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Comment by shakezula | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

There's also the other option similar to what happened after the New York Elevator Operator Strike in 1945 -- the total elimination of a profession.

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.

retraining does not work https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/01/the-fa...

> If Amazon is close enough to automating these jobs, then it will likely just automate it and fire whoever it can.

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.

"being a temp for future robots"

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.

Management isn't analysis of data, it is making a decision based on that analysis. A completely different and more complex problem. One could argue that the border between the two is unclear but we have for sure been automatizing the analysis and we are nowhere near removing the managers. Maybe we could say we have removed layers of management though

I'm with the bet-the-house guy. I've worked for huge organizations since 1990 and I really think that even a mid-grade student project could make decisions as well as the management I've known, which includes multiple Fortune 50 CEOs. When I say "known" I mean "known" and not "been ten layers under."

What I think will happen is CEOs will be glorified actors that are tasked with delivering the decisions some ML system has made. It'll be like the "white guy in a suit" role that some Chinese companies have.

Because you knew every counter factual, right?

ML systems don’t make decisions.

I feel like a lot of comments about what ML will do start with a misunderstanding of what ML actually is.

Saying ML will make a CEO’s decisions is like saying Excel will make CEO’s decisions. Neither is anything more than a system for keeping track of correlations.

ML models don't make decisions, but there certainly are ML systems, within which are ML models embedded with data flows, business logic, etc., which make "decisions" or "adjudications" or "classifications" or whatever term you are trying to avoid here.

Neither do most CEOs. What they do is best guess which fully evaluated option for (d)investment they like better based on gut feel. Most business-oriented decisions are basically stack ranking the options presented.

This is basically where we are today, except that instead of AI it's management consultants (and they're expensive).

There are strong reasons to believe that tasks that are new to humans and are considered difficult, will be easy to AI. Like programming, finance, strategy, etc

Whereas things humans have developed over millions of years and think are easy, like vision, dexterity, etc might be quite hard and the last things to be automated.

Absolutely. This is why it would be better to chose the best option without the management.

I regularly consult management about technical decisions and the always chose something else than the best option. Based on feelings, opinions and kickback rates.

> I regularly consult management about technical decisions....

Well, right there's your problem.

> we still don't have a robot that can take out the trash

Because it's hard to justify the $$$ on a robot to automate a job that takes 30 seconds once a week.

Modern people don't realize it, but an awful lot of household drudgery has been automated. I'm old enough to remember life before the microwave. What a marvelous time saver that is! You can even buy one from the thrift store for $10. I remember them being $1000, and that was back when a dollar was worth something.

Add to that the cheap-as-dirt popcorn maker. My mom would make popcorn in a frying pan. The machine is sooo much easier.

There are the mothers of kitchen automation:

1. refrigerator

2. garbage disposal

3. dishwasher

4. electric / gas stove and oven

These are really marvelous inventions. It seems I spent half my childhood washing dishes by hand. Ugh.

I'll be honest: I do think frying pan popcorn legitimately tastes better. That said, it can't be argued it's far easier to use the machine.

pretty easy if you use a steel mixing bowl covered in foil with some holes poked (unpopped kernels pool towards the Center)

> My mom would make popcorn in a frying pan. The machine is sooo much easier.

But perhaps not as much fun, particularly if you forget to put the lid on?

> It seems I spent half my childhood washing dishes by hand. Ugh.

Yes, I remember that when I left home to go to university, the very first thing my parents did was to buy a dishwasher.

Mind you, I don't have one today - kitchen too small, and I don't like bending down to fill/empty it.

Out of interest, what do you mean by automated garbage disposal? The urban infrastructure of someone taking away your garbage, or the mostly-US device installed in your sinks?

The latter does not exist in Europe so I haven't ever thought it would be an important step in reducing chores. We have bio waste bins for food leftovers which seems pretty efficient already.

It's a grinder machine that people install just below their drain. Ostensibly so that you don't have to put a strainer in there.

