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Comment by dionidium | Hacker News Reader

Your definition of fair and square is weird to me. If other companies pay their employees more than Amazon, then it must mean that they think they gain some competitive advantage from that. If that turns out not to be true, then, assuming they're a US company, they operate in the same legal climate as Amazon and can pay their employees Amazon-scale rates rather than shutdown. If they do that and still lose, then your argument seems to fall apart.

Look, Prime is genius, their prices are ridiculously low, their return policy is more than generous, and as long as their shareholders are happy to subsidize me, the consumer, I'll probably never get enough.

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As a happy Amazon customer: That line is bullshit. Employment law exists for a reason, we don't just accept "oh, that's what the market will bear" for things like unsafe working conditions or workplace sexual harrassment.

Europeans feel that underpaying your employees to the point where they rely on welfare programs to subsidize their paycheck is not only wrong (that's fine, life's not fair) but distorted and not-free-market. I have to agree with them on the distortion part.

Just to bring things back to the article in question ... this law being passed has nothing to do with fair labour pay or practice.

It just makes sure that customers aren't allowed to get 5 percent discounts and free shipping.

I was careful to say, "assuming they're a US company," because I was trying to point out that, yes, employment law exists for a reason, but Amazon's competitors operate under the same employment laws as Amazon. In fact, I said this explicitly.

Edit: Maybe you're trying to say that Amazon's competitors pay their employees more than Amazon because they have bigger hearts and are willing to crash their businesses before paying (legal, but unfair) low wages. That's a pretty big claim that requires some evidence. I think it's more likely that they are losing for other reasons.

Well, Amazon's French competitors have to comply with French labor law. So there's a mismatch and market distortion there. If they don't want to change their labor law, you can see why they'd take other, ameliorative measures, even if banning low prices seems silly.

At least Amazon can still compete on service and convenience, which are their strengths anyways.

I'm not even saying I agree with labor law in France, I can just see, things being what they are, why this is more reasonable than it looks for them.

Actually, it seems that amazon has 5 warehouses in France, which it ships from and which have to comply with French labor laws. The technology is probably still mostly developed in the U.S, but those workers aren't the ones we're talking about here.

Speak for yourself @jbooth, I'm opposed to government interference in the employment market.

When haven't they? Ever heard of Lewis Hine? The Factory Acts?

When haven't hasn't who done what? Did you somehow interpret my comment imply that I thought there wasn't government interference in employment markets? silly billy.

And "hard working strivers" to borrow a line from David Cameron don't like their taxes subsidizing tax dodging foreign companies.

And given the Poujadist nature of french society you can add an order of magnitude at least to how this is considered in France.

> we don't just accept "oh, that's what the market will bear" for things like unsafe working conditions or workplace sexual harrassment.

I would.

And why is that?

Because he's a white male at a non-physical job, presumably. Pretty brave of him.

I would think the other Amazon markets are subsidising the books, rather than the shareholder. Does free market theory expect bookshop competition to be between bookshops, homogeneous, or heterogeneous, between bookshops and consumer electronics shops?

I was referring to the fact that, despite soaring revenues, Amazon is basically running a break-even business and its shareholders are consistently OK with this (i.e. they aren't demanding that Amazon try harder to turn revenue into profit).

This, plus great customer service and extremely popular/convenient services like Prime are probably the actual reason that Amazon is beating everyone else. The guy I was responding to is bringing his established beliefs about fair labor to a story that isn't about that, in other words.

See here: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-a-long-view-...

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