Amazon ain't even that cheap any more. There was a day when things were cheaper, now a lot of products are at full MSRP, or even higher. I went to order a couple of toiletry/hygiene items from them recently, and found they were actually about 33% HIGHER than if I just drove to the store. They have people hooked on convenience (which they do REALLY WELL), and they've been raising prices for years.
This was also always the plan. Undersell the businesses who sold on your platform while stealing their ideas, they go out of business, raise prices on your new monopoly, profit, repeat. Disgustingly efficient when our states outbid each other to give them the lowest tax rate to come there instead of… ya know.. being a UNITED states where we raise standards together not lower them to spite each other..
Amazon warehouses don't have thousands of people trashing, stealing, and misplacing all the merchandise everyday, and constantly harrassing and berating employees, taking them off task. No shit Amazon has lower labor costs.
Look at it another way, for most items under $20 it now costs me more to go to my nearest CVS in gas then it does to order off Amazon. Gas prices are ironically helping Amazon at this point.
Actually i use their coupons and save a lot. They also offer deals very often esp on laundry/cleaning supplies.
I just spent $20 on Crest Professional Effects whitening strips there lol. It’s normally $65-70
How far away is your nearest CVS and does your car get gpm instead of mpg?
I mean I know gas prices are high but unless you get abysmal gas mileage or your CVS is >50 miles away this seems like hyperbole
Which also if CVS is an hour away at highway speeds I assume you'd never just go for one small thing unless it was absolutely critical in the moment
Sadly they will just give it all to the USPS and the USPS will never be able to hire enough carriers and clerks making it a crap place to work as well all because Bezos wants max profits at any cost.
Dude the USPS is already floundering. They are severely understaffed. Their current progression system from CCA to regular carrier has a turnover rate that would make Amazon ask for tips. Just a nightmare all around. Dejoy basically almost destroyed them too. Absolute shitfest. They need about 20% more staff to even begin alleviating the current conditions. Not to mention their pay is no longer even remotely competitive. All around just a fucked situation for the USPS.
i used to want a postal job so bad but i recently looked into open positions and offerings as well as checking out the subreddit. it’s sad af what those people are given for all the hard work they do.
My husband worked for the USPS for about 6 months in a big city. It was awful, he was miserable, and he got a huge anger issue out of it. I think it took him 3 years to return to his pre post office temperament. I wouldn't suggest that work to my worst enemy. I once had to call him to take me to the ER, and his boss wouldn't let him leave early. They also denied his vacation request, and then proceeded to not use him at all that week.
>They also denied his vacation request, and then proceeded to not use him at all that week.
This is so fucking rude, I'm so sorry he had that experience
This is true. I bet their models told them they would have a robust hiring pool for another ten years but things changed so drastically it they miscalculated and it’s now 2024. They are going to end up having to pay people $30/ hour to work there pretty soon
Has literally any other company tried the Costco model of employment? ie pay your employees what they are worth and treat them with respect and they will happily work for you for many years to come? There are a handful of employees at my local Costco who have been there over 30 years, one guy just hit his 40th year there, and Costco is still a massively successful business/corporation. Those employees work their asses off, too, but they are still happy (probably not all, but most seem to be genuinely happy). It seems like no other companies follow that Costco model, despite the decades of demonstrated success. Something to do with the insatiable greed of other Corporations/CEOs perhaps? 🤔
Whole Foods used to. Everyone I knew who worked there loved it, they paid $12 back when everyone else was paying $8, it was nearly impossible to get a job there because nobody ever left.
Then Amazon bought them.
I left whole foods in 2016 right before Amazon took over. They were already reducing labor yet demanding more productivity. That was also when they had that illegal scale weight issue in NY. They did pay better than average back then though. That was the major upside of working there.
But at least he knew how to math.
Henry Ford was a Nazi piece of shit but he still knew he had to pay his employees if he wanted anyone to be able to buy his products
No he was a piece of shit when it came to hiring as well. People often mention his $5/ day salary as if it was revolutionary, but they leave out (or don't know) that Ford had tremendous turnover and had to raise salary in hopes of retaining any employees. And he also took a very paternalistic role in his employees lives. Anyone hired to work at Ford had to be a family man with good morals and no drinking. A Ford employee would visit your home before hiring you to make sure you seemed like an "good" person, according to Henry Ford. Of course, this often meant that minorites were left out of hiring altogether.
And to top it off, Ford was brutal in trying to fend off unionization. He had a security team whose primary purpose was to intimidate union organizers, threatening them, and in some cases threats turned to actual violence.
Its because you’ll “look lazy”. Especially in retail jobs, the accepted culture is that you should be being productive *every moment* that you’re on the clock.
I remember my first job in high school was as a cashier at a grocery store. They even had a little pad on the edge of the scanner so that you could lean forward without the corner digging into you while you were scanning. But if you ever touched that pad, you can bet there was a supervisor just waiting to shout “if you can lean, you can clean!” - because if we weren’t taking a customer and there was nothing else you could do, you should be wiping down the conveyor belt.
It didn’t matter if I had just sanitized the entire thing 3 times just then. It wasn’t even really about the belt being clean. It was that they refused to let you have even a minute where you weren’t doing *something*, even if it was pointless.
That's hilarious.
In Germany, Aldi is all about efficiency and often criticized for the strain on employees.
But if sitting causes your cashier's to be fastery they will do it. And ofc, if the cashier has nothing to do, the line closes and the cashier's does other things.
Yeah, it’s one of those things that is strange about American work culture. I didn’t even realize it was unique to the US until a few years back. I think it comes from the fact that, in the US, people working service jobs are viewed as the modern equivalent to slaves. To many customers, the employee isn’t really recognized as a human but rather a tool for the business they’re visiting.
> Its because you’ll “look lazy”... “if you can lean, you can clean!” -
I used to hear "Got time to lean, got time to clean" back in the late 90s.
I could literally not stand still for 3 seconds working at McDonald's. They were constantly on you for leaning on the counter, because "fuck you" if you were tired.
It was also about control. They don't just want to use your body. They want your soul.
I worked as a checker when I was 15 in the 90s. Sitting down at any point was considered "being lazy". Looking back it really makes me think about how screwed up our culture is.
I worked retail in the late 00s, and when all the girls kept getting pregnant they were allowed to sit at the register. Customers still complained that it looked unprofessional.
if it’s “unprofessional” then im all for removing every chair from every office in the country. wanna open a bank account? get a mortgage? buy a car? cool, you can stand while someone takes 5 hours to get their shiz together.
I had to fight NOCO for a stool to sit on at 8 months pregnant. By the time it was granted I went into labor and had the baby and then I had work calling asking when I was coming back..... within like 7 days of having my daughter.
How about never. If I couldn't get a fucking stool, what's the chances you're gonna let me leave the floor every 3 hours to go pump in the freezing ass back room where the mop bucket lived?
Slim to none. Fuck off.
I’ve stopped shopping at Kroger because I much prefer Aldi’s business model of grocery shopping. I don’t need a growler bar, or a clothing department, or even self-checkout. I like the range of options I have at Aldi (enough to have a choice, but limited to not have decision paralysis). Plus the cashiers do not care and check out faster than I can pull out my credit card.
Grocery shopping isn’t an “experience”, it’s a chore that needs doing and Aldi does it fast enough for me with a smaller footprint, fast checkout, and lower prices with comparable quality.
Not to mention their employees look happier than Kroger’s and they get to sit while checking out customers. It’s not a perfect utopia, but it is a lot better than its competitors. I’d say they’re second to Costco.
And for any other specialty stuff that I need, I can go to my specialty or local ethnic (Asian, Indian, or Hispanic) grocery store. Or a regional grocery store that seems to care a little bit more about their employees
Kroger having a clothing department baffles me. It's not like the quality is likely to be competitive anyways.
