About 6 years ago I ordered a tv on Amazon, it was going to be shipped out and delivered in about a week.
About an hour later I got a phone a call with a thick accented voice – "John, John, are you home?"
"Who is this?"
"I got your TV, we can come over right now."
Sure enough they pulled up with their van and I got my TV about two hours after I ordered. Unknown to me I had ordered it from a Hasidic run company just down the street from my home in Brooklyn.
All other things being equal, if 2hr delivery happened to me I'd at least be tossing referrals around if not being a return customer [maybe they sell only TVs and I only needed the one].
They probably were able to save money by delivering it directly, instead of taking it to a postal office to ship it which probably would have been more work anyway.
This is not necessarily true. Some sellers can request disbursement at any time. For a breakdown of when Amazon pays sellers, see [0].
In this case, the only delay is the 7 day holding period after the latest possible delivery date.
For example, if you sell and deliver a product on Jan 1st, you may be able to disburse the funds as soon as the 8th.
However! This example does not hold for the situation described by the GP because no tracking information can be provided to Amazon. In which case, the longest possible delivery period in the shipping method selected will be used.
More importantly, what the seller did as described by GP is big liability, for two reasons:
1. Phone numbers should never, ever, be used to contact the customer directly. They are for the seller to give to the carrier. This is a violation of Amazon's ToS.
2. Sellers should never, ever, deliver directly to buyers. Not only will this hurt their valid tracking rate metric, but it also makes them a very easy target for item not received cases as there is no proof that the item was delivered. The only recourse in a case like this would be through small claims court.
And on a much more minor note, it's unprofessional to visit a buyer in person. Amazon is not eBay.
Admittedly I did not think about the proof of delivery aspect. Definitely would cause issues. Although I imagine it could be mitigated by forcing the person to click "I accept delivery" on their Amazon account when you meet up, that way the retailer knows it is actually the person in question.
A lot of assumptions there. Why is delivery from the he vendor unprofessional and unreliable, compared to Amazon who hires anyone off the street as independent contractors to handle deliveries?
It's a very oligopolistic view to say only Amazon and a few big companies are trustworthy logistics providers.
They can still use the same tracking mechanisms, I mean when I order from the pizza place, they don't contract it out, so why should I care of my amazon seller does?
For orders over 10 USD, Amazon requires a verifiable tracking number from one of the major carrier services. (It's possible to "ship" an order without a tracking number, but the seller takes a hit to their account metrics, and Amazon will eventually freeze their account for review).
This is so they can verify you actually shipped the package, and verify it was delivered within the fulfillment promise date range, ie. if you paid for 2 day shipping or whatever.
There are some sellers that have been approved for self-delivery of packages, which are not trackable. In these cases, they usually forfeit all rights to dispute non-delivery claims and more. So, it's pretty risky for the seller.
Speaking of which: Amazon (and ebay, too) had recently started using a UK-based service called Yodel.
Last time Yodel had delivered a parcel of $50 to my door (marking it as delivered), which obviously got stolen. You can’t call Yodel - their line is always busy, and the line is not a free number.
Yodel had done that regularly to me, but I could never contact them or do anything about my delivery, since their customer service is horrendous.
Is there any way to set it up in Amazon (or ebay, too) so that their fulfillment never uses a certain delivery brand?
>Is there any way to set it up in Amazon (or ebay, too) so that their fulfillment never uses a certain delivery brand?
Amazon support was able to do this for me. They also CC:d me on a really strongly worded email to the delivery company, which I found really surprising.
This was one of the euro amazons with european support staff.
Did it actually work? Did they actually stop using that delivery company for your packages (and is the company common enough for this to not be random chance)?
> Is there any way to set it up in Amazon (or ebay, too) so that their fulfillment never uses a certain delivery brand?
No, unfortunately not. Well, unless you're open to moving outside of Yodel's delivery radius.
eBay has no fulfillment network, so you can reach out to the seller and ask for a different shipping method. You should expect to be asked to cover the cost difference though.
You can also do this on Amazon as well, just make sure that the product you're buying says "ships and sold by XYZ". Send them a message prior to ordering and they'll let you know if they can accommodate.
The risk here is that the customer commits fraud by saying they did not receive the TV. Amazon may side with the customer and refund the money; but the merchant should still be able to file a small claims lawsuit or maybe even a police report.
Fair enough. I am one of those few sellers and I tend to assume it's more commonplace than it is.
In any case, I don't really understand the desire for instant disbursements. Certainly you eliminate the risk of Amazon carrying a larger balance than necessary, and in rare cash crunch situations it may rescue the day... But beyond that, why is it so desireable?
For most businesses at scale, cash flow is a gating factor for growth and profitability. This is why businesses always try to get cash on delivery, but pay their vendors Net 60.
not every order will show up on the next payment though; to my knowledge, they can be delayed until some amount of time after the order is placed or after it's arrived
Amazon seller here. Amazon doesn't make funds available for disbursement until 7 days after delivery. At that point funds are available for disbursement, but they aren't necessarily disbursed. Seller accounts created before 2011 have what are called daily disbursements: the seller has a button they can click once every 24 hours that will disburse all available funds. Most sellers accounts opened since then have bi-weekly disbursements, though, so all available funds get disbursed every 14 days.
God I hate the word bi-weekly; if you hadn't specified 14 days I would've thought it was twice a week. "bi-weekly" is never the right word to use because you always have to add additional information that makes it redundant.
For some reason the bi-weekly vs. semi-weekly thing doesn't confuse me, but I take your point and the dictionary seems to agree that it can mean either every two weeks or twice a week.
It confuses me because I regularly hear "bi-weekly" to mean "twice per week". I don't think I've ever heard someone say semi-weekly. Usually you can make a good guess of the intended meaning from context, but the two time intervals are similar enough that it's frequently ambiguous.
I guess I’m just generalizing semi-weekly from semi-annual. Do people actual my use the term bi-weekly to mean twice a week? I understand confusing bi-annual to mean twice a year because years can be evenly split in two and bi-annual would thus mean every six months. But weeks, being 7 days long, don’t naturally get cut in half. If you heard someone use the phrase bi-weekly and the context implied twice a week, what would that even mean to you? It seems to me that someone would always say the exact days of the week they meant.
Interesting... in my area (NYC) I only hear people say it to mean 14 days. I suppose the rationale is to think of "bi" as "two" (precisely as you'd do for bicycle, bisexual, binomial, etc.) rather than as "twice" and then the ambiguity disappears. Counterexample supporting ambiguity: the word bisect, which means two sections, but can quite easily also be thought of as halving!
A lot of people dictionary words incorrectly and the dictionary unfortunately adapts and decays the language into incomprehensibility. That doesn't make correct usage wrong.
A bicycle is not half a wheel, it is two wheels. If bi-annual is twice a year, then why does the word semi-annual exist? And I’m American, we don’t use the word fortnight unless we’re pretending to be British.