In my opinion they provide basically zero value but lots of trouble. They encourage putting all kinds of nastiness down your pipes and in my experience tend to break and leak. But they are virtually ubiquitous here.

Lots of local and regional governments in Europe encourage people to not use the toilet or the sink as a trash can. The wastewater is usually treated before arriving to rivers and other places, so the cleanest is the water, the easiest is to treat it.

Absolutely, only toilet paper can be thrown to toilets. Everything else must go to garbage bins, especially all kinds of wet wipes. Same is surely true for US too.

I still don't have a dishwasher or a garbage disposal (and I've never even used / seen any), diswasher seems really marginal upgrade as a childless couple - I guess it is a timesaver for a family of 4+?

I'm really wondering about the garbage disposal thing and I'll go Google about them.

Yeah, I'm old enough to remember that era, too.

My first encounter with a microwave was at far Bob's in Pasadena. Finals had just ended at Cal Tech and I walked to far Bob's to decompress. I had no knowledge of microwave ovens.

I ordered a piece of cherry pie. Waitress decided to warm it without telling me, using their then-new microwave oven.

The plate was ice cold when she passed it to me. When I bit into a piece of the pie, I burned the bejesus out of my mouth. I yelped and the waitress came running.

She showed me this magic box, which made sense as I'd just finished E&M. She comped me the pie and since it was a slow night (around 2am), we spent an hour testing different foods in the microwave. Bacon layered in paper towels was the clear winner.

Nice to see a fellow techer here!

The fastest tech revolution I ever saw was in the fall of '75, when I was a frosh. At the beginning of the semester, the Caltech bookstore had slide rules for $125. By December, they were on closeout for $5. Never saw them again. The calculators had arrived!

What was that like, going from log tables to instant calculations?

Like riding your bike to school instead of walking.

(Showing my age again. Kids today don't ride bikes to school. All you gotta do is look at the lonely single bike rack at elementary schools. In my day there were lots of racks festooned with bikes. These days when I pass a school, there's a long line of moms in SUVs with the motor running talking on their phones.)

> Kids today don't ride bikes to school.

In the USA. But in plenty of other places they do. In fact, at the bike rack of my sons school there is too little place, so some of them overflow onto the school yard.

Microwaves are great but they save waiting time more than drudgery. A toaster oven will heat/cook something with just as little input.

> but we still don't have a robot that can take out the trash.

Pneumatic waste collection is a thing, and has been for quite some time.

See

- https://www.wired.com/2010/08/trash-sucking-island/

- https://untappedcities.com/2020/04/09/inside-roosevelt-islan...

- https://qz.com/1909600/the-future-of-garbage-collection-is-p...

Don't we have robots that take out the trash? The garbage trucks pickup the garbage and put it in the truck.

Also, the vacuum now empties itself

forget if it empties, the fact 90%+ of my vacuuming is done automatically is incredible! I can live with the 30 seconds to empty the bin every couple weeks

How is your vacuuming done automatically? You mean with a Roomba robot?

Have you found those working? All my friends that have one just end up storing them somewhere never to be used again.

Not the parent comment, but I think it depends on the house you have. I find huge american houses with 3-5 rooms are unsuitable, except when you limit the robot to one or two rooms.

My apartment in Europe is suitable for it, as I do not have many rooms, so that it does a decent job on cleaning. I do not use the regular vacuum very often.

On the other hand my old European apartment isn't very suitable as my robot gets stuck on high door thresholds and under radiators. It's great anyway, just can't be left alone as I need to save it every now and then.

How? I've had a roomba for almost 2 years now, and I use it all the time - it runs and cleans our living room and kitchen at least 2-3 times a week. There has been a noticeable reduction in dust present in the house. And that's not even a fancy self-emptying model, just a normal roomba where I have to empty the bin by hand. Why would you stop using one?

1) I think we can automate the janitor now. We just don't because it's cheaper to pay minimum wage for 25-30 years.

2) The CEO, and CEO pay, is already more of political action.

