Amazon has had to raise warehouse pay [1 [2], definitely screams labor shortage to me. This makes sense considering structural demographics and a shrinking participation rate in the US labor force [3]. I would not have expected Amazon to just ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and say "we are all out of workers"; they have to compete like everyone else for a shrinking pool of folks.

They have run out of folks to abuse at the previous price point. The wage floor will continue to rise. Even Bank of America is raising wages for tellers [4]. Demographics are destiny, all that jazz.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-18/amazon-bo... | https://archive.today/5ODb8

[2] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/amazon-wage-incre... | https://archive.today/fY28B

[3] https://www.ebri.org/retirement/content/new-research-of-u.s.... ("A new research report published today by the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) taking a historical look at labor force participation and employment data in the United States found the prime working age population (25–64 years old) has significantly fallen and is being filled by older workers. At the same time, the labor force participation rate of those ages 65 or older has not reached its pre-pandemic level, while that of the prime working age population has reached that level")

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41500201 ("Bank of America is pledging to pay its bank tellers and other hourly workers at least $24 per hour starting in October. The company says that this pay raise, from $23 per hour currently, will affect “thousands” of its 212,000 employees. The wage increase will particularly affect tellers and other customer-facing employees, such as call-center workers.")

(~10K Boomers retire per day, 3.6M per year; ~1.8M people 55+ die every year in the US, ~5k per day; roughly half of which are in the labor force, so ~2.5k workers actively in a job die each day; ~20% of the population is retired today, in 10 years that'll go to ~30%)

This subthread is not about RTO, it's about Amazon's general culture of insatiable attrition.