Hacker News Reader

Hire patsies. Motivate them by telling them they’re entrepreneurs. Every time somebody notices, act really shocked and offended, smack your patsy around (just the one they know about), coddle the customer (just the one who noticed). Bribe politicians to look the other way.

View on HN

This is what they do with their logistics companies. Almost every Amazon delivery employee, driving an Amazon van, works for a "independent logistics contractor", and the rotate them every 2 years or so as the abuse becomes apparent.

It's far from unique to amazon, though. The Microsoft employee/contractor decision in the 90s made it socially acceptable to treat contractors like shit, and it's been downhill since then.

Hmmm...contractors have a contract. Employees don't even get that, and half the pay.

End result: make a few grand. Or are you saying $AMZN does this at scale across every category? Hmm.. yikes.

Have you seen the Amazon storefront recently? It's the world's biggest scam, valued at 1.86 trillion USD.

The patsies are the amazon marketplace sellers. The public and regulars have to play wack-a-mole on the thousands of disposable marketplace sellers and Amazon can act shocked shocked every time any particular marketplace seller is found to be a fraud.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com