My large Collins dictionary suggests that biannual means twice per year, while semi-annual has more of a hint at 'six-monthly', i.e. evenly space (which makes sense if you think semi-circle, semi-detached, etc.).
> And I’m American, we don’t use the word fortnight unless we’re pretending to be British.
Ah well there's the problem! ;) But well, yes, of course if you remove the word for something from your vocabulary there's going to be ambiguity when a similar one is used. Or just stick to 'every [other] week' and remove biweekly too.
Mostly I'm just arguing that it's ambiguous. I don't have a strong opinion, but the person I was responding to did and it seems like a silly thing to be so adamant about.
I'm 'so adamant' about what they mean only in the same sense that I am about any other word I know the meaning of, I only meant to be helpful.
For your bicycle example that I didn't reply to initially - I don't see what it breaks? Unicycles have one and tricycles three wheels. If i give you a wheel triweekly you have three by the end of the week and can build a tricycle.
FWIW, regarding correct usage: the dictionary on my computer (Oxford American English) lists both meanings of biweekly and does not put either meaning forward as more correct. It even has a whole entry on the ambiguity of the 'bi' prefix.
Yes, 14 days (nights), which is - as I phrased it - every other week.
I didn't claim any strong grammatical structure of 'bi', just consistency between biweekly and biannually, and that 'once per two weeks' was the meaning of a different word, as is 'once per two years'.
Understand that the way Buzzfeed covered it obscures the very real fact that there's a huge amount of controversy regarding this specific Satmar Hasidic community. This is not a question of Antisemitism, there have been very real issues directly caused by prominent rabbis within this community. These controversies are known to pretty much anyone in the NY metro area, so it makes sense that the NYTimes (being located in NYC and publishing in the nyarea section) would cover it in such a way.
They say this in the Buzzfeed article:
>But on an economic level, this commitment translates into a 28% poverty rate among Orthodox Jews in New York, according to the UJA Federation of New York. Many Orthodox Jews find employment at religious schools and rely on welfare to support their large families, which have an average of seven children.
This completely ignores that welfare fraud has been a perennial issue in the Lakewood [1] and Brooklyn [2] Hasidic communities. The community knows it can take advantage federal, state, and local programs so they do. The same community has issues with overt employment discrimination [3], and is also known for being one of the more vocal anti-vaxxer communities [4].
I deliberately chose local, Jewish, and official state sources to appeal to your sensitivities. I understand if you aren't from the area and/or have never associated with members of the Hasidic community so I encourage you to review and understand why the NYTimes article was written the way it was.
I think anyone who is not familiar with these particular communities in Lakewood and Brooklyn will see warning flags of anti-semitism in a lot of related comments about them. I would just like to voice some support for the people speaking up about them, because this is not a problem with Jews, or even Orthodox Jews. It is specific to these particular Hasidic communities and the fraud is rampant and expanding.
Thanks, I believe it's really important to call out and charge the leadership inside these communities. They know full well what is and isn't legal. If you shut down discussion on these sorts of issues, I believe you allow for abuses to happen and rage to grow against the larger community who are often innocent.
As others have mentioned, the Hasidic community is an insular community. I have interacted numerous times in business and I've never had an issue professionally. In matters of business they learn how to behave with customers and run things efficiently. It was why, until the discrimination charges were announced, I kept going back to B&H to spend thousands of dollars on gear over the years. When I was a kid I thought of them like Amish, but instead of farming and barn raising they just happened to sell stuff.
Unfortunately, just like other groups that rely on propaganda to hide abuses, the good rabbis inside it that act as whistleblowers end up attacked. This sickening NSFW/NSFL article [1] is about a rabbi inside the community that decided to speak out against child abuse. He was rewarded with chemical burns after bleach was tossed in his face.
How are they different from the Amish on this sense?
I think you may have let some anti Semitism slip in there.
Amish communities have their own problems, like running puppy mills.
BTW, why did you say "child abuse" and not "child rape"?
Not to mention child sexual abuse scandals in these communities in the NYC area.
Edit: hadn't seen an earlier poster's comment on this, my bad.
Edit 2: it's worth mentioning that the fraud/welfare issue is a massive political hot-button topic in Israel: many Israelis resent having to pay taxes to support hasidim who in many cases don't contribute to society: they don't serve in the army, they don't work, they don't go to university, but they have lots of children and get welfare for them and themselves. Current electoral brouhaha over there is at least partly driven by related issues and the overall religious-secular divide. It's fascinating reading!
In Israel the orthodox are 12% and growing rapidly, in 30 years they will constitute about 30% of Israeli Jews. In the u.s they are tiny and insignificant. Like the Amish.
There was also a notorious story of multiple kosher restaurants who had booked a lesbian comedienne only for the local kosher board, run by Hasidic rabbis, to blackmail them by saying that if they don't cancel on her they'll revoke their food's kosher certifications. [0]
One thing you left out is that despite their insularity, the Hasidim vote, in large numbers, and largely the way their rabbis instruct them to. Combine this with the fact that they have very large families, and you can see how they can quickly become very politically powerful.
I recently feel like I want people to be left alone. Everyone always seems to be intruding into communities that don't want to be intruded on. I disagree with this.
I think that says more about the complexity of getting and utilizing welfare services being used as a way to keep people who qualify away from the benefits they deserve.
A family of 8 is under the poverty level if they make less than $43,430. I'd not consider that to be a "rather a lot of money" if raising 8 children is involved.
If you have 5 children already, the additional cost of raising another one is greatly smaller than is the cost of raising the first one. The most likely scenario is that there is already a full time stay at home parent, so they will get additional workload, but won’t incur much additional expenses beyond some more food expenditure, some extra clothing if whatever older siblings have been wearing is too worn out, and extra bed. If the cost of children for you is daycare bills, private school, after school organized activity and college fund, you’re most likely not the kind of person who ends up having 6 children.
My commercial tenant is hasidic and he and his brothers might very well be from mars. It's a very insular community and they don't mingle with outsiders as much so it can get a little strange or awkward. If I stop by and one of his brothers is there they act as if they are afraid to talk to me or dont want to. Feels awkward. If he's there, he hands me a beer and chews my ear off for an hour while chain smoking. Very cool dude and usually the convo is about interesting stuff like culture, art, life and politics. Though he admits that he is the black sheep of his family and half a pariah in the community because he does what he wants. Has more energy than the sun.
I didn't feel that it represented them like that at all. They are walk unique way of life and outsiders have questions, I felt it did a good job conveying why some of their religious practices make them ideal candidates for Amazon businesses.
This makes for interesting contrast with this two part story on Reply All about a Hasidic Jew who discovers the internet and begins to struggle with his community.
I strongly dispute your "Amazon is great" statement but I digress. I think I heard about OpenBazaar when it launched but just checked it out again and having no web frontend for a marketplace is total crazysauce. People who are looking to buy something elsewhere from Amazon find those storefronts through search.