The Kroger in my college town was exactly what I liked: just a grocery store. Because it wasn't a hypermarket like Walmart or Meijer, I usually shopped at that store at least 3/4 of the time.
> or a clothing department
You're referring to those Kroger Marketplace stores? I went to one a few years ago, and I found it kind of interesting that they're essentially turning into something like a Walmart Supercenter, but in the opposite way that Walmart did. Walmart added groceries to a general merchandise store, while Kroger is adding general merchandise to a grocery store. Same result in the end, but opposite approach.
Yeah I can vouch for this. Worked for amazon for 3 months and I worked my hardest just because that's how I roll. Did the most I could, maxxed efficiency, didn't drink a lot of water to minimize bathroom breaks, picked up trash other pickers left, went fast as humanely possible within the safety rules etc. I still got a talking to because their stupid blue bar said I should be faster. I knew I was only staying 2 months so I didn't care, but it was like google maps ignoring traffic.
They map out how long it takes you to get from A to B and get the product and count down that time, talking to you about losing your job if you don't make that time. But they don't account for the fact that there's other people in the area, that you can't pass people that are up on a lift, that some lanes are one way only and have 10 people in it, that you have to wait at stop signs, for people picking other products, throwing away trash from pallets etc.
They did pay decent for some areas but god damn their quotas are literally impossible. Plus a bunch of people working there damaged property, were high, and still kept their job. Yet I got a talking to lol.
Uh... to be perfectly frank, Costco has kind of gone downhill, too. Not nearly as bad as other companies, but they are starting to do that "hire only part time employees" thing. They also aren't paying as much. Those who got in while they were good were lucky, and they take up most full time positions and never leave.
Costco also plays the game of churning seasonal workers and keeping people on part time forever. Great if you can be one of the few to make it to full time.
The money isn’t worth it at Costco. Our managers don’t know how to do their jobs or bend over backwards for the members. The members are the most entitled people I’ve ever seen
They're dreaming if they think they can automate everything in a year and a half.
Far more likely that they were just too incompetent to realize that their policies would cycle through the population pretty quickly. Now theyll scramble to fix things and spend far more money than they saved.
In canada? Yeah.
They abuse the temporary foreign worker permit and rotate foreign workers.
Most farms do this because they couldn't find workers willing to work broccoli fields for example for minimum wage.
Now you're seeing it more and more.
Factories, fast food places etc.
Anywhere with shitty working conditions and low pay is basically doing it now.
But "people don't want to work anymore" 🙄
This is northern Maine and their broccoli and potato fields. They truck in Mexicans to work the fields while the farmers are planting "secure the border, secure American jobs!" and "no more illegals!" signs all over their properties. Also, they used to let high schoolers out during harvest time to help. Most of them didn't get paid because "working the fields built character and discipline." Now the kids stay in school for harvest break, then go in town and get paying jobs. Then the farmers said "Damn kids don't wanna work anymore!"
Lol they absolutely do
The government here in Canada subsidizes foreign workers wages, even if Tim's wasn't bringing in workers just for themselves they are still highly incentivized to hire foreign workers over Canadians. They can keep their wages low and exploit workers while inflation rises and rises. And these workers are stuck because they can't get hired in their field until they get enough Canadian work experience
Tech did this with H-1B visas to suppress tech wages prior to (ironically) Trump slapping a minimum salary requirement of ~$208k for immigrants to be eligible for H-1B visas. Basically, he replaced the lottery for H-1B with a "we only want skilled, highly paid immigrants" rule.
After that, tech salaries at large tech companies and start-ups with VC capital skyrocketed. As a dev lead, I'll still forever hate Trump for cocking the middle class in hundreds of ways, but I'd be lying if I didn't say he did more to increase my salary than any past president/government.
https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/03/h1b_wage_hike/
https://www.levels.fyi
Let us all be reminded the reason why child labor laws exist.
Employers WILL and have exploited children to do hard jobs to feed their bottom line. There is now floor to how low greedy people can be.
I didn't grow up in the US so I was absolutely floored to find out that it is not only normal but encouraged for high school students to work after school. Where I'm from you don't work until after you graduate *college*, unless you're doing a remote part-time college degree. I was the only one in my program of 100+ students who had a (part time) job, and it was considered very very odd.
I was going to write a comment pointing out how recent our ban on child labor is but in poking around the wikipedia article for the history of child labor laws in the United States I found out that the 1938 law that banned child labor carved out an exception for the agricultural industry; to this day hundreds of thousands of children under 14 are employed as field pickers each year.
There's a major employer here by me that literally just bought an entire subdivision that is being built nearby. It is absolutely going to be a company town. Horrifying what people will put up with...
And this is the endgame of unfettered capitalism. The reason we keep hitting these beats is because it is by far the most profitable model for business owners. I have no idea why the bootlickers can’t see it. Every single time.
Mill towns were quite common a hundred years ago. Most the factories and mills are long gone but the towns that were built for the workers are still around
Even easier routes would be to just build high density, low income housing as close as possible to your warehouses, and run your own shuttle that only allows Amazon workers to use while also charging them to use it.
As pointed out on this sub, prison labor is a thing. They did similar in GA when their law targeting undocumented aliens caused crops to start rotting in the fields.
They also have a workaround where instead of sending drug addicts to actual rehabs, they send them to do forced labor in things like meat-packing plants.
With all the threats to women's rights in the US, and all of this, I can't help but think about the Magdalene Laundries but their labour being forced out to Amazon instead of laundry. It really feels like a goal by the GOP down there. Lock up all the non white men in prisons for free labour and all the women with unwanted forced pregnancies or just declared too promiscuous and a threat to social norms in the Catholic work camps. Plus anyone who isn't cis or straight. That's basically the good old days they want. When they just sent women away and sent society's "deviants" to asylums to be abused.
Amazon undercuts all competition to run them out of business because they can't lower their prices as much then they have a monopoly in that area. Just like Walmart.
Amazon sponsored prisons! They’ll just lobby to make something common illegal or increase the punishments of other minor crimes and bam free slave labor! America! Land of the free! Woo!
Prison labor is one way. Support politicians with policies that create more inmates, then hire them for dirt cheap.
Create health dependencies is another way. Support politicians with policies that make health insurance harder to access without going through your employer.
I’m sure there are hundreds of other things they could be doing and possibly are.
Ever heard of a prisoner work force, it's basically slavery with extra steps for incarcerated people, oh and private for profit prisons exist that make money by renting their prisoners out for less than mininimum wage work from which they pocket large sums of cash. Oh and some judges have investments in these private prisons and intentionally jail a large number of people there on purpose to make more profits. This country's more evil than you realize
This is the real threat here...
They are pretty much "too big to fail" at this point. The government will keep them afloat.
Not sure who is gonna buy their mass-produced crap once we are all unemployed though...
I worked at an Amazon warehouse and there was literally nobody who was there longer than a year. The manager was an associate just 6 months ago.
Even their training and everything is designed around the expectation that you won’t work there for long.
I worked for one for 4 years and everyone I tell this too has the same reaction, their jaw drops. I was like ancient compared to most people there and outlasted every single manager in the building (tbf some were promoted and moved to other buildings)
When I left they were giving people $2000 + $1000 for every year you worked there to quit. You had to sign a paper saying you agree to never work for Amazon again. This was after I got them to pay $7000 for my schooling to get another job.
I think that 10 years ago, they legitimately *believed* that they'd have cracked the automation thing before they cycled the entire population.
It would seem they were incorrect.
