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Comment by systemerror | Hacker News Reader

Don't give money to amazon that is better spent on an amazingly efficient postal service. Amazon is subsidized by imaginary money until they put all their competition out of business(including USPS).

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My honest question is: If you pull shenanigans like this, isn't it actually making Amazon burn through said imaginary money, thus hastening its demise? The cost of delivering a potato has to be on the order of at least a couple dollars.

Amazon will close your account before you can impact their bottom line.

I think they let you (not YOU necessarily, but the proverbial you.) get away with stuff because they know your habits and you probably make more money for them than you realize.

I can almost guarantee that everyone mentioned in that blog post is a habitual Amazon user. They're all renewing Prime each year at full price and making a ton of regular purchases. The family has even turned on the FOMO by making Prime a family social network with social pressure to stay. I see it as a self-own, personally.

Edit: I'm taking part of this to the root of the thread

I don't think Amazon is losing money. It's really just that efficient.

E.g. an Amazon van rolls through my street multiple times a day. What is the marginal cost of them stopping at my house and dropping off a potato?

At your house it might be fractions of a cent.

At my house, it's a 140 mile round trip between the fulfillment center ("are you feeling fulfilled yet?") and the drop off location.

OTOH, there's likely more of "you" than there are of "me" ...

Assuming it's the US we're talking about, the federal minimum wage is $7.25, which means that if every worker involved is paid at the minimum wage, you incur a cent of labour costs every 4.97 person-seconds. AFAICT, most Amazon workers are paid substantially higher than the federal minimum wage. And that's just labour costs.

While Amazon is efficient, "fractions of a cent" is probably the wrong order of magnitude for even the most efficient order.

That's not even mentioning their additional overheads, like the cost of fuel for their idling van as they drop off your potato.

You might be 140 miles round trip to the nearest fulfilment centre, but you're almost certainly closer to your nearest neighbours who regularly buy stuff from Amazon, so the van is probably coming pretty close to you any way.

Can you explain? Amazon is wildly profitable, and while AWS is far higher margin than their retail businesses, everything I can find suggests their retail segment also has a healthy operating margin.

If you put all of the money Amazon as a whole has taken since it was founded in 1994 in a stack on the left, and all of the money Amazon as a whole has spent since then in a stack on the right, the stack on the left is slightly larger, but this has only been true for a couple of years now.

It's the difference in 1990s billionaires and 2020s billionaires. Bill Gates was so rich because he owned a lot of Microsoft shares and received profits from those shares as dividends. Jeff Bezos is so rich because he owns a lot of Amazon shares and people keep being willing to pay more and more for those shares so his notional net worth increases (AMZN has never paid a dividend).

Can you share numbers? What are Amazon’s margins?

Across the board they're about 11%, I believe, though retail seems to be about 5% despite being the bulk of revenue. AWS has far higher margins.

> his notional net worth increases (AMZN has never paid a dividend).

But that’s exactly the loophole: you can borrow for very cheap against this notional equity without incurring a cent in taxes (since divodends are never paid out)

It is worth pointing out that many executives cash out the old fashioned way: by selling stock. That includes Bezos.

https://www.secform4.com/insider-trading/1043298.htm

None of which supports the argument of the person I replied to that what you buy from them today is somehow "subsidised by imaginary money"

I hate USPS, and will not be doing anything to benefit them until they offer a way to limit my deliveries to once a month, and opt out of anything that has "or current resident"

At the very least they should charge more for bulk mail, not give out discounts.

Unfortunately bulk mail is the only thing paying the bills. That and being a last mile delivery service for Amazon.

Which is a totally valid reason to hate USPS.

The USPS is a government-run spam delivery service that there is no way to opt out of. Those of us who do banking and other administrative tasks online would be better off if the government shut it down completely, or better yet subsidized it slightly so it doesn't have to deliver spam to survive.

But as it is, I don't see any good reason to have any more respect for USPS than I do for any other spammer.

Yes, exactly. I wish the post office were subsidized and acted in the interests of the public. But it is not, and does not.

Doesn't seem like USPS is the spammer. They're Gmail. People send spam and USPS/Gmail delivers it.

No, it’s completely different. Gmail actively tries to prevent spam. If they catch you sending it, you will be banned, and they let individual users block whoever they want. A huge part of their product is automated spam filtering.

On the other hand, spam delivery is the business model of USPS. They actively and intentionally market and sell their services to spammers, and not surprisingly, give normal users no way to opt out.

There are mail forwarding services[0] that let you automatically filter out junk mail. Yes, they cost money, but at least you can accomplish your goal of opting out (or in) from receiving postal mail from certain senders.

  [0] E.g. https://www.usglobalmail.com/virtual-mailbox/

You will still get mail to your address though...

If your goal is to receive zero mail at your address, simply have all your email forwarded to this service and configure it to opt-out of all notifications.

Alternately, you can forward your mail to an entirely different address. (This is just a Gedankenexperiment; please don't spam strangers by forwarding your mail to them.)

A lot of mail is marked as do not forward

And junk/bulk rate mail is never forwarded.

Such mail is returned to the sender, which means you will never receive it, so problem solved.

It will still land in your mailbox at home, how would you never receive it?

In Canada, you can place a red dot (or write no unsolicited mail) on your mailbox and they will withhold delivering anything not directly addressed to you.

I was shocked when I moved to SF and found out there was no way to opt out of unaddressed mail (or "current resident").

In Finland AFAICT there's no bulk postal rate. Instead, paper spam is delivered thru mail slots by private services that hit all the buildings in the neighborhood and drop collections of paper spam. So, many people post a note on their door opting out from this stuff. (Ei mainoksia = No ads.) It must be saving absolutely huge amounts of paper.

Fun fact: in the U.S. it’s illegal to put anything but mail (delivered by USPS) in a mailbox or mail slot. USPS wants a monopoly on that paper spam.

But when you have to push a rotten fish thru someone's mail slot, the law be damned.

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