Does the Hasidic community have any advantages in the reseller market? With some of their traditional businesses, such as the diamond trade they do: evaluating gems, connections for sourcing stones, etc.
B&H, an electronics super store in Manhattan, is owned by Hasidic Jews, and it sells new and used gear. The web site won't even take orders on Shabbat. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the people selling new or used electronics have some connection to B&H or another brick and mortar store.
B&H has been our goto place for electronics / computers lately. They deal well with educational institutions, will take a PO from an community college on a reservation in North Dakota, and have excellent customer service.
I do keep track when I can order, for instance right now they are closed for Succos.
It's not so much an advantage as a drawback; big families led by people with no formal (in the what society expects sense; Talmudic study is quite formal) education and strict gender roles. They also have to drop everything and pray three times per day so I don't know how well that jives with "normal" career.
What I got out of it is they spend a lot of time doing intensive Talmud studies, and perhaps that teaches discipline and hones intellectual skills.
Then someone with this background finds themselves struggling to support their family and they realize that with some hustle, they can do it through Amazon.
I believe the only advantage is being near a large city so there's a lot of stuff available to buy at a discount. NYC is a very interesting city. The other possible advantage is that self-starting is an admirable trait amongst the Hasidim.
Yeah, a lot of people locked out of traditional careers turn to running small businesses. I'm sure it helps though if everyone around you tends to run small businesses as well -- cultural expectations probably push you towards it, and you have a wide support network.
I know nothing about the culture, but if the fathers are already in these trades and instill a business mindset in their sons early on, it makes sense that they excel in running the trades they grew up watching, listening, studying, and helping their fathers run.
I think there’s something about knowing you need to care for a large family (e.g. a member of a religion that values having lots of kids) that is motivating for entrepreneurs in a way I don’t always hear about e.g. entrepreneurial tendencies among Hasidic Jews and Mormons
For Latter-day Saints (Mormons), the entrepreneurship roots go back to the early church history. Between 1831-1847, members of the church established 4 settlements and were expelled from 3(Kirtland, OH; Western Missouri; Nauvoo, IL; Salt Lake City). These areas were all frontiers at the time, and grew to become the largest cities in their region, which drew fear and persecution from people in the surrounding areas. Salt Lake was many hundreds of miles from the closest white settlement, and Brigham Young intentionally assigned/coerced/funded as many crafts and industries as possible to reduce dependence on trade with the (indifferent to hostile) United States. And established dozens of settlements throughout the Mountain West. So you have generations of entrepreneurs that had a captive market that needed EVERYTHING, and only internal competition.
Also, many Latter-day Saints go on 2 year missions in their late teens/early 20s, where you mostly self-direct your proselyting in the area you are assigned to. Good sales experience, self-starting, persistence, etc.
The last point can't be overstated. Sales is largely about overcoming and largely overcoming rejection. After 1000 rejections, they roll off. Lots of people stop at the first or second.
I really liked the book The Mormon Way of Doing Business[1]. The central idea of the book is that a high commitment church like LDS is a great training ground for business with many examples including the mission example that you cite above.
I think having a tight-knit community of people willing to do each other favors in the face of a world that may not necessarily approve of your beliefs also plays a big part. Also true of both conservative/Orthodox Jews and Mormons.
That'd be pretty to think so, but the wide majority of the Satmar community lives in poverty and is dependent on government benefits. The tendency towards entrepreneurship -- if there is one -- is more likely to be the result of being unwilling or unable to assimilate into a non-religious society.
I can't speak for the LDSs, since I don't know them.
I grew up LDS my whole pre-adult life. There's a big focus on self-reliance. Also, the men are supposed to serve missions for two years (go teach about Jesus and the church). I imagine the skillset required to go door-to-door teaching people about something is very transferrable to other sales, which is very important when being an entrepreneur.
-Just out of curiosity, doesn't that same obligation to serve missions apply to women? I used to live right next to an apartment owned by the Mormon church in a small Norwegian town; on two occasions the missionaries were female.
Oddly enough, the most efficient mission they did (whether they were male or female!) was to simply not make such a big deal of it; being a rather devout Lutheran myself, we quickly agreed there was no need to attempt converting each other - though they were always good conversation partners and with a seemingly genuine desire to be of assistance any way they possibly could.
Apparently, the incoming ones were to an extent briefed on the locals by the departing ones - I had a chuckle being playfully greeted by a new pair of missionaries as "Oh, so you are that stubborn heathen we've been hearing about..."
Missionaries with a well-developed sense of humour.
Spencer W. Kimball said,
"Every boy and many girls and couples should serve missions. Every prospective missionary should prepare morally, spiritually, mentally, and financially all of his life in order to serve faithfully, efficiently, and well in the great program of missionary work” (“Advice to a Young Man: Now Is the Time to Prepare,” New Era, June 1973, 9; italics added)."
I grew up with a lot of Mormons...anecdotally would say their families were more often SMB owners than not. Utah also has a pretty happening tech scene nowadays.
I am a Mormon SMB owner, and I agree with your point, but in the interest of full disclosure, there is a darker side to this tendency as well. Utah (read Mormons) is the MLM capital of the world, with other get rich quick schemes being pretty popular as well.
I had always wondered if there was a link between MLMs and Mormons. They are always overly upbeat and Christian (classic Mormon stereotypes) in their marketing, and so many of them are in Utah.
Exactly, it probably has more to do with setting your own hours plus not needing to ask permission to take off for religious holidays or even Saturdays.
Self-employment of any kind gives you a lot more freedom to integrate your religious practice into your working life without friction. I suspect that has much more to do with it than family size or any inherent entrepreneurialism.
(correlation isn't causation, but) fathers on average have a higher income than non-fathers. I can definitely imagine the increased urgency at work when you have more mouths to feed.
For those who are manufacturing private label items in China, tarrifs are have the potential to be damaging (depends very much on the product category).
Both the article and many in this comment section are using the term "Hasidic" to refer to all ultra-Orthodox (aka Haredi) Jews. This is not the case.
As the article briefly mentions, Hasidism is a recent (~18th-century) ecstatic religious movement that split off from conventional ultra-Orthodoxy. Non-Hasidic Haredim originally called themselves Misnagdim ("opposition"), but these days are usually called Litvish ("Lithuanian", since that was the stronghold of Misnagdi thought). The two have since reconciled over their combined opposition to later secularist Jewish religious and political trends, and through the efforts/existence of groups like Chabad which blur the binary; but the separate identities are still strong.
Borough Park, the neighborhood the article is about, happens to be majority Hasidic, but also has a substantial Litvish minority which is subject to all of the same pressures and constraints that draw Haredim of all stripes to online businesses.
A lot of culturally conservative cultures lean left on economic issues. The first country to roll out a universal healthcare system was Imperial Germany under Bismarck.