"I think we can automate the janitor now."

Have you ever seen a robot unclog a toiler? Get into a greasy kitchen vent to clean it? Clean out the molt between the tiles?

Of fuck that, there is no cleaning robot that can even recognise a stain a scrub it off with a brush.

Do you know there are different kinds of cleaning products and brushes for different surfaces?

Cleaning is a very complex process made up of hundreds of little actions, each fairly complex. They require loads of dexterity

> Have you ever seen a robot unclog a toiler? Get into a greasy kitchen vent to clean it? Clean out the molt between the tiles?

I have seen a plunger-bot. I have never seen a commercial plunger-bot. I think I've also seen a mold scrubber bot. I'm not trying to minimize the skill involved. I'm trying to say that the labor it replaces (assuming the time value of money and minimum wage increases cancel out) is worth 362,500 over 25 years. That's a lot of money, but it's also not for a robot that can do all those things assuming it was as efficient as replacing a whole person. And less if the robot has to be replaced more frequently.

If the market supported a robot that cost a few orders of magnitude more than that, I can see a fleet of robots. Not 100% "let 'er rip" L-5 autonomy, but where one person managed a fleet of specialized robots. Mapping out the surfaces ahead of time, etc.

I will say, I was responding to a "janitor" in the office environment doing routine tasks emptying trash. Not a kitchen vent cleaner. There are a lot of deep cleaning actions that would be harder to automate, and given their rareness and extra difficulty are likely the last to go.

I think a fully automated amazon without a large local workforce and therefor a large local TAXBASE is going to be a huge target for regulatory enforcement.

How? If the workforce isn't local, then there's no citizens involved which US law applies too.

Reducing jobs reduces overall political support, which makes it more attractive for politicians and regulators to pass new laws or more aggressively pursue existing ones. Amazon could get hit with antitrust or some other new legal theory that develops.

Those warehouses have to go somewhere and politicians are much more likely to initiate a shakedown when non of their constituents benefit.

Should these menial, easily automated jobs in a low margin business exist in the future?

To be clear, from Amazon's point of view, all of their human employees are tamping for future robots right now.

They're always pushing for automation as fast as they possibly can.

I don’t disagree with you, but robots don’t spend money.

Amazon should be federally fined for every RIF sufficiently to pay for a retraining/education. As should all dominant employers receiving sweetheart deals on local taxes.

It should be done today and held in escrow for when it happens.

> 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.

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.

> 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

People keep saying that but we are no closer than we were 50 years ago. A lot of jobs have been replaced but new jobs have been created and society has absorbed the increased productivity (cheaper goods, foods, and much more complex high end goods (iPhone, airplanes, etc).

Yep. Back in the hand-written letter days people must have thought “think how much time we would save if all this was automated and letters were delivered instantly!” Nope. We just send 10x more.

Yeah but we read 100% fewer of them.

Counting workers is misleading, you don’t replace a 40$ an hour jobs with a 15$ an hour job without consequences. Beyond that looking at the percentage of Americans employed shows a net drop even accounting for retirement etc.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001

Employment rates aren't the issue IMO, wealth concentration is. And that's increasing.

It's important because wealth is essentially power, so concentration of wealth inevitably changes the balance of power in society. And that in turn creates a feedback loop where the wealth and powerful can undermine thelaws and regulations intended to keep the distribution of wealth and power from becoming too lopsided.

This is why I view the current everything-as-a-service model that takes things people used to own and turns them into things people rent pretty skeptically.

Do you think the centralization of power in the federal government is a problem? Do you think famous people are a problem? Or is it only wealth that's a problem?

Power, as in the ability to alter others lives, is the “problem” IMO. Wealth is only a problem in that it’s intrinsically linked to power.

Really I think it’s a balancing act. Since we can’t just get rid of the concept of power, we try to regulate its use. This is pretty difficult.

The government is, to a certain extend, chosen by the people.

But it doesn't represent the people, which is the problem: https://act.represent.us/sign/the-problem/

That wealth is power is a correlation that few realize.