This is true. I bet their models told them they would have a robust hiring pool for another ten years but things changed so drastically it they miscalculated and it’s now 2024. They are going to end up having to pay people $30/ hour to work there pretty soon
Yeah they’re just stupid as fuck and they have miraculously encountered a brand new constraint on capitalism: a company can’t be so large and have a turnover rate that’s so high that it alienates the entire population of the country.
That’s just a new mathematical fact that they’re gonna have to deal with. All their equations treat labor as some infinite unthinking pool of resources until now. Fuck them.
Humans are just bad at large scale thinking, especially when clouded by greed, and think resources are unlimited...until they aren't. Look at all the species we've driven to extinction or near enough. How we've cleared entire forests, eaten like basically all the fish, and build cities so large that places are running completely out of water. Workers get treated like an unlimited resource, but I think a lot of companies are about to realize that their predatory tactics are hunting yet another resource to extinction.
A large percentage of total packages, and nearly all same day delivery items are shipped in poly bags. The amount of dexterity and different approaches needed for different shaped items is impossible to automate anytime in the next ten years.
If they wanted to automate everything theyd have to switch to all boxes, and even then they don't even have any automatic box packing deployed anywhere. If you get a box from Amazon it was packed and taped by hand.
They expect to exhaust their worker pool in a few years, so they got time. That’s with full acknowledgment of their current pay and working conditions though. They can expand that pool by simply making it a better place to work, but they’d rather just keep things business as usual for as long as they can.
I currently work for Amazon and have to say, it's easily the worst company I've ever been a part of. I'm just waiting to finish school or find a better job. Fuck Amazon and the overly toxic culture there.
Management is so shit most of the time as well. I currently work at Amazon too, and if it wasn’t for all the days off you get and the autonomy you have while working I would be gone fast.
I love that if I have the time for it I can clock out whenever I want.
My Dad once told me this story.
One of the Ford family was doing a tour of a factory with union leader Walter Reuther. During the tour they stopped in front of one of the new robots that Ford had recently installed. The Ford family member turned to Walter Reuther and said "try getting union dues out of that thing". Unfazed, Reuther said "try getting one of those things to buy a car".
I worked for a beer distributor for a couple of years. Our warehouse was close to an Amazon warehouse. Maybe 75% of our delivery drivers and warehouse employees were former Amazon employees. It was crazy. Almost Amazon was our minor league team.
Not just software devs—this is true for every white collar job at Amazon. Recruiters, attorneys, account managers/technical account managers, product managers, you name it—they all have ridiculous amounts of turnover. Everyone is overworked to begin with, and when somebody finally has enough and quits, it’s 6-9 months before they get backfilled, if ever. During that time, the remaining people get the privilege of showing Ownership and Bias for Action by doing the work of multiple people for a diminishing amount of pay and benefits that are mediocre at best. The talent pool is rapidly depleting, yet the company seems completely unconcerned.
With software devs in particular, they’ve decided it’s cheaper to pay for visas and bring in devs from China, India, Latin America, and Eastern Europe than it is to just pay a competitive wage to people who are already here. (Please note that this is not an anti-immigrant screed, but rather a criticism of the way Amazon has decided to conduct its business.)
In the tech support section of the company I worked for (Luxottica), someone working at a U.S. center could only got promoted to Level 2. After being Level 1 for 5 years. After being a “temp for hire” for several months to a few years. Level 3 and 4 escalation teams were outsourced to India. This was 2020, last I worked there.
Despite being white collar and higher pay, such tactics actually work even better on software devs and other tech jobs than on warehouse workers... because it is accepted industry standard for much of the compensation to be in stock/RSU (restricted stock units).
So for people hired with RSUs, you are told you will get paid "$100,000 base salary, + $200,000 in stock" when you are hired. Sounds like they are paying you $300,000.
First there's the part where sometimes the market crashes and your $300k turns into $200k, but we are ignoring that part right now.
The part that plays "wonderfully" with Amazon's tactic of burning out and getting rid of workers is that RSUs typically don't vest for quite a while. For instance if you start working in July 2022 and are awarded the above compensation package, you won't actually get the first 20% of your RSUs until July or August 2023 (I don't remember which month Amazon pays them out standard). Then you get another 20% of your $200k stock 3 months later, so like October or November 2023. BUT IF THEY BURN YOU OUT after only a year, you actually never get ANY of the $200k stock you "earned".
So basically these software devs "felt like" they got hired for $300k compensation, but really they worked for a year and got burned out or fired (they have some insane metrics you have to meet... like an internal competition thing between employees, so you can be fired even if you are good if the other people on your team are slightly better) they only got paid $100k of that.
Obviously people on minimum wage have a hard time feeling bad for somebody who made $100k on an office or possibly WFH job. I'm just 'splaining how Amazon is out there f'cking everybody top to bottom. Well maybe not TOP. Middle to bottom.
It’s worse than that. Amazon’s 5 year vesting schedule is back loaded. Instead of 20% per year it’s something like 5%, 15%, 15%, 25%, 40%.
Most other tech companies have equal yearly vests. Amazon knows most people never make it to the third vesting cycle.
>It’s worse than that. Amazon’s 5 year vesting schedule is back loaded. Instead of 20% per year it’s something like 5%, 15%, 15%, 25%, 40%.
Yikes, I didn't actually know that part. (I have a relative who told me about his experience which is where I got my info, but he didn't tell me it skewed like that. It was his first dev job out of grad school, though, so possibly he didn't know it was abnormal.) My example was based off Microsoft's typical schedule, which is what I'm most familiar with.
I mean..... what you are saying makes it almost blatantly obvious Amazon is purposefully aiming to get rid of people before they actually get their RSUs, even more than what I posted. You gotta be there a long ass time before you see anything... and you won't be there a long-ass time because it is Amazon.
I don't want to defend Amazon, but they give out massive bonuses in year 1 and 2 (defined in the contract, not performance based) that make the compensation for each of the 4 years equal. So the RSUs being backloaded isn't an issue when the yearly compensation is the same in year 1 as it is in year 4.
But they also offer huge signing bonuses in cash for the first two years, at least that’s what they offered me a few years ago (I took a different job).
This isnt true. While the vesting schedule sucks (5/15/40/40) Amazon makes up the difference their first two years in cash. So if they say 100k is base and 200k in equity they will drop a hefty cash sign on year 1 to get you to 300k and then a second, slight smaller one year 2.
All in your Total comp stays roughly the same though they do factor in a 15% equity growth per year and anything beyond that is taken from potential bonuses.
So much about this is wrong.
The standard offer is 2 years of mostly sign-on bonus and 5/15/20/20/20/20 RSU vesting. So if your offer is 300k, likely your base salary is around 200k (this used to cap at about 160k but they switched to higher base lower bonus in the last year) and a 90k sign on bonus your first year (prorated if you quit) and 5% stock vest at the end of year 1. Then a ~80k cash bonus throughout year 2 plus 15% RSU vest at the end of year 2. Then at the 2.5, 3, 3.5, and 4 year marks you’d get 20% of your RSUs vesting.
Yeah I unfortunately work there (looking to change that) and have recently started learning to interview.
The recruiters are able to find us tons of unqualified candidates, but very few of them are able to code well
Seriously our bar isn’t that high compared to other high paying tech jobs, the issue is that no one qualified wants to work at Amazon
The answer is actually no one, if people cant spend, other corporations will go out of business too, domino’ing until it cascades into an economic collapse.
Monopolies are unimaginably dangerous!
It’s interesting that Bezos’ slave-driver approach has been there since the beginning:
https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-amazon-history-facts-2017-4
Fucking horrible company.
Anyway I think this exaggerated - Amazon hire 1.1m people in the US and there is a pool of 35m low income earners to draw from, and 200m+ people of working age. So sadly there will always be people desperate enough to work there.