Conservatism in the U.S. is pretty anti-social in that regard, which isn't true everywhere, as in other countries it wasn't co-opted by "free market" types
the 'conservative' here does not refer to traditional conservative politics that include those values. You're being confused by two definitions of 'conservative'.
I'm really not though. I'm aware that 'conservative' has specific religious connotations, but on the Venn diagram with political conservatism, there's a lot of overlap. Trump won many predominantly Jewish districts in the last election.
Nonetheless the values of receiving and giving charity are more common in the community in question than your comment about conservative values, because conservative doesn't mean "trump supporter" or "same values as Republican party".
So aware or not your previous comment was wrong in every way because you cannot or will not separate different meanings of "conservative".
You smeared all with one brush and your subsequent worldview is just as nonsensical as one would expect from such a nonsensical approach to viewing others.
Your comment was the opposite of insight - anyone who read your comment was actively mislead. You are fake news.
Everyone makes generalizations, it's one of the ways we communicate without needing to get overly academic about everything. I would also note that your tone exudes a high level of bias. If, as TFA states, there are a lot of very poor people in these communities, then that underlies your statement that charity is common among Hasidim.
It is an interesting fact that (disclaimer, generalizations follow) a community that tends to take charity from the government also tends to vote for a candidate like Donald Trump.
generalizations are good when they're somewhat accurate. they're bad when they're inaccurate. Generalizations aren't inherently good. yours distorts reality by ignoring specifics in a way that does not good except to your ego.
Your reaction to my pointing this out is that my "tone exudes a high level of bias" - when you're the one doing the tone reading.
People are more complex than you make them, and your one dimensional analysis based on a purposeful misconstruing of a word, leading you to smear an entire religious group adds no value to any conversation, and reveals you as a likely a bigot.
For anyone struggling to understand why this might be interesting , do yourself a favour watch “one of us” on Netflix. The disparity between Hasidic culture and our modern world is massive.
People making a business selling on Amazon.. If you left out the religion, would this be a story?
Is the point to get NYT and BuzzFeed clicks? Is it to get more attendance at the 'how you can get rich selling on Amazon' conferences? For better or worse, is it to show how a certain demographic is making a lot of money?
It’s interesting that a extremely disproportionate number of Orthodox Jews sell on Amazon. The mesh (as opposed to clash) of religion and modern technology and culture makes the article meaningful.
I do believe you have misread this. "Ourselves" is used because "me" would not be correct, but really the meaning is "me the author" in that sentence. I would suggest a more generous re-reading.
it's interesting because it gives insight into a culture and community we typically don't have access to. the point isn't amazon - the point is the hasids.
Perhaps you weren't aware that the reason Jews have for a long time been so engaged in commerce is that long ago they got kicked out of their homeland and so many of them weren't able to support themselves any longer with their traditional occupations of farming and herding. So it is not that there is something greedy about Jews, they are just, like everyone, trying to survive.
I'm aware that. I'm saying the article feels like a trope or playing to a stereotype. Maybe I should read the Buzzfeed article, which someone mentioned displayed more sensitivity.
maybe because you're projecting? it's a local culture piece (it's in the ny region section). for better or worse the hasids are large component of ny culture.
Yet another example of how a decentralized free market has innumerable and unexpected positive outcomes, such as letting a restricted and insular community become prosperous and self-sufficient. Don't be fooled by calls to allow the government to take over tech - this outcome would never have been centrally planned by any bureaucrat.
Seems like an unusually large percentage of posts on Hacker News are behind paywalls, some soft, some hard, some with a maximum free articles per time-unit. I peruse most of the top stories daily and can't read a good number of them making me have to just read the comments to get a sense of the article. It is seriously annoying. I wish there was some kind of flair or warning on these posts.
You can block JavaScript on a site basis and read it. There might be some multimedia you sometimes miss but its good if you just want to read the text.
I think HN should have a rule that if someone puts up a link that is behind a paywall, they should give some way to get around it. Like they should make the first comment a set of instructions, like disable JS or an alternative link.
The problem with that is I would have to subscribe to a hundred different publications, and a new one every few days.
If I could buy a subscription that covered all online publications, and for a reasonable price, I would be quite happy. As it is I already have 5 print subscriptions.
We curate the front page for interestingness (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Advertisement has nothing to do with it. If there's a class of articles you're seeing here consistently that you don't think gratifies intellectual curiosity, I'd like to know what they are. Usually the trouble is that users don't all share the same curiosity, but it's possible that we need to make a change somehow.
We also try to make sure that hard-paywalled articles don't appear on the front page, though that's gotten complicated because those publications work differently for different users.
I agree with the other user that mentioned it would be nice to have some indication of hard or soft blocks. I realize that wouldn't be easy, especially to be completely accurate with, but even if it was done for a subset of sites that often appear it would be a nice feature.
About 6 years ago I ordered a tv on Amazon, it was going to be shipped out and delivered in about a week.
About an hour later I got a phone a call with a thick accented voice – "John, John, are you home?"
"Who is this?"
"I got your TV, we can come over right now."
Sure enough they pulled up with their van and I got my TV about two hours after I ordered. Unknown to me I had ordered it from a Hasidic run company just down the street from my home in Brooklyn.
Nice! I wonder if the vendor gets his money earlier from Amazon if he delivered it faster.
All other things being equal, if 2hr delivery happened to me I'd at least be tossing referrals around if not being a return customer [maybe they sell only TVs and I only needed the one].
I dug up the seller info - Always A Deal
https://www.amazon.com/sp?_encoding=UTF8&asin=&isAmazonFulfi...
They probably were able to save money by delivering it directly, instead of taking it to a postal office to ship it which probably would have been more work anyway.
Also their breakage rate (and thus returns processing and associated Amazon hit) will likely be much lower since they're delivering it themselves.
> I wonder if the vendor gets his money earlier from Amazon if he delivered it faster
No - Amazon pays sellers every other week.
This is not necessarily true. Some sellers can request disbursement at any time. For a breakdown of when Amazon pays sellers, see [0].
In this case, the only delay is the 7 day holding period after the latest possible delivery date.
For example, if you sell and deliver a product on Jan 1st, you may be able to disburse the funds as soon as the 8th.
However! This example does not hold for the situation described by the GP because no tracking information can be provided to Amazon. In which case, the longest possible delivery period in the shipping method selected will be used.
More importantly, what the seller did as described by GP is big liability, for two reasons:
1. Phone numbers should never, ever, be used to contact the customer directly. They are for the seller to give to the carrier. This is a violation of Amazon's ToS.
2. Sellers should never, ever, deliver directly to buyers. Not only will this hurt their valid tracking rate metric, but it also makes them a very easy target for item not received cases as there is no proof that the item was delivered. The only recourse in a case like this would be through small claims court.