It’s why these wage debates get so heated - they threaten the core social power of people.

And it absolutely is a feedback loop. Something about absolute power corrupting absolutely.

> A lot of jobs have been replaced but new jobs have been created and society has absorbed the increased productivity.

Not in every case. You can look at workers in the Rust Belt. Their well paying jobs with benefits were "replaced" and new jobs never came, unless you think working at Walmart for close to minimum wage is one of those new jobs.

Even when, say, manufacturers come back and produce domestically, they've reduced what used to be a 1,000+ person job to one that requires 40 engineers and a handful of maintenance people. It's not like any of those factory workers who were laid off in the past were later rehired as engineers, either.

It isn't "society" that's absorbed absorbed increased worker productivity, but employers and those who own the automation. Worker productivity in the US increased dramatically over the last 20 years, and even more over the last 40. Despite that, worker compensation hasn't increased, and has roughly remained the same over those same 40 years[1].

[1] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

> Not in every case. You can look at workers in the Rust Belt

And the old coal mining towns in Northern England (and South Wales).

> It isn't "society" that's absorbed absorbed increased worker productivity, but employers and those who own the automation.

What society has "absorbed" is an expectation that stock markets will continue rising at a pace that significantly outstrips inflation and (related) wage increases. Pension funds and individual retirement savings (401k, RRSP) heavily rely on employers pocketing the bulk of productivity increases for themselves and continuing to exploit labour. It'd be interesting to see the chaos that would arise if governments decided at some point that workers should get an equal share of that.

I think your source is just bad here. Productivity hasn’t increased, process streamlining has. This is usually thought up, created, and managed by the same higher earners that your “source” is saying is the cause of all of the worlds problems.

With wages the minimum wage in 1980 was $3.10, while the last increase from 2009 rose from $6.55 to $7.25 per hour

> It isn't "society" that's absorbed absorbed increased worker productivity,

Yes it has. Food is way cheaper now. Clothes are way cheaper. Transportation is way cheaper. Housing is way better (and cheaper if you want what passed for housing in the 40s).

People keep saying that but we are no closer than we were 50 years ago.

People have been saying it for far longer than 50 years:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

The trouble is, both sides of the argument are correct. When disruption occurs, many people are badly disadvantaged even if society as a whole moves forward. It would be best to find ways to reduce the impact on the affected people without holding up automation and other improvements which have been shown to be beneficial to productivity in the long term.

And luddites were right because pre-industrial level of worker compensation, in real terms, was only achieved by the early XX century.

Actually compensation for most workers went up dramatically from the outset of the industrial revolution. There just wasn't that much wealth to go around prior to industrialisation.

http://nws-sa.com/rr/Inequality/Lindert.pdf

There's not enough high-value jobs to go around. We can either automate and share the wealth, or automate and have a class of useless poor people and some factory owners. Historically the former tends to end in violent ways. And so far, we haven't experimented enough with sharing the wealth in ways that also didn't turn incredibly authoritarian and also oppressive with violent ends...

> There's not enough high-value jobs to go around

it's hard to make this argument when you apply it to the industrial revolution which has already happened, and people aren't completely destitute because of it. In fact, people, on average, are wealthier because of it!

Automation means wealth, and this new-found wealth means more demand for goods/services - of which may not yet exist today. How many people would have guessed that a youtube content-creator is going to be a thing?

Key comment of the thread

Rest assured if Amazon could automate, Amazon would automate.

> 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.

And Amazon will over time or they'll get squeezed.

I get my groceries from Ocado in the UK. Their warehouses are almost entirely automated, including increasingly picking and packing groceries that often include soft or easily breakable products into bags.

They're moved from focusing on growing their own direct sales to increasingly licensing that platform globally.

You say that, but you know how many people that "fully automated" warehouse in the UK employs? Around 800 per shift. It was mentioned in the last incident report when one robot caught fire.

Yeah a big part of the work is automated. But these warehouses still need people.

