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Comment by anonylizard | Hacker News Reader

“let the workers go pee” or “donate 30 minutes off task to a worker”

You mean:

1. Donate 15 minutes, which at a Amazon warehouse rate about $20/h, is about $5.

2. Donate 30 minutes, or about $10.

Worker speed affects both 1. Latency (How fast you get it), but also 2. Throughput (How much packages Amazon sends per worker/hour)

Are you seriously willing to donate that much on a regular basis? Do you think ordinary people will want to do so? If so, such a button makes sense.

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The reality is decent work conditions should be built in and any "cost" spread across all customers (and heaven forbid reduce Amazon's margins a tiny amount).

Maybe the executives can have catheters installed on themselves first since the opportunity cost of their going to the bathroom is so damn high.

You first, buddy.

I think you are looking at much higher rates. The question is not what it cost to them, but what they will make from that much time. They may pay the worker 20 dollars an hour, but that worker may be earning them 100 or 200 or even 1000 an hour, and that is Amazon's loss if they get an hour's break.

I am not an amazon employee, and this is standard in every industry ... the employee salary is just a small part of what it costs an employer. The corporate office, the worker's office (or warehouse), the management overhead etc., all add up to what it costs the company per hour of employee work and that is the bare minimum we should plan to donate (per above formula), and then what I mentioned is the profit side of things which would be even higher.

Given how much profit that employee means to the company, you think they could afford to treat them better lmao.

If Amazon lowers attrition I don't think those numbers are necessarily true. Experienced workers are more effective and mess up less than newbies.

The times I've experienced "prime membership" [0], Amazon generally offers "no rush shipping credits" of $1 towards "digital content" [1]. Obviously their cost basis for that is much lower than the face value. But assuming 50% discounting, 100% labor cost overhead, and using the 60 packages/hour figure in a sibling comment, only 20% of customers would have to choose the option for a worker to get a 15 minute break every 2 hours.

The popularity would also be a great indicator of how many customers resent their practices, before they simply disappear.

[0] free trials of course, because why would I pay to subject myself to a sunk cost fallacy?

[1] aka stuff that you're better off torrenting

Spread across 60 pick items an hour...

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