3? Well, you'll get to know those departments _real_ well once you start using eBay enough.
Third, PayPal has a Buyer Protection guarantee, but it only applies in a handful of specific situations and is, again, very easy to game. Hard contrast to Amazon's return policy, which is, basically, "if you still have it, and it's in the return window, you can return it, unless you abuse it."
No one wants to be the bad guy in their own story. That's why excuses exist.
Good luck. I understand where you're coming from.
Motivate other retailers to not be such lazy louts about technology?
I can see which aisle things are in the store, what can be picked up today, what can be ordered to the store, etc.
They need warehouse space though.
We need to make those things illegal and we need to make sure those laws are enforced. This is the greatest downfall of capitalism, morals cannot be enforced by consumers because business operations are completely opaque to them. No company should be able to outcompete another by using such terrible, exploitative practices.
If you are “torn” over this, if it’s so bad that you’re “torn”, how is this a difficult decision? Convenience trumps being “torn”. I mean, really.
As far as I can see, there are only two forces potentially big enough to fight a big corporation today:
1. Another equally big corporation.
2. The federal government.
The fact that US anti-trust enforcement has been essentially non-existent means that #1 is almost gone these days. Citizens United allowed corporations to buy politicians, so it seems that #2 is dead too.
It sucks.
When Amazon Prime was real 2-day shipping and they'd send something via overnight air just to get it to you in time, it was nice. And would have been hard to give up.
Now that it just means free shipping, and you might get it tomorrow and you might get it in a week, it's much easier just to buy somewhere else. Walmart. Target. BH Photo. Adorama. Best Buy. Tons of options.
IMHO, the system is [china builds things] -> [middle man sells it on amazon] -> [consumer buys it on amazon]. Amazon needs these middle man people and has starting cutting them out by producing their own lines to create even more profit. The only way Amazon will die is if the graph turns into: [china builds things] -> [consumer buys it]. I know, I know, i hear everyone saying: that is impossible. But I don't think it is and I think that is coming.
Entity US Employees
1. US Government 2.7M
2. Walmart 1.6M
3. Amazon 1.0M
Looking at these figures, it's evident that these three entities are far larger, wealthier, more connected, and likely more powerful than the vast majority of US cities, the vast majority of small countries in the world, and maybe even a few smaller US states.
Contrary to popular belief in the bloated growth of the U.S. public sector, the size of the federal government proportionate to the total U.S. population has significantly decreased over the last 50 years. It has also shrunk in absolute numbers in terms of both the full-time and part-time workforce. If we compare the size of the U.S. public sector as a percentage of the total workforce with other advanced countries, the U.S. is often smaller than its European counterparts, including the United Kingdom, although larger than Japan, which has one of the smallest public sectors internationally. In stark contrast, 40% of the workforce in Russia is employed in the public sector. In Europe, the optimal size of government is equally hotly debated, while in Russia, the size of the government and the dependency that this generates within the workforce tends to mute critical commentary." https://www.brookings.edu/policy2020/votervital/public-servi...
I think states and cities have legitimately shrunk budgets in proportion to regional economic output since the downsizing efforts of the 80s, but the federal government has not. Tax revenue as a proportion of GDP has dropped, and presumably discretionary budget has, but debt-financed mandatory budget has skyrocketed. The chart from the Fed seems to show outlays in proportion to GDP steadily growing for over a century, but pretty slowly: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S
Obviously, the ginormous spikes for WWII and Covid are outliers.
When GM was "good for America", we pretty much lost public transportation, so what are we losing now?
And that never happens. /s
Indeed there are not a lot of countries/cities that are wealthy/powerful enough to send people in space
I'm glad we've moved to a peaceful and private-public model with BO and SpaceX but its not like every country is failing everyday at getting rockets off the ground. They just don't care that much and know they can buy rocket rides from other nations, the same as buying medicine or arms from them. It just makes a lot more sense to buy space-related services from others than start your own for almost all nations.
I'd guess that there's a similar number of cities and companies that could send people to space
Think of all the Walmart, Dicks, Big Lots parking lots and strip malls that could be converted into better space. Think of how much waste there is when you have to pack, unpack, stage and repack merchandise.
Amazon’s distribution is a superior business model which is why it is popular. I’d also reckon that the carbon footprint per package is lower if you account for the driving that is required for more traditional shopping.