They still need people, but far fewer, and dropping rapidly as a proportion of goods shipped. The number of workers is a distraction - what matters is product shipped per worker.

E.g. a few years ago the packing into bags was still done by people across the board from trays brought by robots. They've systematically automated more and more of it at a pretty astounding pace.

The problem is that all automatic elevators are going to be stamped Amazon and there is hardly any room available for someone else. It’s a bigger and bigger monopoly. I am sure that Amazon is going to automate as much as possible and it will only increase.

Cool story about the elevator. :)

> A lot of rural communities have no other viable options for some items as well.

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.

After having just taken my first trip to the big island I was actually very surprised how sparse the retail was. Felt very much like rural America.

They're probably using highly restrictive zoning/permitting to keep it out. Local businesses that are charging tourist prices don't want big box stores (who can't get away with a very big local markup) to compete with and local consumer facing businesses hold basically all the influence in that kind of economy.

There is no need to look for conspiracies.

There is only 185k people living on the "big island". I'm not sure why people would expect something other than a rural America level of services, when it is really just a small city of people effectively in the middle of no where.

Note that smaller cities in rural America service a much larger population than just the city itself. The island does not have a surrounding population that can drive an hour in once a week to make use of a big box stores.

Google maps says there is a Walmart, Kmart, Sears and a number of other well known American brands. It's not like they are being blocked from entering the market.

I wasn't talking about rural cities. I think those are generally pretty good and pretty well run. I was talking about how it works in the tourist dumps. Protecting your "authentic" <place> branded Chinese trinket importers from the big boxes is SOP in a tourist economy.

The two times I went on a trip and we ended up at Walmart I was not pleased.

Of course we ended up at Walmart because the people I was with are suckers. Lovable suckers, but all-day suckers nonetheless.

Be careful trusting what you read. The blogs are run by people who've drank the cool-aid or move there already having made their money and life, not the kids who grew up there, saw it for what it was and GTFO'd or the townies who are either living on the relative poverty line (these economies are screwy, federal numbers don't apply well) or have a substance addiction.

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.

Wages are suppressed because it's _legal enough_ to suppress them

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

It is mostly PR.

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.

Wait, so they're taking a part time pay for a year in which someone didn't work full time and dividing it by full time hours, even though those aren't worked to calculate an hourly salary below the minimum hourly salary that's actually paid?

Yeah, I wondered about the methodology there, but they provide an additional data point.

> It is mostly PR.

>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.

It might be tempting to conclude from that amazon is under-paying for that, but it's unknown what the median "warehouse job" at amazon entails compared to the median "warehouse job" elsewhere. If the jobs at amazon is mostly low skill (comparable with retail), then it wouldn't be fair to compare to the median warehouse job that has higher proportion of skilled labor like forklift drivers.

Just anecdotally, the warehouses around here pay $15/hour for unskilled workers who do not drive lifts. In a low cost-of-living Midwestern suburban area.

Only one data point but the local Amazon warehouse I worked at for a while has a Target warehouse about a mile away that pays ~20% more for similar work. People were leaving for them in droves, including management.

I'm sure the competitiveness varies wildly in different areas though.

There's something to be said for poaching workers your competition has trained already.

The downside, especially for the managers, is that they bring their toxic attitudes with them. Diluted of course, but removing it entirely would be a huge effort.

I don't know a lot about warehouse work, and most of it is second hand, but I don't think anyone works as hard as Amazon warehouse workers. Yes, having robots deliver stuff to you is more efficient, but it sounds more like Lucile Ball in the candy factory trying to keep up with the conveyor belt.

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.

And it’s a negative cycle. Those already budget stretched people are getting paid poorly by Amazon, so they too will shop at Amazon. We’re not there yet but the cycle is reminiscent of the factory owners with factory stores and pubs where the workers spend all their money during the industrial revolution. Unions and worker laws stem from that era. So who knows - maybe we’re on the cusp of another revolution that’s similar, but in our current digital revolution!

