Comment by theVirginian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by theVirginian | Hacker News Reader

Sabotaging Customers: I have no reason to believe that they would ever sabotage me.

Restricting and Shafting Customers: I have never had a problem with my kindle or any other media from Amazon. If I ever do I'm sure I can find an alternative source in a matter of minutes.

Censorship: They are Amazon's servers and it is their right to enforce their rules on them. If Wikileaks believes that they were unlawfully cut off then they should take Amazon to court.

Exploiting workers mercilessly: good luck finding a retailer that has not done this at some point. This is an unfortunate reality as far as I am concerned and while I support fighting for better worker's conditions, I see no reason that refusing to buy through Amazon helps the problem.

Shafting others in the publishing world: I'm not a publisher, their industry is none of my concern. If Amazon is so bad for them then I'm sure there is another way they can sell their books.

Dodging Taxes: The government should close tax loopholes. I don't blame Amazon for being competitive. If it's legal it's fair as far as I'm concerned.

Other reasons: These all seem to be trivial to me though I don't feel like typing out the reasons why.

I've never had a problem with Amazon particularly and this article seems rather strange to me.

"Sabotaging Customers:"

"I've never had a problem with Amazon particularly and this article seems rather strange to me."

I had a problem with Amazon once, they repeatedly messed up a delivery. I emailed Jeff Bezos, got a call the next day from his office and my problem was solved.

Further, Amazon's solution to workers is going to be robotics: the elimination of as many manual labor jobs as possible. This is something Walmart will not be able to pull off easily because their workers are out front, higher profile; Amazon's workers can disappear through firings and few will notice. At a minimum Amazon is going to leverage robotics to drastically stretch (reduce) how many workers they have per dollar of sales.

In ten years Stallman will be telling us not to buy from Amazon because they use robots instead of human labor.

Which is silly, because instead of putting people to work doing meaningless jobs that can be done by robots, we should be focusing more on how we can take advantage of that efficiency to make life more meaningful as a society.

> This is something Walmart will not be able to pull off easily because their workers are out front, higher profile

Even then, they're cutting staff by increasing the number of self-checkout lanes. You still have to have somebody supervising, but you can just have one person watching 6-8 lanes.

At my local Walmart, the self-checkout is far more convenient than the regular lanes. They have more self-checkout lanes open than regular lanes, and people tend to scan their stuff and get out much faster than the cashiers would (seriously, the regular lanes move so slow...). I never use the regular lanes anymore, because they're always so busy compared to the self-checkouts.

I think the main thing holding Walmart back from further mechanization is that their aisles still have to be human-traversable. Amazon can use really efficient layouts when converting their warehouses to 100% machine-stocked because then there will be no reason for a human to ever walk down the aisles. At Walmart, customers still have to make their way through the aisles, and they have to be laid out to a) allow humans to walk through and take stuff off the shelves and b) arrange items in order to maximize purchases (e.g. put the milk in the back, impulse items at the checkouts, etc.).

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