I’d rather see more competition using a similar business model than a return to concrete strip malls full of big box retailers.
If I want to walk around and browse, I will do that without you forcing me to.
You think that big box stores and/or malls don't impact traffic on nearby roads?
- At work we use AWS
- Amazon uses my company software
- My wife is a retailer and now sells on Amazon
- During work I use Twitch.TV as background noise (Amazon bought Twitch.TV)
- Last week, after work I was playing the new Amazon MMO game.
- After dinner I was watching The Office on Amazon Prime
And such a pretty garden
And no alarms and no surprises
Since everyone is using government works as the comparison, government employees + government contractors, and those in the government contracting sphere.
so, yeah... they're big. At the very least, amazon jobs are now a standard of sorts. What they do and/or don't do as an employer is what's normal.
That said, amazon is just more of a moving target. So, news.
Derivative matters in the context of size
Actually, the more I think on this claim, the less it makes sense. The xkcd of how many weddings someone will have the day after their marriage comes to mind.
What am I missing?
However, the graphs in this article from 2018 make it fairly clear how the trendlines for Walmart vs. Amazon compare:
https://www.pymnts.com/consumer-insights/2018/walmart-amazon...
Assuming the relationship between those curves is still roughly the same, it seems clear that Amazon's employee growth is likely to take it past Walmart's numbers within a couple of years.
>According to the most recent US employment report, there are 145.8 million nonfarm payroll workers out of a total population of 332 million.
ignoring the mismatching "Populations". (261 million seems to be "Civilian noninstitutional population")
This [0] seems to say there are 152,283,000 employed in US.
are there really ~6.4 million people working on farms in US? i thought farm work was <1% of employed peoples.
BLS has this showing 2.3 million people working in agriculture: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat15.htm
And this showing there are 900,000 jobs for "Agricultural worker" https://www.bls.gov/ooh/farming-fishing-and-forestry/mobile/...
Clearly the terms "Employed persons in agriculture industries" and "agricultural workers" have definitions that diverge much, much more than I would have thought as a layperson.
> Agricultural workers maintain crops and tend livestock. They perform physical labor and operate machinery under the supervision of farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural managers.
According to https://www.bls.gov/ooh/management/farmers-ranchers-and-othe..., there are 952,000 jobs as "agricultural managers," which isn't how I'd naively expect things to be divided, but it does make sense.
I wonder how the remaining jobs are categorized.
It feels like agricultural worker is actually quite narrowly defined to only be unskilled people specifically requiring oversight and management.
We currently have a labor force of ~160 million people and Walmart employs "1 out of every 72 American workers" or ~1.3%
WalMart has about 2.2 million world wide of which 1.5 million are US employees.
Amazon, according to the article, has about 950,000 employees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_De...
There are 1.6m people working for NHS and about 41m people of working age in the UK. So that's about 1 in 26 (or 3.9%).
Sources: https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/nhs-in-a-nutshell/nhs-..., https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTGBQ647S
The USSR after the revolution was literally called the Soviet Union. A "soviet" is a council elected by workers. Basically workers would own the means of production through soviets, and they would join together as a larger governing body. Unfortunately, the autocrats and populists took control and killed everyone; or as in Russia, illness also helped kill the vast majority of able-bodied people which really screwed their production. But I'm WAY oversimplifying.
In Soviet Union considerable part was in cooperation. And more in Stalin era then later.
Citing Russian wikipedia:
> By the end of the 1950s, there were more than 114 thousand workshops and other industrial enterprises in its system, where 1.8 million people worked. They produced 5.9 % of the gross industrial output, for example, up to 40 % of all furniture, up to 70 % of all metal utensils, more than a third of upper knitwear, almost all children's toys. The system of commercial cooperation included 100 design bureaus, 22 experimental laboratories and two research institutes.
China is capitalism all the way now.
IDK about North Korea but they don't seems like a "communist country" for me.
In the USSR the government set ranges of wages that different firms/administrators could give out. I guess in practice you had some choice but not if you had one entity with practically unlimited negotiating power.
Is that the count of actual "employees with an employee number", or does that include contractors?
Edit: Apparently, yes, actual US employees. From the Q2 2021 Quarterly Results:
"Amazon introduced a new mental health benefit for all of its 950,000 U.S. employees..."
https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2021/q2/...
