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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

Did anyone else find this somewhat surprising:

"The seasonal workers are unloading and loading, picking and packing at more than 250 new facilities Amazon says it’s opened in the U.S. just in 2021..."

250 new warehouse facilities opened in the United States in 2021. Five new facilties per state? And, obviously, some states would only have gotten 1 or 2 (or maybe less) - so some states would have been getting 10-15....

That just seems like a suspiciously high number to me, I'm not sure if I buy it.

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I can buy it because I don’t think we’ve yet gotten anywhere close to a full accounting of the second order effects of the collective reaction to Covid-19: not just in terms of negative health impacts of the shutdowns, but also the long-term economic devastation.

At the same time as many governors were effectively shutting down hordes of small businesses for daring to stay open even while Amazon and other big firms were doing record-setting business, scammers rushed to claim many of the government loans meant to keep actual businesses afloat. I think many real businesses got completely hosed.

Don’t expect to hear an inkling about this forced transfer of wealth from Main Street to Wall Street from self-described progressives who are currently focusing on enriching Big Pharma. They might start to focus on the economy again when it’s entirely too late.

> Don’t expect to hear an inkling about this forced transfer of wealth from Main Street to Wall Street from self-described progressives who are currently focusing on enriching Big Pharma.

Progressives, including progressive Democrats in Congress, were arguing from day one for a much larger massive transfer from the rich to everyone else to compensate for expected costs of the pandemic including anticipated control measures.

I think you are confusing the neoliberal centrist Democrats who aligned against that with the Republicans that with “progressives.” All while ignoring the actual progressives, who have been talking about this since before it happened, and continue to talk about it, and also Pharma profiteering, contrary to your description; e.g., https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/1467622911989145618?t=...

> this forced transfer of wealth from Main Street to Wall Street

Another reason some people think the entire crisis was engineered, if not the virus itself, then it was certainly seized as an "opportunity"

You don't need a big conspiracy for that, just people acting in their own interest.

I agree that the wealth transfer is awful, but your take is so wrong. Sanders was talking about it explicitly and continues to do so, and many progressives think the impact on small business during the pandemic is awful.

But you seem to think that vaccine advocacy is a bad faith attempt at giving pharma money rather than a good faith attempt at pu lic health and economic recovery. I think is a ridiculous opinion.

Yep. All the people refusing the vaccine due to misinformation are not rich wallstreet folks, it’s the less educated of our society. Those are the people suffering and losing their family members because Covid is devastating their community.

As a self-described progressive, I mostly agree. I'm skeptical that any administration is equipped to handle widespread profiteering. It's beyond even regulatory capture. The megacorps just ignore the rules which bind everyone else. Then treat any fines and such as the cost of doing business.

On my todo list is reading about how the robber barrons were eventually, albeit partially, reigned in.

“Facilities” may be grander language than the reality. I know of one new facility near where I grew up which was a new mall that could never find tenants. It sat vacant for a decade. Amazon leased the whole thing and uses it as a warehouse. The parking lot is filled with their last-mile delivery vans.

A whole mall+parking lot is probably as grand if not grander than I was imagining an average facility to be.

Oh yeah… poor word choice on my part. I’d actually say it’s pretty damn creative given that this was unproductive space for 10 years and was well on its way to being a dead mall.

I guess I meant to say that “facilities” implies new construction in the reader’s mind, but in fact, they’re being more clever.

Yes, they’ve taken over vacant buildings in our area as well. Hard to complain about that but some folks still do.

Mourning the lost potential.

There is a grocery store near me that sat vacant for several years. Finally a storage company took it over. It's a good thing that something is there, just wish it was an actual grocery store.

My area in suburban Washington DC USA is filled with old grocery stores. Just within several miles of my home, one is now a trampoline park, one is an Amish market, and one is an LA Fitness.

My theory is that between huge warehouse stores, newer huge supermarkets, Dollar General, and Walmart (even non-supercenter ones) selling lots of food, and online shopping nibbling at the margins, marginal supermarkets are getting pushed out. There's another supermarket not far from my house that I doubt will make it.

I have no idea what it's like near you but where I am I don't think I'll be seeing any new supermarkets.

This is how it's been though. Before the supermarkets and malls there were just markets and corner grocery stores and Main Streets. But those mostly existed in walkable cities, and when they started being depopulated a generation ago the new suburban supermarkets and department stores and malls ate their lunch.

When the flow started going back into cities again during the '00s, a bunch of firms like Walmart and Target thought they would have a go at operating smaller "urban" stores but that seems to have had mixed results. Retail's a tough business.

My local grocer was bought out by a competitor 2 miles away. They figured that most of the customers would shop at the 2 mile away store instead of the 2.7 mile away supermarket. They closed the store and maintained the lease. They were willing to sublease to anyone as long as they weren't a grocery store. With the lack of an anchoring grocery store, the small stores around it died.

I don't think I'll visit a large supermarket again more than a handful times in my lifetime. I get my groceries delivered from a company without retail outlets. It seems likely big supermarkets are doomed.

The company I use (Ocado) have started licensing their tech worldwide, and includes mostly robotic warehouses.

Did they build more loading docks? Most malls I've seen don't have a lot of big overhead door loading docks, which would be essential for a distribution center.

My theory on how this works is as (nearly) everyone shopping on Amazon is logged in they know where you are probably going to ask to ship your order to. And so they show you search result tailored to what is in stock at your nearest Amazon warehouse. That way they don’t have to distribute the same stock to all warehouses.

Try searching Amazon in a privet window, you get very different result and prices (from different sellers) for the same products. I think that’s down to what’s regionally distributed near you.

You definitely get different shipping times for different products based on your location - so presumably they are cross referencing what is in your local distribution center to get you that shipping time.

Ahh, I'm wondering if they got it (uncredited) from this:

https://www.commercialsearch.com/news/amazon-to-open-more-th...

So - not just warehouses, but also delivery stations. I can buy that.

Looking around the surrounding Seattle area I see a ton of new warehousing going up. From SODO to Tacoma there are major projects. I'm not in that industry at all, just observational and noticing a lot of it is Amazon related. They've also been buying a lot of empty lots between Seattle and Kent for their delivery vehicle parking.

I want to say there's been a few articles that have discussed commercial property boom of new warehousing.

I checked wikipedia and they list 442 amazon facilities in the US currently and under construction, with 58 noted as opening in 2021. I can't speak to the accuracy of this, but those numbers seem more believable.

I think that's a believable number based on the info I've heard out of MN. evidently AMZN is crazy about their privacy and contracts so might be impossible for us to know unless we work directly.

The bigger more shocking number would be the huge % of commercial space bought up by PE and blackrock type etf money, & REITs. often paying shockingly high prices because they're bidding against each other & their investors keep pouring money in.

1. What possible reason could they have to lie about it?

2. It’s likely that this information could be confirmed in other publicly available information.

3. They were the beneficiaries of a gigantic positive shock to demand for their services in the last half of 2020 which continued through 2021 so the number seems very plausible to me.

I heard an anecdote 15 years ago that Walmart at the time opened 600 new stores a year. If that anecdote was true, this isn't that surprising to me with such a large shift we've experienced during the pandemic of increasing online purchases. It might be expanding too quickly, but it doesn't seem insane to me.

Is it so surprising in light of the absolute pummeling brick and mortar got during covid?

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