And on a much more minor note, it's unprofessional to visit a buyer in person. Amazon is not eBay.
[0] https://3t122x28ppxb3z3e3u3i0eib-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-...
Admittedly I did not think about the proof of delivery aspect. Definitely would cause issues. Although I imagine it could be mitigated by forcing the person to click "I accept delivery" on their Amazon account when you meet up, that way the retailer knows it is actually the person in question.
A lot of assumptions there. Why is delivery from the he vendor unprofessional and unreliable, compared to Amazon who hires anyone off the street as independent contractors to handle deliveries?
It's a very oligopolistic view to say only Amazon and a few big companies are trustworthy logistics providers.
Maybe?
They can still use the same tracking mechanisms, I mean when I order from the pizza place, they don't contract it out, so why should I care of my amazon seller does?
For orders over 10 USD, Amazon requires a verifiable tracking number from one of the major carrier services. (It's possible to "ship" an order without a tracking number, but the seller takes a hit to their account metrics, and Amazon will eventually freeze their account for review).
This is so they can verify you actually shipped the package, and verify it was delivered within the fulfillment promise date range, ie. if you paid for 2 day shipping or whatever.
There are some sellers that have been approved for self-delivery of packages, which are not trackable. In these cases, they usually forfeit all rights to dispute non-delivery claims and more. So, it's pretty risky for the seller.
Speaking of which: Amazon (and ebay, too) had recently started using a UK-based service called Yodel.
Last time Yodel had delivered a parcel of $50 to my door (marking it as delivered), which obviously got stolen. You can’t call Yodel - their line is always busy, and the line is not a free number.
Yodel had done that regularly to me, but I could never contact them or do anything about my delivery, since their customer service is horrendous.
Is there any way to set it up in Amazon (or ebay, too) so that their fulfillment never uses a certain delivery brand?
>Is there any way to set it up in Amazon (or ebay, too) so that their fulfillment never uses a certain delivery brand?
Amazon support was able to do this for me. They also CC:d me on a really strongly worded email to the delivery company, which I found really surprising.
This was one of the euro amazons with european support staff.
Did it actually work? Did they actually stop using that delivery company for your packages (and is the company common enough for this to not be random chance)?
Yes, and yes. I probably get closer to 1000 deliveries annually.
> Is there any way to set it up in Amazon (or ebay, too) so that their fulfillment never uses a certain delivery brand?
No, unfortunately not. Well, unless you're open to moving outside of Yodel's delivery radius.
eBay has no fulfillment network, so you can reach out to the seller and ask for a different shipping method. You should expect to be asked to cover the cost difference though.
You can also do this on Amazon as well, just make sure that the product you're buying says "ships and sold by XYZ". Send them a message prior to ordering and they'll let you know if they can accommodate.
The risk here is that the customer commits fraud by saying they did not receive the TV. Amazon may side with the customer and refund the money; but the merchant should still be able to file a small claims lawsuit or maybe even a police report.
> Some sellers can request disbursement at any time
This applies to very few sellers.
> This applies to very few sellers.
Fair enough. I am one of those few sellers and I tend to assume it's more commonplace than it is.
In any case, I don't really understand the desire for instant disbursements. Certainly you eliminate the risk of Amazon carrying a larger balance than necessary, and in rare cash crunch situations it may rescue the day... But beyond that, why is it so desireable?
Retail is all about accounts receivable vs payable. Getting money faster means it can create interest while you wait to pay suppliers.
For most businesses at scale, cash flow is a gating factor for growth and profitability. This is why businesses always try to get cash on delivery, but pay their vendors Net 60.
"unprofessional to visit a buyer in person"
It might be unusual in the context, its not unprofessional, and in certain contexts associated with a premium service.
not every order will show up on the next payment though; to my knowledge, they can be delayed until some amount of time after the order is placed or after it's arrived
Definitely. The credit card only charges when it ships.
I never thought about that. I figured Amazon was just being a middle-man for some insane amount of money and making a nice spread off of it.
Amazon seller here. Amazon doesn't make funds available for disbursement until 7 days after delivery. At that point funds are available for disbursement, but they aren't necessarily disbursed. Seller accounts created before 2011 have what are called daily disbursements: the seller has a button they can click once every 24 hours that will disburse all available funds. Most sellers accounts opened since then have bi-weekly disbursements, though, so all available funds get disbursed every 14 days.
God I hate the word bi-weekly; if you hadn't specified 14 days I would've thought it was twice a week. "bi-weekly" is never the right word to use because you always have to add additional information that makes it redundant.
Fortnightly is how I would express every 14 days.
Americans don't generally use that word.
For some reason the bi-weekly vs. semi-weekly thing doesn't confuse me, but I take your point and the dictionary seems to agree that it can mean either every two weeks or twice a week.
It confuses me because I regularly hear "bi-weekly" to mean "twice per week". I don't think I've ever heard someone say semi-weekly. Usually you can make a good guess of the intended meaning from context, but the two time intervals are similar enough that it's frequently ambiguous.
I guess I’m just generalizing semi-weekly from semi-annual. Do people actual my use the term bi-weekly to mean twice a week? I understand confusing bi-annual to mean twice a year because years can be evenly split in two and bi-annual would thus mean every six months. But weeks, being 7 days long, don’t naturally get cut in half. If you heard someone use the phrase bi-weekly and the context implied twice a week, what would that even mean to you? It seems to me that someone would always say the exact days of the week they meant.
Interesting... in my area (NYC) I only hear people say it to mean 14 days. I suppose the rationale is to think of "bi" as "two" (precisely as you'd do for bicycle, bisexual, binomial, etc.) rather than as "twice" and then the ambiguity disappears. Counterexample supporting ambiguity: the word bisect, which means two sections, but can quite easily also be thought of as halving!
A lot of people dictionary words incorrectly and the dictionary unfortunately adapts and decays the language into incomprehensibility. That doesn't make correct usage wrong.
fort-weekly
The 'fort' is short for fourteen, so fort-weekly would be every fourteen weeks.
fortnightly
Heh, I just realized that this means that biweekly (once per two weeks) is about the same as bimonthly (twice per month)
Biweekly is twice per week just like biannually is twice per anum.
Fortnightly and biennially are 'every other'.
The fact that the parent comment used Biweekly to mean 14 days seems to suggest that it's not unambiguous.
It’s ambiguous if people misunderstand you even if they’re “wrong” for being confused. Avoid those terms. People will widely misinterpret them.
A bicycle is not half a wheel, it is two wheels. If bi-annual is twice a year, then why does the word semi-annual exist? And I’m American, we don’t use the word fortnight unless we’re pretending to be British.
> then why does the word semi-annual exist
My large Collins dictionary suggests that biannual means twice per year, while semi-annual has more of a hint at 'six-monthly', i.e. evenly space (which makes sense if you think semi-circle, semi-detached, etc.).