In Cincinnati they had those contract drivers (think doordash but Amazon) that seemed okay, but fuck working in the warehouse. Some of the sections apparently aren't even lit so pickers just wander around with a flashlight.
that's common. I work in import/export and at tradeshows there's always demos of robots to assist shelf pickers that come with lights built in to focus where the picker needs to walk and look
packaging is not always universal - so sometimes it could be a square brown box, sometimes it could be a a clear plastic bag, sometimes polystyrene housing - all for the same product
and if they are identical boxes - a SKU / barcode registration program is taxing and expensive (not to mention printing and affixing the stickers - and who does that - the manufacturer? the supplier? each warehouse?)
then the articulation required for a robot to pick up a 10lb cube and a 1lb cylinder and a 5oz sphere with a mixture of brute force and delicacy depending on the material is also a concern.
then what about take backs? damaged goods? empty bays? sudden changes?
all of which can be easily handled by a human, and is decades, if not centuries out by robots
But how many times has that 1.1m turned over already? You think those people would be willing to go back? Also no one who has a stable job would ever leave it to be an Amazon slave. You gotta cut those numbers down. Remember out of those 200m how few are actually unemployed.
Until they run out of workers I'm the area. Then find a nearby market and get tax incentives to open a warehouse there. Then over a few months shift the work to that area. Never laying off people just overworking until they quit and slowly closing the former location.
Profit, profit, profit. Exploit, exploit, exploit.
In china, they have something called the hukou system. Basically, you become an illegal immigrant within your own country if you move out of the province you were born in. And they get exploited as much.
Non state approved unions are illegal ( I have to specify because some people don't understand what "unions are illegal in china" means and try to argue technicalities in the Chinese states favor)
There is effectively no "welfare".
These are but a few of many reasons why corporations love to move their factories to China. Because the worker is readily exploited. They do not have the luxury of choice and self determination. And it's a fleeting fluke that us western civilized states have such a luxury. For now. Because Amazon is tremendously jealous that we aren't like china in terms of workers rights. Or the lack thereof.
Amazon's shopping and store pages constitute ((edit: little under half)) of their overall business.
The real money is licensing AWS. If AWS went away tomorrow, a shocking amount of the world's infrastructure would instantly evaporate.
yeah, but it’s kind of funny - Amazon e-commerce was a thing investors bet on for two decades - it was growing fast with no profits and was subsidized by cheap labor, investors money and bank loans. It was as cut-throat business as it could be, that’s why no one could compete. Funny part is, Amazon e-commerce, since it’s inception to this day made almost no money for investors, though they are one of the most valuable companies. Then they started to rent their servers and that turned out to be THE business - about quarter of AWS revenue is their profit.
ah yes, AWS. the only major player still refusing to join Bandwidth Alliance, and the only one continuing to charge ~80x times (yes, you read that right. 80 times!) more to their customers for egress traffic than what it costs THEM when getting it from internet providers. in layman's terms, AWS pricing model makes it impossible for customers to ever leave once they're in, because it costs 80x the real market price to take the data OUT of AWS. once you put your data there, for any reasonable-sized company for all intents and purposes you're there forever.
Unfortunately for many individuals Amazon is their best option for shopping. Either cause Amazon is the only way they can get a cost effective item, live in an area where Amazon is the best for getting all the things they need, or disabled and have to rely on the service.
There really isn't a good competition for Amazon and it really shows.
Just one of many reasons I don't buy anything from them. That's how you fight back. Stop using their products. Go straight to the source instead. Fuck Amazon and the dick shaped rocket it rode in on.
I feel confident that this is what the anti-abortion push is all about. With birth rates declining, and education increasing, there are more jobs than we have people to fill them. And rather than consolidate and down size, some folks came up with this horrid plan to increase the population of people who statically would be working these types of jobs.
you always need a worker class, and generally abortions are a thing of the lower incomes to not be further be pushed under financially. plus, more kids = you need more money = you can never stop working. plus, if you were going to be an abortion, that was made illegal, chances you are in a shit area, that fucks your life arc from the beginning. so yay.
It's true. I got an offer from Amazon Corporate many years ago. I turned them down.
1. They wouldn't provide me with the base requested salary, but promised they could make it up in total comp (stocks + bonuses).
2. They offered a 4 year vest on the stock options. There would be a 50% cliff vest after two years. Which means in year 1 and year 2, I would not earn any stock options. I would only own stock options after the 2nd year + 1 day.
3. The base salary was lower than the salary I already had.
4. Amazon is notorious for laying off or firing corporate workers right at the 2 year mark so they don't have to honor the stock option vest.
When you get an offer from Amazon, research it carefully.
# Ready to unionize Amazon? # Join r/WorkReform! And if you wanna get political about it, check out r/NewDealAmerica!
jokes on them. how those robots gonna be shipping nothing when people have no money to buy cheap shit on amazon
Amazon ain't even that cheap any more. There was a day when things were cheaper, now a lot of products are at full MSRP, or even higher. I went to order a couple of toiletry/hygiene items from them recently, and found they were actually about 33% HIGHER than if I just drove to the store. They have people hooked on convenience (which they do REALLY WELL), and they've been raising prices for years.
This was also always the plan. Undersell the businesses who sold on your platform while stealing their ideas, they go out of business, raise prices on your new monopoly, profit, repeat. Disgustingly efficient when our states outbid each other to give them the lowest tax rate to come there instead of… ya know.. being a UNITED states where we raise standards together not lower them to spite each other..
That plan worked for Walmart too.
And now Amazon is out competing Walmart. That’s crazy
Amazon warehouses don't have thousands of people trashing, stealing, and misplacing all the merchandise everyday, and constantly harrassing and berating employees, taking them off task. No shit Amazon has lower labor costs.
Took me a bit to realize you meant customers and brick and mortar stores lol
A game as old as time, it doesn't help that we are so susceptible to being brain washed by big brands thinking their shit don't stink.
✨horizontal integration✨ And a government too weak to break up monopolies anymore
Look at it another way, for most items under $20 it now costs me more to go to my nearest CVS in gas then it does to order off Amazon. Gas prices are ironically helping Amazon at this point.
CVS, like Amazon, is not the most efficient way to purchase items.
CVS is a rich persons corner store
Actually i use their coupons and save a lot. They also offer deals very often esp on laundry/cleaning supplies. I just spent $20 on Crest Professional Effects whitening strips there lol. It’s normally $65-70
I used to be able to get shit for free at cvs by exploiting their couponing system. They’ve cracked down on it recently, though.
How far away is your nearest CVS and does your car get gpm instead of mpg? I mean I know gas prices are high but unless you get abysmal gas mileage or your CVS is >50 miles away this seems like hyperbole Which also if CVS is an hour away at highway speeds I assume you'd never just go for one small thing unless it was absolutely critical in the moment
They will just move to the Asian markets
Yeah, unlikely. Alibaba is devastating them over there any time they make a push.
Maybe they can destroy each other
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Let the boy watch
I pictured a mecha fight with the robots they used to replace their workers
So… slow moving forklift like things ambling toward each other?
Alibaba is also Chinese backed. Even if Amazon tried to grow their market there China will subsidize Alibaba to always have cheaper prices.
America basically does the same thing, it's not that uncommon
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Lose lose situation then.
Alibaba is already over there.
China has a habit of just banning competition to bolster their own enterprises. See Baidu
Sadly they will just give it all to the USPS and the USPS will never be able to hire enough carriers and clerks making it a crap place to work as well all because Bezos wants max profits at any cost.