In denser neighborhoods there is a certain charm to walking around dense streets, and sometimes randomly entering stores that catch your eye. Having malls be this dreary location that you must visit to get anything, makes amazon look so much more attractive.
Similarly, small roadside stores in high foot traffic areas can end up being sustainable due to a high number of customers per second. On the other hand, malls are built to be large and inefficient in a manner that almost feels like it's by design.
There are a huge number of products that benefit from use-before-you-buy. Brick & mortar is innately profitable in this scenario. Brick & mortar stores can also facilitate warranty more easily and will generally have fewer returns. Usually, they would have be able to stand against online shopping in those product categories. However, most US cities lack areas that would naturally see high foot-traffic. This makes it impossible to actually run a physical store. As for the other product categories, I am so glad online shopping became a thing.
Unless that scenario turns unto "use (in the store) before you buy (on Amazon)," which retailers have been complaining is often what happens.
* US DoD * Walmart * McDonalds * USPS
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/438242-the-federal-gover...
Mass employment businesses aren’t common. I visited a gold ball factory once… there were about 3 people packing boxes and one dude fiddling with the machines.
I've been waiting 6 months to buy a couch, every time I check on an update, its delayed. Government services are impossible to work with, try getting a passport or license. If you have an emergency every office is closed or dysfunctional. Amazon on the other hand works fine. I'm so thankful for it.
Would you be able to buy a couch on Amazon? The #1 bestseller on Amazon currently says "Currently unavailable. We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock." so it doesn't work here the same way other retailers don't work.
So you're saying you can't get a passport from the government but you're able to buy certain things on Amazon therefore Amazon is better?
It is virtually impossible to get an appointment at the passport office in the US right now. Not a local passport office, ANY passport office. There were people outside the one I went to offering a Nintendo Switch to people to trade for a time slot. The shortest wait time I had on the phone was three hours, and I called one minute after they opened.
It works... ok. The delivery company only delivered one of three boxes for my bedframe, I got a refund but now I have a headboard and a mattress on the floor, and the model is out of stock. Woe is me, right?
Everything else has gone off without a hitch, and so, tl;dr yes you can buy a couch on Amazon. Or Wayfair. But not necessarily at Ikea, at the moment. At least not here.
Only in the US, thank goodness. Or I suppose I should say: everything is still working here in Norway, not quite at 100% but close.
Why is everything but Amazon underperforming in the US? It sounds like mismanagement to me.
I buy as much as I can not from Amazon, but from AliExpress. The reason is that many kf the stores selling me brands I have never heard of, are sourced from China anyways. That kinda pisses me off.
1. Everyone works at Amazon
2. Amazon has vertically integrated into every conceivable industry.
3. Everyone gets paid in Amazon gift cards.
4. Amazon automatically delivers to your home everything you need to live your life without you having to ask. It knows what to order based on an AI model of everything you have ever done or thought. Your level of consumption is automatically scaled to your gift card balance.
5. You rent everything that's not a consumable from Amazon.
6. If you quit your job at Amazon, you starve to death. You must even return your clothes because your license to them has been canceled. You could try and live in the woods and eat nuts and berries. Using someone else's Amazon prime account is punishable by death since that's the practical consequence of getting fired from your job at Amazon. The right of first sale has been abolished for all goods, so even if someone wanted to give you food, they don't have a product license to do that.
Here are a few more things for your list:
7. Amazon monitors everything you do online and offline (they do provide the backbone and all of ISP services). Corrective action is taken if needed
8. Amazon decides who get to live and who gets to die based on your predicted future value. Also, Amazon decides who gets to reproduce.
Probably because Amazon historically hasn't done vertical integration. Amazon Basics items aren't manufactured in Amazon factories. Heck, half the time they're not even branded. I bought an AB air conditioner last month and there wasn't a single Amazon logo on the box.
A maximal Amazon would eat all retail, but I don't seem them running hotels or hospitals. They could still cause plenty of problem if 1 in 4 people worked there, though.
It's not like a small retail shop where the manager gives you less shifts after you refuse a sexual advance, or a restauranta where you're working 3 more hours than your wage.
Amazon's scale and reach is frighteningly massive.
If the US was serious about antitrust, breaking AWS from Retail would probably be the best thing it could do.