> And I’m American, we don’t use the word fortnight unless we’re pretending to be British.
Ah well there's the problem! ;) But well, yes, of course if you remove the word for something from your vocabulary there's going to be ambiguity when a similar one is used. Or just stick to 'every [other] week' and remove biweekly too.
"why does the word semi-annual exist"
Your parent already provided the counterpoint, Biennially.
Additionally I'm not convinced by your bicycle => 2 => bi annual logic.
You could equally argue it leads to 2 times a year, because it doesn't happen a half every year just like a bike doesn't have half a wheel.
Mostly I'm just arguing that it's ambiguous. I don't have a strong opinion, but the person I was responding to did and it seems like a silly thing to be so adamant about.
I'm 'so adamant' about what they mean only in the same sense that I am about any other word I know the meaning of, I only meant to be helpful.
For your bicycle example that I didn't reply to initially - I don't see what it breaks? Unicycles have one and tricycles three wheels. If i give you a wheel triweekly you have three by the end of the week and can build a tricycle.
FWIW, regarding correct usage: the dictionary on my computer (Oxford American English) lists both meanings of biweekly and does not put either meaning forward as more correct. It even has a whole entry on the ambiguity of the 'bi' prefix.
I can confirm that the proper OED has the same definition.
"Bi- 2a occurring twice in every one or once in every two (biweekly)"
Biannual is only defined as occurring twice a year though.
So, inflammable.
That's wrong in multiple ways. Fortnightly is 14, and bi is ambiguous because English has weak grammatical structure inside words.
Yes, 14 days (nights), which is - as I phrased it - every other week.
I didn't claim any strong grammatical structure of 'bi', just consistency between biweekly and biannually, and that 'once per two weeks' was the meaning of a different word, as is 'once per two years'.
Buzz Feed News (yes!) covered this same story with much more sensitivity several weeks ago.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/leticiamiranda/amazon-o...
Understand that the way Buzzfeed covered it obscures the very real fact that there's a huge amount of controversy regarding this specific Satmar Hasidic community. This is not a question of Antisemitism, there have been very real issues directly caused by prominent rabbis within this community. These controversies are known to pretty much anyone in the NY metro area, so it makes sense that the NYTimes (being located in NYC and publishing in the nyarea section) would cover it in such a way.
They say this in the Buzzfeed article:
>But on an economic level, this commitment translates into a 28% poverty rate among Orthodox Jews in New York, according to the UJA Federation of New York. Many Orthodox Jews find employment at religious schools and rely on welfare to support their large families, which have an average of seven children.
This completely ignores that welfare fraud has been a perennial issue in the Lakewood [1] and Brooklyn [2] Hasidic communities. The community knows it can take advantage federal, state, and local programs so they do. The same community has issues with overt employment discrimination [3], and is also known for being one of the more vocal anti-vaxxer communities [4].
I deliberately chose local, Jewish, and official state sources to appeal to your sensitivities. I understand if you aren't from the area and/or have never associated with members of the Hasidic community so I encourage you to review and understand why the NYTimes article was written the way it was.
[1] https://www.app.com/story/news/investigations/watchdog/2018/...
[2] https://forward.com/news/351162/wealthy-orthodox-couples-cha...
[3] https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/ofccp/ofccp20170814
[4] https://forward.com/news/national/422354/hasidic-measles-out...
I think anyone who is not familiar with these particular communities in Lakewood and Brooklyn will see warning flags of anti-semitism in a lot of related comments about them. I would just like to voice some support for the people speaking up about them, because this is not a problem with Jews, or even Orthodox Jews. It is specific to these particular Hasidic communities and the fraud is rampant and expanding.
Thanks, I believe it's really important to call out and charge the leadership inside these communities. They know full well what is and isn't legal. If you shut down discussion on these sorts of issues, I believe you allow for abuses to happen and rage to grow against the larger community who are often innocent.
As others have mentioned, the Hasidic community is an insular community. I have interacted numerous times in business and I've never had an issue professionally. In matters of business they learn how to behave with customers and run things efficiently. It was why, until the discrimination charges were announced, I kept going back to B&H to spend thousands of dollars on gear over the years. When I was a kid I thought of them like Amish, but instead of farming and barn raising they just happened to sell stuff.
Unfortunately, just like other groups that rely on propaganda to hide abuses, the good rabbis inside it that act as whistleblowers end up attacked. This sickening NSFW/NSFL article [1] is about a rabbi inside the community that decided to speak out against child abuse. He was rewarded with chemical burns after bleach was tossed in his face.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qbe8bp/the-child-rape-ass...
How are they different from the Amish on this sense? I think you may have let some anti Semitism slip in there. Amish communities have their own problems, like running puppy mills.
BTW, why did you say "child abuse" and not "child rape"?
Is it any more "insular" than the Haskell community or the Scheme community?
One of these things is not like the other. One of these things just isn’t the same.
Good example of how justice should be blind to all but the law.
Not to mention child sexual abuse scandals in these communities in the NYC area.
Edit: hadn't seen an earlier poster's comment on this, my bad.
Edit 2: it's worth mentioning that the fraud/welfare issue is a massive political hot-button topic in Israel: many Israelis resent having to pay taxes to support hasidim who in many cases don't contribute to society: they don't serve in the army, they don't work, they don't go to university, but they have lots of children and get welfare for them and themselves. Current electoral brouhaha over there is at least partly driven by related issues and the overall religious-secular divide. It's fascinating reading!
In Israel the orthodox are 12% and growing rapidly, in 30 years they will constitute about 30% of Israeli Jews. In the u.s they are tiny and insignificant. Like the Amish.
Both of you are conflating Hasidic with Orthodox.
There was also a notorious story of multiple kosher restaurants who had booked a lesbian comedienne only for the local kosher board, run by Hasidic rabbis, to blackmail them by saying that if they don't cancel on her they'll revoke their food's kosher certifications. [0]
FWIW, I am Jewish myself, as is the source.
[0] https://www.jta.org/quick-reads/brooklyn-eateries-cancel-les...
This story is mostly true, but what does it have to do with this group of Amazon sellers?
One thing you left out is that despite their insularity, the Hasidim vote, in large numbers, and largely the way their rabbis instruct them to. Combine this with the fact that they have very large families, and you can see how they can quickly become very politically powerful.
I recently feel like I want people to be left alone. Everyone always seems to be intruding into communities that don't want to be intruded on. I disagree with this.
Even if they're committing crimes? What if the victims want your help?
I think that says more about the complexity of getting and utilizing welfare services being used as a way to keep people who qualify away from the benefits they deserve.
> this commitment translates into a 28% poverty rate
The table used to calculate federal poverty level doesn't scale correctly to high numbers of children.
You can make rather a lot of money, yet be considered poor if you have lots of children.
Additional children don't cost as much as the federal government thinks.
Can you back that up with some additional data?