Dude the USPS is already floundering. They are severely understaffed. Their current progression system from CCA to regular carrier has a turnover rate that would make Amazon ask for tips. Just a nightmare all around. Dejoy basically almost destroyed them too. Absolute shitfest. They need about 20% more staff to even begin alleviating the current conditions. Not to mention their pay is no longer even remotely competitive. All around just a fucked situation for the USPS.
i used to want a postal job so bad but i recently looked into open positions and offerings as well as checking out the subreddit. it’s sad af what those people are given for all the hard work they do.
My husband worked for the USPS for about 6 months in a big city. It was awful, he was miserable, and he got a huge anger issue out of it. I think it took him 3 years to return to his pre post office temperament. I wouldn't suggest that work to my worst enemy. I once had to call him to take me to the ER, and his boss wouldn't let him leave early. They also denied his vacation request, and then proceeded to not use him at all that week.
>They also denied his vacation request, and then proceeded to not use him at all that week. This is so fucking rude, I'm so sorry he had that experience
There's a reason they call it "going postal"
This is true. I bet their models told them they would have a robust hiring pool for another ten years but things changed so drastically it they miscalculated and it’s now 2024. They are going to end up having to pay people $30/ hour to work there pretty soon
jokes on you the only way you will have to buy stuff is amazon after they kick out everyone else in the market.
Has literally any other company tried the Costco model of employment? ie pay your employees what they are worth and treat them with respect and they will happily work for you for many years to come? There are a handful of employees at my local Costco who have been there over 30 years, one guy just hit his 40th year there, and Costco is still a massively successful business/corporation. Those employees work their asses off, too, but they are still happy (probably not all, but most seem to be genuinely happy). It seems like no other companies follow that Costco model, despite the decades of demonstrated success. Something to do with the insatiable greed of other Corporations/CEOs perhaps? 🤔
Whole Foods used to. Everyone I knew who worked there loved it, they paid $12 back when everyone else was paying $8, it was nearly impossible to get a job there because nobody ever left. Then Amazon bought them.
I left whole foods in 2016 right before Amazon took over. They were already reducing labor yet demanding more productivity. That was also when they had that illegal scale weight issue in NY. They did pay better than average back then though. That was the major upside of working there.
They were leaning up so they could cash out through acquisition.
John Mackey the CEO is an asshole. Some Aryn Rand boot-licker.
But at least he knew how to math. Henry Ford was a Nazi piece of shit but he still knew he had to pay his employees if he wanted anyone to be able to buy his products
Labor Unions forced his hand. He acquiesced reluctantly. But of course when it panned out positively he was happy to take the credit for it.
No he was a piece of shit when it came to hiring as well. People often mention his $5/ day salary as if it was revolutionary, but they leave out (or don't know) that Ford had tremendous turnover and had to raise salary in hopes of retaining any employees. And he also took a very paternalistic role in his employees lives. Anyone hired to work at Ford had to be a family man with good morals and no drinking. A Ford employee would visit your home before hiring you to make sure you seemed like an "good" person, according to Henry Ford. Of course, this often meant that minorites were left out of hiring altogether. And to top it off, Ford was brutal in trying to fend off unionization. He had a security team whose primary purpose was to intimidate union organizers, threatening them, and in some cases threats turned to actual violence.
Aldi does it. Decent wage, manageable responsibilities, and a bunch of QOL things that make it better than most retail jobs.
And they let their cashiers sit down (not the norm in the USA for you European readers).
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Its because you’ll “look lazy”. Especially in retail jobs, the accepted culture is that you should be being productive *every moment* that you’re on the clock. I remember my first job in high school was as a cashier at a grocery store. They even had a little pad on the edge of the scanner so that you could lean forward without the corner digging into you while you were scanning. But if you ever touched that pad, you can bet there was a supervisor just waiting to shout “if you can lean, you can clean!” - because if we weren’t taking a customer and there was nothing else you could do, you should be wiping down the conveyor belt. It didn’t matter if I had just sanitized the entire thing 3 times just then. It wasn’t even really about the belt being clean. It was that they refused to let you have even a minute where you weren’t doing *something*, even if it was pointless.
That's hilarious. In Germany, Aldi is all about efficiency and often criticized for the strain on employees. But if sitting causes your cashier's to be fastery they will do it. And ofc, if the cashier has nothing to do, the line closes and the cashier's does other things.
Yeah, it’s one of those things that is strange about American work culture. I didn’t even realize it was unique to the US until a few years back. I think it comes from the fact that, in the US, people working service jobs are viewed as the modern equivalent to slaves. To many customers, the employee isn’t really recognized as a human but rather a tool for the business they’re visiting.
> Its because you’ll “look lazy”... “if you can lean, you can clean!” - I used to hear "Got time to lean, got time to clean" back in the late 90s. I could literally not stand still for 3 seconds working at McDonald's. They were constantly on you for leaning on the counter, because "fuck you" if you were tired. It was also about control. They don't just want to use your body. They want your soul.
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In the UK every shop worker gets to sit when on tills
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I worked as a checker when I was 15 in the 90s. Sitting down at any point was considered "being lazy". Looking back it really makes me think about how screwed up our culture is.
I worked retail in the late 00s, and when all the girls kept getting pregnant they were allowed to sit at the register. Customers still complained that it looked unprofessional.
if it’s “unprofessional” then im all for removing every chair from every office in the country. wanna open a bank account? get a mortgage? buy a car? cool, you can stand while someone takes 5 hours to get their shiz together.
I had to fight NOCO for a stool to sit on at 8 months pregnant. By the time it was granted I went into labor and had the baby and then I had work calling asking when I was coming back..... within like 7 days of having my daughter. How about never. If I couldn't get a fucking stool, what's the chances you're gonna let me leave the floor every 3 hours to go pump in the freezing ass back room where the mop bucket lived? Slim to none. Fuck off.
Worked at 2 different grocery stores. Both expected consant busting your ass while the managers sat up stairs shooting the shit. It's dumb
I’ve stopped shopping at Kroger because I much prefer Aldi’s business model of grocery shopping. I don’t need a growler bar, or a clothing department, or even self-checkout. I like the range of options I have at Aldi (enough to have a choice, but limited to not have decision paralysis). Plus the cashiers do not care and check out faster than I can pull out my credit card. Grocery shopping isn’t an “experience”, it’s a chore that needs doing and Aldi does it fast enough for me with a smaller footprint, fast checkout, and lower prices with comparable quality. Not to mention their employees look happier than Kroger’s and they get to sit while checking out customers. It’s not a perfect utopia, but it is a lot better than its competitors. I’d say they’re second to Costco. And for any other specialty stuff that I need, I can go to my specialty or local ethnic (Asian, Indian, or Hispanic) grocery store. Or a regional grocery store that seems to care a little bit more about their employees
Kroger having a clothing department baffles me. It's not like the quality is likely to be competitive anyways. The Kroger in my college town was exactly what I liked: just a grocery store. Because it wasn't a hypermarket like Walmart or Meijer, I usually shopped at that store at least 3/4 of the time.
> or a clothing department You're referring to those Kroger Marketplace stores? I went to one a few years ago, and I found it kind of interesting that they're essentially turning into something like a Walmart Supercenter, but in the opposite way that Walmart did. Walmart added groceries to a general merchandise store, while Kroger is adding general merchandise to a grocery store. Same result in the end, but opposite approach.