There was an article on the front page about how Amazon does this in some places already.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store

> We’re not there yet but the cycle is reminiscent of the factory owners with factory stores and pubs where the workers spend all their money during the industrial revolution.

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.

See also: Walmart and its standard practice onboarding employees by signing them up to food stamps.

Why is helping employees get government aid bad? Isn't that what government aid is supposed to be for?

It is to stop the employees from wondering why their wage does not cover their living expenses.

Because if you tax Bob who makes 24 bucks an hour to feed Sam who is making 12 then Sam is in effect working for below market wages because in a functional market Sam would never work for less money than he required to eat.

This arrangement is a transfer of wealth between the middle class and Walmart regardless of whether they opt to shop at Walmart.

In a world where Bob makes $24/hr and Sam doesn’t work (because he won’t take the $12/hr job), Bob’s probably not going to pay less taxes or be better off.

In a world where Walmart didn't post a gross profit of 24.3% for 2020[1], you might have a point.

But in a world where Walmart posted that much profit on it's $559 billion 2020 revenues[2], somehow Walmart is being allowed to tax me, not a Walmart shopper, via my taxes, and transfer it to Walmart's owners and shareholders, by forcing me to pay for part of their employees wages.

Which they clearly have the money to actually pay for.

Unless Walmart is a break-even business, there is no excuse, period, for them to not be paying a living wage and getting sponsored by the government for it.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/269414/gross-profit-marg...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/shelleykohan/2021/02/18/walmart...

Gross profit is profit before paying their employees, so saying they have a gross profit percentage of X is certainly not dispositive (and is close to meaningless) in terms of supporting whether they could pay their employees more than currently.

You need to look at an operating income figure to make such a conclusion. (Or another financial measure that’s “after” labor, but OI is probably the standard one.)

If Walmart makes 1 single cent of profit while having employees on food stamps, then that is the government sponsoring Walmart's profits by allowing it not to pay it's employees a living wage, and banking the difference as "profit".

They are literally taking your tax dollars to do this.

This is the simplest possible economic calculus: a business that doesn't pay full time employees a living wage is getting sponsored by your tax dollars for its profits.

>somehow Walmart is being allowed to tax me, not a Walmart shopper, via my taxes, and transfer it to Walmart's owners and shareholders, by forcing me to pay for part of their employees wages.

How is it a transfer to walmart? The people who get paid the benefit are eligible for it regardless of whether they're employed by walmart or not. Suppose walmart automated their jobs and replaced them with robots, you'll still be on the hook for paying those benefits.

but it hasnt. if they weren't so huge those people might be making living wages working at Bills and Jims and Franklin's sewing shop.

>if they weren't so huge those people might be making living wages working at Bills and Jims and Franklin's sewing shop.

I'm skeptical of this. If anything amazon's push for minimum wage makes me think they're better able to afford the increased cost of labor than their competitors.

It’s not reminiscent of it at all. The factory stores had shitty prices and were the only option. Amazon employees can choose to spend their money anywhere. The company towns are gone.

Which is precisely my point. Amazon is forcing competitors out of business. And once they have a monopoly, history teaches us they will have no incentives left to keep their prices down, and introduce the very shitty prices you speak off. Hence: we’re not there _yet_

> Which is precisely my point.

No it’s not. Your point was completely the opposite (factory towns had shitty prices due to exclusivity).

> Amazon is forcing competitors out of business. And once they have a monopoly

They are forcing little shitty stores that have nothing to add over ordering online out of business.

They aren’t anywhere near a monopoly in any segment of the world. They aren’t even on a path to it. It’s so trivial for people to sell things online that they will never be anything close to one unless they get online sales banned for the rest of the Internet.

My relatives come from a town of <10k people who got a Walmart around the time everyone was figuring out Walmart's tactics. They tore up the side of the road from the highway to grandma's house to install bigger storm drains, and as we know now the town usually never recoups those costs.

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.

> 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.

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.