According to this: https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/federal-poverty-level-fp...
A family of 8 is under the poverty level if they make less than $43,430. I'd not consider that to be a "rather a lot of money" if raising 8 children is involved.
If you have 5 children already, the additional cost of raising another one is greatly smaller than is the cost of raising the first one. The most likely scenario is that there is already a full time stay at home parent, so they will get additional workload, but won’t incur much additional expenses beyond some more food expenditure, some extra clothing if whatever older siblings have been wearing is too worn out, and extra bed. If the cost of children for you is daycare bills, private school, after school organized activity and college fund, you’re most likely not the kind of person who ends up having 6 children.
$43,430 is the number that the federal government considers to be abject poverty.
Clearly it's not though.
But use your chart to check the 250% level often used as a cut off for services. You can make a 6 figure income and still be considered poor.
$43,430 split 8 ways is $5428.75/person/year, before taxes.
Yah, that's exactly the math the federal government does.
It's wrong though, the incremental expense of more children doesn't work that way.
And fast company did this story back in 2013
https://www.fastcompany.com/3021229/chaim-pikarski-the-amazo...
Honestly asking what due sensitivity was missed here.
They talk about the Hasidic community as if they were Martians.
My commercial tenant is hasidic and he and his brothers might very well be from mars. It's a very insular community and they don't mingle with outsiders as much so it can get a little strange or awkward. If I stop by and one of his brothers is there they act as if they are afraid to talk to me or dont want to. Feels awkward. If he's there, he hands me a beer and chews my ear off for an hour while chain smoking. Very cool dude and usually the convo is about interesting stuff like culture, art, life and politics. Though he admits that he is the black sheep of his family and half a pariah in the community because he does what he wants. Has more energy than the sun.
I didn't feel that it represented them like that at all. They are walk unique way of life and outsiders have questions, I felt it did a good job conveying why some of their religious practices make them ideal candidates for Amazon businesses.
Got any examples? I didn't see anything like that in the article.
"Alexander Rapaport... often serves as an informal guide for reporters to the insular Hasidic communities"
Hasidic communities are extremely insular...
Careful now... that comment seems to have a strong anti-Martian bias.
This makes for interesting contrast with this two part story on Reply All about a Hasidic Jew who discovers the internet and begins to struggle with his community.
https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/39hzw2 https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/awhm5x
wow, that was a great story, thanks for sharing
Amazon is great yet I wish there were more sites like Amazon and eBay so healthy competition between them would stimulate further improvement.
BTW why people won't use OpenBazaar instead?
> BTW why people won't use OpenBazaar instead?
I strongly dispute your "Amazon is great" statement but I digress. I think I heard about OpenBazaar when it launched but just checked it out again and having no web frontend for a marketplace is total crazysauce. People who are looking to buy something elsewhere from Amazon find those storefronts through search.
> BTW why people won't use OpenBazaar instead?
Disputes and legal recourse.
Buyers go where there are sellers. Sellers go where there are buyers. This is the classic network effect.
Does the Hasidic community have any advantages in the reseller market? With some of their traditional businesses, such as the diamond trade they do: evaluating gems, connections for sourcing stones, etc.
B&H, an electronics super store in Manhattan, is owned by Hasidic Jews, and it sells new and used gear. The web site won't even take orders on Shabbat. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the people selling new or used electronics have some connection to B&H or another brick and mortar store.
B&H has been our goto place for electronics / computers lately. They deal well with educational institutions, will take a PO from an community college on a reservation in North Dakota, and have excellent customer service.
I do keep track when I can order, for instance right now they are closed for Succos.
I had no idea. Ordered some camera gear from them years ago and they had great prices/service. Cool.
It's not so much an advantage as a drawback; big families led by people with no formal (in the what society expects sense; Talmudic study is quite formal) education and strict gender roles. They also have to drop everything and pray three times per day so I don't know how well that jives with "normal" career.
What I got out of it is they spend a lot of time doing intensive Talmud studies, and perhaps that teaches discipline and hones intellectual skills.
Then someone with this background finds themselves struggling to support their family and they realize that with some hustle, they can do it through Amazon.
I believe the only advantage is being near a large city so there's a lot of stuff available to buy at a discount. NYC is a very interesting city. The other possible advantage is that self-starting is an admirable trait amongst the Hasidim.
1) I doubt the NYC merchandise itself is the advantage, rather it is the concentration of Hasidic entrepreneurs which provides invaluable networks.
2) The need to support a growing family from a young age with no formal education, propels many to try their hand at business.
Yeah, a lot of people locked out of traditional careers turn to running small businesses. I'm sure it helps though if everyone around you tends to run small businesses as well -- cultural expectations probably push you towards it, and you have a wide support network.
I know nothing about the culture, but if the fathers are already in these trades and instill a business mindset in their sons early on, it makes sense that they excel in running the trades they grew up watching, listening, studying, and helping their fathers run.
There are also some online communities that facilitate networking in this area such as https://forums.dansdeals.com/
IIRC there is even a Hasidic version of Shark Tank floating around on YouTube
'“Whatever you decide to sell doesn’t matter as long as you meet Amazon’s requirements,” he said.'
That's about all you need to know about Amazon these days.
I think there’s something about knowing you need to care for a large family (e.g. a member of a religion that values having lots of kids) that is motivating for entrepreneurs in a way I don’t always hear about e.g. entrepreneurial tendencies among Hasidic Jews and Mormons
For Latter-day Saints (Mormons), the entrepreneurship roots go back to the early church history. Between 1831-1847, members of the church established 4 settlements and were expelled from 3(Kirtland, OH; Western Missouri; Nauvoo, IL; Salt Lake City). These areas were all frontiers at the time, and grew to become the largest cities in their region, which drew fear and persecution from people in the surrounding areas. Salt Lake was many hundreds of miles from the closest white settlement, and Brigham Young intentionally assigned/coerced/funded as many crafts and industries as possible to reduce dependence on trade with the (indifferent to hostile) United States. And established dozens of settlements throughout the Mountain West. So you have generations of entrepreneurs that had a captive market that needed EVERYTHING, and only internal competition.
Also, many Latter-day Saints go on 2 year missions in their late teens/early 20s, where you mostly self-direct your proselyting in the area you are assigned to. Good sales experience, self-starting, persistence, etc.
It's a potent combination for business.
The last point can't be overstated. Sales is largely about overcoming and largely overcoming rejection. After 1000 rejections, they roll off. Lots of people stop at the first or second.
I really liked the book The Mormon Way of Doing Business[1]. The central idea of the book is that a high commitment church like LDS is a great training ground for business with many examples including the mission example that you cite above.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Mormon-Way-Doing-Business/dp/14555229...
I think having a tight-knit community of people willing to do each other favors in the face of a world that may not necessarily approve of your beliefs also plays a big part. Also true of both conservative/Orthodox Jews and Mormons.
