Amazon to close Quebec facilities, insists it's not because of new union | Hacker News Reader

Amazon to close Quebec facilities, insists it's not because of new union

cbc.ca

48 pointscf100clunk21 comments

I wonder if this is part of a wider trend of Amazon having difficult with its first party delivery network outside the US. They started doing first party deliveries here over 2023/2024 and while that worked well during the year, it really didn't over the Christmas period - delivery windows got much longer than they did last Christmas so for all of December even with Prime you were looking at delivery estimates several weeks away, and I've noticed in January an increase in the number of Amazon deliveries being delivered by third party shipping companies again.

You might be surprised, but if you look at their published quarter remarks even as recent as 2023, Amazon had a operating loss of $0.1 billion in Q3 2023 for the International Segment. Amazon is a success in the USA mostly.

AWS of course is a different story.

Old but still relevant: https://qz.com/1196193/amazon-amzn-is-struggling-to-duplicat...

In the US this would hardly be news, but I wonder if Canada could do something about this. AFAIK their labor laws are enforced and a bit stricter.

That's brutal.

Canning 1800 people not because they were bad at their jobs or for any economic factors but as collective punishment for just 200 people joining a union.

Welcome to the oligarchy I guess.

Unionization and the threat of collective bargaining (and other workers’ rights) are economic factors.

At the same time there is nothing sold at Amazon that you can't find somewhere else. And probably will also not be a fake.

> And probably will also not be a fake.

Happened to me twice with usb drives. Nowadays i only buy usb flash drives and sd/microsd cards from brick and mortar stores.

Unironically the local grocery store has great deals on high quality (kioxia) usb3 flash drives. Better prices than specialised stores.

Amazon has a lot of very niche parts that you can only find on Aliexpress and by waiting 3 months.

And every time I tried I noticed its a seller, with an address, sometimes out of the first floor of a Pub somewhere in the UK, and Amazon will wash their hands out of it when the product turns out to be crap.

I found those are often on ebay with 2-3 day shipping sometimes. Same product image and everything. Usually a few bucks cheaper than the same item on amazon.

Maybe works for the US, but eBay shipping to Canada tend to ridiculously overpriced...

There are basically two flavors of it on ebay. You could opt for free shipping from china, pay substantially less, but wait a month. Or you pay a little more in product cost for free shipping from someone who ordered these goods bulk from china and now ships them out of Van Nuys. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are Canada based sellers like this as well.

Yeah I’ve sometimes even seen the same user on HN expresing a desire to cut Amazon down to size and then the very next week bemoan some layoff or closure.

Seems like it would save a lot of stress, and be less schizophrenic, to just buy things elsewhere.

Sure, an old school grassroots boycott can theoretically work, but talking about it in this context is a little like considering 'GoFundMe' fundraising campaigns as a replacement for a functional medical system.

Laws should be enacted and enforced. Personal boycotts are not a replacement for government.

Laws pushed through… based on what political will?

Legislators, the general population, regulators, etc., have finite amounts of time, energy, and determination.

The laws already exist. Antitrust suits would do a very good job of effecting change here.

'and enforced.'

Temu is the new Amazon, same quality and real free shipping, it also sends a single package.

Sorry, but there's a roughly zero percent chance that Amazon (a company who loves money, as a reminder) decided to close operations in a major city purely out of spite.

Either it was already unprofitable, or was going to become unprofitable after the labor negotiations.

Closing up all facilities in the only city with a unionized workforce isn't something I would call spite. Example-setting is what springs to mind. A company that loves money sure wouldn't love a trend of spending more of it.

And I don't live in mansion because I'm modest, not because I'm poor ;)

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