Any rural community that has a trade deficit with the outside world slowly spirals into poverty. Buying local increases the number of times a dollar travels around the community before leaving.

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’m always curious about the cost of labor, and the breaking point for AI to be a solution to that. I’m thinking mostly autonomous robotics to pick, pack, and ship the products, make the burgers, and heck probably restock the shelves at night.

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.

> they killed off all other options

Is it that difficult to imagine the amount of value it created for those communities, too?

Walmart is known as a town killer, Amazon is an industry killer.

The "big town" (8000 residents) near my town (2500 residents) rejected Walmart on these grounds 25 years ago. The town that accepted Walmart has grown tremendously whereas my big town has 14 empty storefronts on the two main streets which is about 25 percent of the walkable storefronts. It's probably a confounding factor more related to my town's resistance to change and growth than the fact that Walmart isn't there but that's my anecdata.

Another anecdote: Walmart moved into our rural town around, IIRC, 1980. The population chart takes a large upturn around that year. It was about 1000 then, and it's over 3000 today. It certainly didn't kill that town. Walmart even moved locations closer to the highway into a bigger store, too.

> Is it that difficult to imagine the amount of value it created for those communities, too?

"Value creation" generally reveals itself through a rightward shift in the distribution of household incomes, increased standards of living, and resilient supply chains. At least that's what Adam Smith had in mind when he wrote "The Wealth of Nations".

If the only "value creation" KPI that ticks up is corporate earnings in offshore tax havens, the system starts to look like a non-governmental tax authority.

There's 152 other families to work as scabs for each striking worker. I worry all of this won't be resolved until the next State level paradigm shift, like when the world mostly did away with kings and queens for liberalism.

The vast majority of those other workers won’t be flexible enough to be able to just drop and work for Amazon.

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.

No, but it will be a constant struggle when companies are incentivized to infinitely reduce costs and their political power far outweighs ours. Significant tax and minimum wage increases are almost a generational event at this point. Those are features, not bugs of our system.

Are there no federal corporate taxes? Or would the US be discluded since it's not a nation state?

With the correct arrangement of holding companies, etc… in various countries around the world, corporations usually get away with paying virtually no taxes themselves. They might have to collect local sales taxes or some such, but going through Ireland, the Netherlands, and various other tax havens, the company itself pays effectively no taxes. And that’s assuming they choose to make a profit. Amazon intentionally makes virtually no “profit”, because they take the revenue that would otherwise have become “profit” and spend it in a way that counts as “re-investing”.

So, Amazon shows billions and billions of dollars of revenue, but relatively little profit. And it’s only profit that would get taxed at the federal level.

> would otherwise have become “profit” and spend it in a way that counts as “re-investing”.

Yes, so that’s not profit anymore. What’s the problem?

Would you prefer that businesses be taxed on revenue and not profit?

It is a problem in where that money is going and being spent on. If they are truly investing, no problem, but if they are "investing" into, for example, buying there own private islands to vacation on under the guise of business, lambos for company cars, or boosting stock prices they already own, they aren't helping or supporting the economy they are extracting wealth from. And it should be taxed just like if I personally bought an island or 50 pounds of gold jewellery or a supercar.

Just because a company buys and owns something doesn't automatically make it an investment that shouldn't be taxed as profit.

> buying there own private islands to vacation on under the guise of business, lambos for company cars

well you'll be glad to know that these are not what's being spent on - because if they did, it'd be an open and shut case from the IRS.

But

> boosting stock prices they already own

that is not considered investment, and i do not believe a company can avoid paying tax on profits used to perform this action.

> there own private islands to vacation on under the guise of business, lambos for company cars

That’s not even a thing. We’re not living in an Austin Powers movie.

> or boosting stock prices they already own

Who is “they” in that sentence? Do you know how public traded companies work?

> …the next State level paradigm shift….

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this point.

Take a listen to James Burke chatting with Dan Carlin. A better job than I could do -- https://www.dancarlin.com/product/common-sense-312-re-connec...

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