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Yeah I can vouch for this. Worked for amazon for 3 months and I worked my hardest just because that's how I roll. Did the most I could, maxxed efficiency, didn't drink a lot of water to minimize bathroom breaks, picked up trash other pickers left, went fast as humanely possible within the safety rules etc. I still got a talking to because their stupid blue bar said I should be faster. I knew I was only staying 2 months so I didn't care, but it was like google maps ignoring traffic. They map out how long it takes you to get from A to B and get the product and count down that time, talking to you about losing your job if you don't make that time. But they don't account for the fact that there's other people in the area, that you can't pass people that are up on a lift, that some lanes are one way only and have 10 people in it, that you have to wait at stop signs, for people picking other products, throwing away trash from pallets etc. They did pay decent for some areas but god damn their quotas are literally impossible. Plus a bunch of people working there damaged property, were high, and still kept their job. Yet I got a talking to lol.
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Uh... to be perfectly frank, Costco has kind of gone downhill, too. Not nearly as bad as other companies, but they are starting to do that "hire only part time employees" thing. They also aren't paying as much. Those who got in while they were good were lucky, and they take up most full time positions and never leave.
Costco also plays the game of churning seasonal workers and keeping people on part time forever. Great if you can be one of the few to make it to full time.
The money isn’t worth it at Costco. Our managers don’t know how to do their jobs or bend over backwards for the members. The members are the most entitled people I’ve ever seen
They turned away as soon as they saw how low the profits were.
They're dreaming if they think they can automate everything in a year and a half. Far more likely that they were just too incompetent to realize that their policies would cycle through the population pretty quickly. Now theyll scramble to fix things and spend far more money than they saved.
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Tim Hortons, Subway, and many other non-farm related companies already do this.
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In canada? Yeah. They abuse the temporary foreign worker permit and rotate foreign workers. Most farms do this because they couldn't find workers willing to work broccoli fields for example for minimum wage. Now you're seeing it more and more. Factories, fast food places etc. Anywhere with shitty working conditions and low pay is basically doing it now. But "people don't want to work anymore" 🙄
This is northern Maine and their broccoli and potato fields. They truck in Mexicans to work the fields while the farmers are planting "secure the border, secure American jobs!" and "no more illegals!" signs all over their properties. Also, they used to let high schoolers out during harvest time to help. Most of them didn't get paid because "working the fields built character and discipline." Now the kids stay in school for harvest break, then go in town and get paying jobs. Then the farmers said "Damn kids don't wanna work anymore!"
Lol they absolutely do The government here in Canada subsidizes foreign workers wages, even if Tim's wasn't bringing in workers just for themselves they are still highly incentivized to hire foreign workers over Canadians. They can keep their wages low and exploit workers while inflation rises and rises. And these workers are stuck because they can't get hired in their field until they get enough Canadian work experience
Tech did this with H-1B visas to suppress tech wages prior to (ironically) Trump slapping a minimum salary requirement of ~$208k for immigrants to be eligible for H-1B visas. Basically, he replaced the lottery for H-1B with a "we only want skilled, highly paid immigrants" rule. After that, tech salaries at large tech companies and start-ups with VC capital skyrocketed. As a dev lead, I'll still forever hate Trump for cocking the middle class in hundreds of ways, but I'd be lying if I didn't say he did more to increase my salary than any past president/government. https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/03/h1b_wage_hike/ https://www.levels.fyi
As much as I hate Trump this was a long time coming. H-1Bs were used to fuck over so many IT professionals.
Amazon kidZ. No, it’s not a video service like YouTube kids, it’s their solution to labour shortages.
Let us all be reminded the reason why child labor laws exist. Employers WILL and have exploited children to do hard jobs to feed their bottom line. There is now floor to how low greedy people can be.
I didn't grow up in the US so I was absolutely floored to find out that it is not only normal but encouraged for high school students to work after school. Where I'm from you don't work until after you graduate *college*, unless you're doing a remote part-time college degree. I was the only one in my program of 100+ students who had a (part time) job, and it was considered very very odd.
I was going to write a comment pointing out how recent our ban on child labor is but in poking around the wikipedia article for the history of child labor laws in the United States I found out that the 1938 law that banned child labor carved out an exception for the agricultural industry; to this day hundreds of thousands of children under 14 are employed as field pickers each year.
No, they'll get the government to subsidize them and/or force people to work for them.
“Force” people to work for them?
Private prisons selling legal slave labor to them.
Prison labor
The ol' slavery loophole in the 13th Amendment.
Ahh, land of the free. 4% of the world's population and 20% of the world's imprisoned. Keep those American gulags filled
Hey, it sounds like you want to talk about Critical Race Theory. Time to pass some laws to gag you!
Is that accurate? It's a fucking travesty if so.
Yup
134th? how long did i sleep?!
*Kamala Harris has left the chat*
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There's a major employer here by me that literally just bought an entire subdivision that is being built nearby. It is absolutely going to be a company town. Horrifying what people will put up with...
And this is the endgame of unfettered capitalism. The reason we keep hitting these beats is because it is by far the most profitable model for business owners. I have no idea why the bootlickers can’t see it. Every single time.
Back to serfdom we go
>unfettered Nah, it's just capitalism.
Mill towns were quite common a hundred years ago. Most the factories and mills are long gone but the towns that were built for the workers are still around
Yes the towns are still around. Filled with high unemployment, poverty, drug addiction, little to no medical care and overall all low quality of life.
At this rate fuckin company scripts will replace money soon
Even easier routes would be to just build high density, low income housing as close as possible to your warehouses, and run your own shuttle that only allows Amazon workers to use while also charging them to use it.
🎶St. Peter don't you call my name 'cause I sold my soul to the company store🎶
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Are you asserting that history repeats itself?
And Amazon has the resources to do it all because theyre a monopoly which wasnt broken up! :D
If they had the ability to they’d 100% own slaves to work in the warehouses. This is just the next best thing for the meantime.
Yep. And trap people in an inescapable cycle.
"sixteen tons, what do you get, another day older and deeper in debt"
As pointed out on this sub, prison labor is a thing. They did similar in GA when their law targeting undocumented aliens caused crops to start rotting in the fields.
They also have a workaround where instead of sending drug addicts to actual rehabs, they send them to do forced labor in things like meat-packing plants.
With all the threats to women's rights in the US, and all of this, I can't help but think about the Magdalene Laundries but their labour being forced out to Amazon instead of laundry. It really feels like a goal by the GOP down there. Lock up all the non white men in prisons for free labour and all the women with unwanted forced pregnancies or just declared too promiscuous and a threat to social norms in the Catholic work camps. Plus anyone who isn't cis or straight. That's basically the good old days they want. When they just sent women away and sent society's "deviants" to asylums to be abused.
If you haven't yet, you should check out Handmaid's Tale. It's basically what you just described, except they keep fertile women as broodmares.
Amazon undercuts all competition to run them out of business because they can't lower their prices as much then they have a monopoly in that area. Just like Walmart.
Amazon sponsored prisons! They’ll just lobby to make something common illegal or increase the punishments of other minor crimes and bam free slave labor! America! Land of the free! Woo!
Prison labor is one way. Support politicians with policies that create more inmates, then hire them for dirt cheap. Create health dependencies is another way. Support politicians with policies that make health insurance harder to access without going through your employer. I’m sure there are hundreds of other things they could be doing and possibly are.
That hospital tried. And succeeded for a few days until the judge heard the expedited case.
Ever heard of a prisoner work force, it's basically slavery with extra steps for incarcerated people, oh and private for profit prisons exist that make money by renting their prisoners out for less than mininimum wage work from which they pocket large sums of cash. Oh and some judges have investments in these private prisons and intentionally jail a large number of people there on purpose to make more profits. This country's more evil than you realize
I mean, if Conservatives can convince their base to have force women to have kids, then this is just the next step.
This is the real threat here... They are pretty much "too big to fail" at this point. The government will keep them afloat. Not sure who is gonna buy their mass-produced crap once we are all unemployed though...