Anyone know why the "non-farm workforce" is the number reported here?
I found this too: https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2019/july/nonfarm-payr...
For scale, one in how many Americans is an Amazon consumer?
The Biggest Employers in 1955
1. General Motors Employees in 1955: 576,667 Employees today: 204,000 (as of 2010)
The No.1 car company in the US used to be the No.1 car company in the world. In 1955, GM had more than 50% of the American vehicle market and, between direct employees and those at suppliers, it was responsible for more than 3 million US jobs. GM has emerged from bankruptcy, but has fewer than half as many people, and its US market share is only 20%.
2. U.S. Steel Employees in 1955: 268,142 Employees today: 43,000 (as of 2010)
US Steel was the largest company in its industry worldwide and was among the Fortune 50 in 1955. A large portion of the steel manufacturing business has moved offshore, first to Japan and then China.
3. General Electric Employees in 1955: 210,151 Employees today: 304,000 (as of 2010)
General Electric is one of the few companies that has grown significantly over the last five decades. It was largely an industrial firm in 1955, and now makes a large amount of its revenue and profits from financial services.
4. Chrysler Employees in 1955: 167,813 Employees today: 58,000 (as of 2010)
Another car company that benefited from a very limited number of imports. The firm nearly went out of business during the 1980s recession and was rescued by the US government. It moved into Chapter 11 nearly two years ago.
5. Standard Oil Of New Jersey Employees in 1955: 155,000 Employees today: 102,700 (as of 2010)
Standard Oil of New Jersey was part of the original Standard Oil trust created by John Rockefeller. The company was merged into what eventually became Exxon Mobil.
Also Read: Apple’s Downfall: Android Sales
6. Amoco Employees in 1955: 135,784 Employees today: N/A
Another piece of the Rockefeller trust, the company was merged into BP America and is now part of BP plc.
7. CBS Employees in 1955: 117,143 Employees today: 25,580 (as of 2010)
The dominant force in both national radio and TV, the company also owned several large stations. As media has broken into more forms of delivery, including cable and Internet, CBS has grown smaller.
8. AT&T Technologies Employees in 1955: 98,141 Employees today: N/A
This division of AT&T handled the telephone company’s R&D was was spun out of AT&T completely in 1984.
9. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Employees in 1955: 95,727 Employees today: 69,000 (as of 2010)
The largest tire company in the world in 1955, Goodyear had large plants around the world. As competition from Japanese companies grew, the company went through several restructurings including a move into energy.
10. Firestone Tire & Rubber Employees in 1955: 90,000 Employees today: N/A
The second largest tire company in the world in 1955, Firestone was at one point the exclusive supplier to Ford. The company was sold to Bridgestone of Japan in 1988.
* From: https://247wallst.com/investing/2010/09/21/americas-biggest-...
NOTE: The above link was produced in 2010. In 2010, Amazon wasn't even in the top 10 of employers in the United States. And since 2010, some of the employers above have shrunk in size further.
Now do the government.
We are in the beginning of our probably very long dystopia, where only the rich will be able to live a life off total surveillance and the rest will be sucked out of all remaining living traces for survival.
The only rule I live by is that I do not try to exert power over anyone that I would not wanted to be subjected to myself. Period.
I wish HN posters would stop encouraging this lowbrow form of journalism. For an educated community, people sure do love their cheap clickbait headlines here.
What's with these stupid "X in Y" numeric expressions that the dumb media insist on continuing to heap on the world ?
Why not consistently use a standardised means of comparison.
Like, I don't know .... percent. Or "X in 100" if you think your newspaper/blog/website readership are too dumb to know what the % symbol means. The clue's in the name FFS ... per... cent ... that's what its there for !
"1 in 153 people" is easier for the human mind to visualize than "0.65 out of every 100 people."
https://www.google.com/books/edition/6th_Grade_Math_Workbook...
In this case, the BPN for working at Amazon is 107 (assuming everyone in the group is a worker).
That being said, it is tricky to move the adjustment between the numerator and denominator, and there are cases where this choice can be key -- "25 miles per gallon" is indeed a far worse metric to use than "4 gallons per 100 miles".
I've eaten 1/5 of the pizza. Now 1/4. Now 1/3. Slices are all different sizes.
I've eaten 20% of the pizza. Now 40%. Now 60%. Slices are the same.