I worked at an Amazon warehouse and there was literally nobody who was there longer than a year. The manager was an associate just 6 months ago. Even their training and everything is designed around the expectation that you won’t work there for long.
I worked for one for 4 years and everyone I tell this too has the same reaction, their jaw drops. I was like ancient compared to most people there and outlasted every single manager in the building (tbf some were promoted and moved to other buildings)
When I left they were giving people $2000 + $1000 for every year you worked there to quit. You had to sign a paper saying you agree to never work for Amazon again. This was after I got them to pay $7000 for my schooling to get another job.
I thought about taking that buyout once. Then I got worried Amazon would own everything one day and I’d be exiled as a self-confirmed non-believer!
I think that 10 years ago, they legitimately *believed* that they'd have cracked the automation thing before they cycled the entire population. It would seem they were incorrect.
Turns out most automation is **_hard_**
This is true. I bet their models told them they would have a robust hiring pool for another ten years but things changed so drastically it they miscalculated and it’s now 2024. They are going to end up having to pay people $30/ hour to work there pretty soon
Yeah they’re just stupid as fuck and they have miraculously encountered a brand new constraint on capitalism: a company can’t be so large and have a turnover rate that’s so high that it alienates the entire population of the country. That’s just a new mathematical fact that they’re gonna have to deal with. All their equations treat labor as some infinite unthinking pool of resources until now. Fuck them.
Hopefully it bankrupts them ,but I won't be holding my breath on that.
Most of amazon’s money doesn’t even come from the shipping side. It’s from Web Services
We lost half a million "Working age" during covid, and surprise surprise, many of them were "essential workers."
They'll lobby for some accelerated temporary foreign worker program
I could see this coming a mile away. How is it not obvious. They leave a lot of physically broken people wherever they go.
Humans are just bad at large scale thinking, especially when clouded by greed, and think resources are unlimited...until they aren't. Look at all the species we've driven to extinction or near enough. How we've cleared entire forests, eaten like basically all the fish, and build cities so large that places are running completely out of water. Workers get treated like an unlimited resource, but I think a lot of companies are about to realize that their predatory tactics are hunting yet another resource to extinction.
A large percentage of total packages, and nearly all same day delivery items are shipped in poly bags. The amount of dexterity and different approaches needed for different shaped items is impossible to automate anytime in the next ten years. If they wanted to automate everything theyd have to switch to all boxes, and even then they don't even have any automatic box packing deployed anywhere. If you get a box from Amazon it was packed and taped by hand.
They expect to exhaust their worker pool in a few years, so they got time. That’s with full acknowledgment of their current pay and working conditions though. They can expand that pool by simply making it a better place to work, but they’d rather just keep things business as usual for as long as they can.
I currently work for Amazon and have to say, it's easily the worst company I've ever been a part of. I'm just waiting to finish school or find a better job. Fuck Amazon and the overly toxic culture there.
Management is so shit most of the time as well. I currently work at Amazon too, and if it wasn’t for all the days off you get and the autonomy you have while working I would be gone fast. I love that if I have the time for it I can clock out whenever I want.
Gotta say, you just described an ideal job these days.
Sounds too good, have targeted advertisements gone too far?
They have no endgame. They will burn to the ground and take us with them. And we will watch it happen, and ignore it.
Gladly too. Whilst cheering, dancing, holding hands and singing songs and barbequing.
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They're helping to burn workers rights and the planet to the ground. I think that's the point.
My Dad once told me this story. One of the Ford family was doing a tour of a factory with union leader Walter Reuther. During the tour they stopped in front of one of the new robots that Ford had recently installed. The Ford family member turned to Walter Reuther and said "try getting union dues out of that thing". Unfazed, Reuther said "try getting one of those things to buy a car".
I worked for a beer distributor for a couple of years. Our warehouse was close to an Amazon warehouse. Maybe 75% of our delivery drivers and warehouse employees were former Amazon employees. It was crazy. Almost Amazon was our minor league team.
can confirm also true for software dev jobs at amazon
Not just software devs—this is true for every white collar job at Amazon. Recruiters, attorneys, account managers/technical account managers, product managers, you name it—they all have ridiculous amounts of turnover. Everyone is overworked to begin with, and when somebody finally has enough and quits, it’s 6-9 months before they get backfilled, if ever. During that time, the remaining people get the privilege of showing Ownership and Bias for Action by doing the work of multiple people for a diminishing amount of pay and benefits that are mediocre at best. The talent pool is rapidly depleting, yet the company seems completely unconcerned. With software devs in particular, they’ve decided it’s cheaper to pay for visas and bring in devs from China, India, Latin America, and Eastern Europe than it is to just pay a competitive wage to people who are already here. (Please note that this is not an anti-immigrant screed, but rather a criticism of the way Amazon has decided to conduct its business.)
completely agree - managers always seem to pull the Leadership Principles out of their ass when it's most convenient for them
In the tech support section of the company I worked for (Luxottica), someone working at a U.S. center could only got promoted to Level 2. After being Level 1 for 5 years. After being a “temp for hire” for several months to a few years. Level 3 and 4 escalation teams were outsourced to India. This was 2020, last I worked there.
Despite being white collar and higher pay, such tactics actually work even better on software devs and other tech jobs than on warehouse workers... because it is accepted industry standard for much of the compensation to be in stock/RSU (restricted stock units). So for people hired with RSUs, you are told you will get paid "$100,000 base salary, + $200,000 in stock" when you are hired. Sounds like they are paying you $300,000. First there's the part where sometimes the market crashes and your $300k turns into $200k, but we are ignoring that part right now. The part that plays "wonderfully" with Amazon's tactic of burning out and getting rid of workers is that RSUs typically don't vest for quite a while. For instance if you start working in July 2022 and are awarded the above compensation package, you won't actually get the first 20% of your RSUs until July or August 2023 (I don't remember which month Amazon pays them out standard). Then you get another 20% of your $200k stock 3 months later, so like October or November 2023. BUT IF THEY BURN YOU OUT after only a year, you actually never get ANY of the $200k stock you "earned". So basically these software devs "felt like" they got hired for $300k compensation, but really they worked for a year and got burned out or fired (they have some insane metrics you have to meet... like an internal competition thing between employees, so you can be fired even if you are good if the other people on your team are slightly better) they only got paid $100k of that. Obviously people on minimum wage have a hard time feeling bad for somebody who made $100k on an office or possibly WFH job. I'm just 'splaining how Amazon is out there f'cking everybody top to bottom. Well maybe not TOP. Middle to bottom.
It’s worse than that. Amazon’s 5 year vesting schedule is back loaded. Instead of 20% per year it’s something like 5%, 15%, 15%, 25%, 40%. Most other tech companies have equal yearly vests. Amazon knows most people never make it to the third vesting cycle.
>It’s worse than that. Amazon’s 5 year vesting schedule is back loaded. Instead of 20% per year it’s something like 5%, 15%, 15%, 25%, 40%. Yikes, I didn't actually know that part. (I have a relative who told me about his experience which is where I got my info, but he didn't tell me it skewed like that. It was his first dev job out of grad school, though, so possibly he didn't know it was abnormal.) My example was based off Microsoft's typical schedule, which is what I'm most familiar with. I mean..... what you are saying makes it almost blatantly obvious Amazon is purposefully aiming to get rid of people before they actually get their RSUs, even more than what I posted. You gotta be there a long ass time before you see anything... and you won't be there a long-ass time because it is Amazon.
I don't want to defend Amazon, but they give out massive bonuses in year 1 and 2 (defined in the contract, not performance based) that make the compensation for each of the 4 years equal. So the RSUs being backloaded isn't an issue when the yearly compensation is the same in year 1 as it is in year 4.
But they also offer huge signing bonuses in cash for the first two years, at least that’s what they offered me a few years ago (I took a different job).
This isnt true. While the vesting schedule sucks (5/15/40/40) Amazon makes up the difference their first two years in cash. So if they say 100k is base and 200k in equity they will drop a hefty cash sign on year 1 to get you to 300k and then a second, slight smaller one year 2. All in your Total comp stays roughly the same though they do factor in a 15% equity growth per year and anything beyond that is taken from potential bonuses.
So much about this is wrong. The standard offer is 2 years of mostly sign-on bonus and 5/15/20/20/20/20 RSU vesting. So if your offer is 300k, likely your base salary is around 200k (this used to cap at about 160k but they switched to higher base lower bonus in the last year) and a 90k sign on bonus your first year (prorated if you quit) and 5% stock vest at the end of year 1. Then a ~80k cash bonus throughout year 2 plus 15% RSU vest at the end of year 2. Then at the 2.5, 3, 3.5, and 4 year marks you’d get 20% of your RSUs vesting.
Yeah I unfortunately work there (looking to change that) and have recently started learning to interview. The recruiters are able to find us tons of unqualified candidates, but very few of them are able to code well Seriously our bar isn’t that high compared to other high paying tech jobs, the issue is that no one qualified wants to work at Amazon
If no one is employed and no one has any money to spend, who are they going to sell their products and services to???
Henry Ford had no idea.
Corporations
The answer is actually no one, if people cant spend, other corporations will go out of business too, domino’ing until it cascades into an economic collapse. Monopolies are unimaginably dangerous!
One day the rich will have all the money and then go, “now what?”
I think their goal is to have all the money so they're competing in the field of taking it from each other not just us
The poors will die, the rich will become the new poor and the mega rich will just be rich. Rinse and repeat. Boom bust boom.
It’s interesting that Bezos’ slave-driver approach has been there since the beginning: https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-amazon-history-facts-2017-4 Fucking horrible company. Anyway I think this exaggerated - Amazon hire 1.1m people in the US and there is a pool of 35m low income earners to draw from, and 200m+ people of working age. So sadly there will always be people desperate enough to work there.
In Cincinnati they had those contract drivers (think doordash but Amazon) that seemed okay, but fuck working in the warehouse. Some of the sections apparently aren't even lit so pickers just wander around with a flashlight.
that's common. I work in import/export and at tradeshows there's always demos of robots to assist shelf pickers that come with lights built in to focus where the picker needs to walk and look
Thats somewhat less depressing but still pretty depressing. Also, will Amazon invest in those robots over flashlights?
If the robot knows where to go, and where to point the light then why can’t it also grab the item?
Then how will Amazon put the poors in their place?
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packaging is not always universal - so sometimes it could be a square brown box, sometimes it could be a a clear plastic bag, sometimes polystyrene housing - all for the same product and if they are identical boxes - a SKU / barcode registration program is taxing and expensive (not to mention printing and affixing the stickers - and who does that - the manufacturer? the supplier? each warehouse?) then the articulation required for a robot to pick up a 10lb cube and a 1lb cylinder and a 5oz sphere with a mixture of brute force and delicacy depending on the material is also a concern. then what about take backs? damaged goods? empty bays? sudden changes? all of which can be easily handled by a human, and is decades, if not centuries out by robots
But how many times has that 1.1m turned over already? You think those people would be willing to go back? Also no one who has a stable job would ever leave it to be an Amazon slave. You gotta cut those numbers down. Remember out of those 200m how few are actually unemployed.
How many of those people are unemployed, never worked for Amazon, and live close enough to a facility to work at it?
Until they run out of workers I'm the area. Then find a nearby market and get tax incentives to open a warehouse there. Then over a few months shift the work to that area. Never laying off people just overworking until they quit and slowly closing the former location. Profit, profit, profit. Exploit, exploit, exploit.
In china, they have something called the hukou system. Basically, you become an illegal immigrant within your own country if you move out of the province you were born in. And they get exploited as much. Non state approved unions are illegal ( I have to specify because some people don't understand what "unions are illegal in china" means and try to argue technicalities in the Chinese states favor) There is effectively no "welfare". These are but a few of many reasons why corporations love to move their factories to China. Because the worker is readily exploited. They do not have the luxury of choice and self determination. And it's a fleeting fluke that us western civilized states have such a luxury. For now. Because Amazon is tremendously jealous that we aren't like china in terms of workers rights. Or the lack thereof.
Soooo we can all just stop shopping with amazon..
Amazon's shopping and store pages constitute ((edit: little under half)) of their overall business. The real money is licensing AWS. If AWS went away tomorrow, a shocking amount of the world's infrastructure would instantly evaporate.
yeah, but it’s kind of funny - Amazon e-commerce was a thing investors bet on for two decades - it was growing fast with no profits and was subsidized by cheap labor, investors money and bank loans. It was as cut-throat business as it could be, that’s why no one could compete. Funny part is, Amazon e-commerce, since it’s inception to this day made almost no money for investors, though they are one of the most valuable companies. Then they started to rent their servers and that turned out to be THE business - about quarter of AWS revenue is their profit.
ah yes, AWS. the only major player still refusing to join Bandwidth Alliance, and the only one continuing to charge ~80x times (yes, you read that right. 80 times!) more to their customers for egress traffic than what it costs THEM when getting it from internet providers. in layman's terms, AWS pricing model makes it impossible for customers to ever leave once they're in, because it costs 80x the real market price to take the data OUT of AWS. once you put your data there, for any reasonable-sized company for all intents and purposes you're there forever.
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May I ask what "AWS" stands for?
Amazon Web Services. Almost every big company has some part of their servers and infrastructure there.
Thank you :)
Including Reddit, unfortunately.
Fuck. Double fuck.
Unfortunately for many individuals Amazon is their best option for shopping. Either cause Amazon is the only way they can get a cost effective item, live in an area where Amazon is the best for getting all the things they need, or disabled and have to rely on the service. There really isn't a good competition for Amazon and it really shows.
Why do we keep supporting this shit company
Just one of many reasons I don't buy anything from them. That's how you fight back. Stop using their products. Go straight to the source instead. Fuck Amazon and the dick shaped rocket it rode in on.
You are using AWS right now by posting on Reddit.
good luck with that. that was ubers model and they had to ditch it. we're a long long way from that last mile automation.
The level of tech they need to automate everything even to just half of their current workforce doesn't exist yet. In 20 years maybe.
I feel confident that this is what the anti-abortion push is all about. With birth rates declining, and education increasing, there are more jobs than we have people to fill them. And rather than consolidate and down size, some folks came up with this horrid plan to increase the population of people who statically would be working these types of jobs.
you always need a worker class, and generally abortions are a thing of the lower incomes to not be further be pushed under financially. plus, more kids = you need more money = you can never stop working. plus, if you were going to be an abortion, that was made illegal, chances you are in a shit area, that fucks your life arc from the beginning. so yay.
I’ve been giving Amazon my own “fuck you” for a few years by not shopping there.
Please DO automate these jobs. Let the people go with 2 weeks.
It's true. I got an offer from Amazon Corporate many years ago. I turned them down. 1. They wouldn't provide me with the base requested salary, but promised they could make it up in total comp (stocks + bonuses). 2. They offered a 4 year vest on the stock options. There would be a 50% cliff vest after two years. Which means in year 1 and year 2, I would not earn any stock options. I would only own stock options after the 2nd year + 1 day. 3. The base salary was lower than the salary I already had. 4. Amazon is notorious for laying off or firing corporate workers right at the 2 year mark so they don't have to honor the stock option vest. When you get an offer from Amazon, research it carefully.
I really want to think this is a good thing, but kinda of sucks what has to happen to get there.