WordPerfect was ran by Mormons, wasn't it? I'd love to hear some stories (I already read Almost Perfect)
Yes, out of Orem, UT.
That'd be pretty to think so, but the wide majority of the Satmar community lives in poverty and is dependent on government benefits. The tendency towards entrepreneurship -- if there is one -- is more likely to be the result of being unwilling or unable to assimilate into a non-religious society.
I can't speak for the LDSs, since I don't know them.
I grew up LDS my whole pre-adult life. There's a big focus on self-reliance. Also, the men are supposed to serve missions for two years (go teach about Jesus and the church). I imagine the skillset required to go door-to-door teaching people about something is very transferrable to other sales, which is very important when being an entrepreneur.
-Just out of curiosity, doesn't that same obligation to serve missions apply to women? I used to live right next to an apartment owned by the Mormon church in a small Norwegian town; on two occasions the missionaries were female.
Oddly enough, the most efficient mission they did (whether they were male or female!) was to simply not make such a big deal of it; being a rather devout Lutheran myself, we quickly agreed there was no need to attempt converting each other - though they were always good conversation partners and with a seemingly genuine desire to be of assistance any way they possibly could.
Apparently, the incoming ones were to an extent briefed on the locals by the departing ones - I had a chuckle being playfully greeted by a new pair of missionaries as "Oh, so you are that stubborn heathen we've been hearing about..."
Missionaries with a well-developed sense of humour.
Brilliant.
Women aren't required to, but they can choose to.
> Also, the men are supposed to serve missions for two years
Not just the men.
Sorry, I should have said, "mandated" instead of "supposed to". Women aren't commanded to serve missions, but they can.
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/2013/01/you...
Spencer W. Kimball said, "Every boy and many girls and couples should serve missions. Every prospective missionary should prepare morally, spiritually, mentally, and financially all of his life in order to serve faithfully, efficiently, and well in the great program of missionary work” (“Advice to a Young Man: Now Is the Time to Prepare,” New Era, June 1973, 9; italics added)."
I grew up with a lot of Mormons...anecdotally would say their families were more often SMB owners than not. Utah also has a pretty happening tech scene nowadays.
I am a Mormon SMB owner, and I agree with your point, but in the interest of full disclosure, there is a darker side to this tendency as well. Utah (read Mormons) is the MLM capital of the world, with other get rich quick schemes being pretty popular as well.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/theslice/mormon-utah-valley-mu...
I had always wondered if there was a link between MLMs and Mormons. They are always overly upbeat and Christian (classic Mormon stereotypes) in their marketing, and so many of them are in Utah.
I grew up in a small Texas town with an outsized population of Mormons, and the ones I knew were either public sector or business owners.
That’s a common SMB and family farm model.
Husband runs the business, wife works for the county/town/school for the healthcare and pension.
Exactly, it probably has more to do with setting your own hours plus not needing to ask permission to take off for religious holidays or even Saturdays.
Self-employment of any kind gives you a lot more freedom to integrate your religious practice into your working life without friction. I suspect that has much more to do with it than family size or any inherent entrepreneurialism.
(correlation isn't causation, but) fathers on average have a higher income than non-fathers. I can definitely imagine the increased urgency at work when you have more mouths to feed.
of they just don't want to be at home and put more hours in. :) kids, wife, etc can be hard for some.
i enjoy my home life with my family, but i know of a few other fathers that dont so much and purposefully work overtime.
The manufacturing is in China; I wonder how the tariffs affect them.
The article says they acquire most of their merchandise through local, physical clearance sales. I don't think they're ordering much from China.
For those who are manufacturing private label items in China, tarrifs are have the potential to be damaging (depends very much on the product category).
Belated cultural note:
Both the article and many in this comment section are using the term "Hasidic" to refer to all ultra-Orthodox (aka Haredi) Jews. This is not the case.
As the article briefly mentions, Hasidism is a recent (~18th-century) ecstatic religious movement that split off from conventional ultra-Orthodoxy. Non-Hasidic Haredim originally called themselves Misnagdim ("opposition"), but these days are usually called Litvish ("Lithuanian", since that was the stronghold of Misnagdi thought). The two have since reconciled over their combined opposition to later secularist Jewish religious and political trends, and through the efforts/existence of groups like Chabad which blur the binary; but the separate identities are still strong.
Borough Park, the neighborhood the article is about, happens to be majority Hasidic, but also has a substantial Litvish minority which is subject to all of the same pressures and constraints that draw Haredim of all stripes to online businesses.
Considering how prevalent state-provided aid is among ultra-conservative sects like this, it is good to see a viable career path for them.
Kinda funny how antithetical that is to tradional conservative values regarding entitlements.
A lot of culturally conservative cultures lean left on economic issues. The first country to roll out a universal healthcare system was Imperial Germany under Bismarck.
Conservatism in the U.S. is pretty anti-social in that regard, which isn't true everywhere, as in other countries it wasn't co-opted by "free market" types
the 'conservative' here does not refer to traditional conservative politics that include those values. You're being confused by two definitions of 'conservative'.
I'm really not though. I'm aware that 'conservative' has specific religious connotations, but on the Venn diagram with political conservatism, there's a lot of overlap. Trump won many predominantly Jewish districts in the last election.
Nonetheless the values of receiving and giving charity are more common in the community in question than your comment about conservative values, because conservative doesn't mean "trump supporter" or "same values as Republican party".
So aware or not your previous comment was wrong in every way because you cannot or will not separate different meanings of "conservative".
You smeared all with one brush and your subsequent worldview is just as nonsensical as one would expect from such a nonsensical approach to viewing others.
Your comment was the opposite of insight - anyone who read your comment was actively mislead. You are fake news.
Everyone makes generalizations, it's one of the ways we communicate without needing to get overly academic about everything. I would also note that your tone exudes a high level of bias. If, as TFA states, there are a lot of very poor people in these communities, then that underlies your statement that charity is common among Hasidim.
It is an interesting fact that (disclaimer, generalizations follow) a community that tends to take charity from the government also tends to vote for a candidate like Donald Trump.
generalizations are good when they're somewhat accurate. they're bad when they're inaccurate. Generalizations aren't inherently good. yours distorts reality by ignoring specifics in a way that does not good except to your ego.
Your reaction to my pointing this out is that my "tone exudes a high level of bias" - when you're the one doing the tone reading.
People are more complex than you make them, and your one dimensional analysis based on a purposeful misconstruing of a word, leading you to smear an entire religious group adds no value to any conversation, and reveals you as a likely a bigot.
Early in my career, I worked for two companies run by orthodox Jews that sold lots of goods on Amazon.
For anyone struggling to understand why this might be interesting , do yourself a favour watch “one of us” on Netflix. The disparity between Hasidic culture and our modern world is massive.
People making a business selling on Amazon.. If you left out the religion, would this be a story?
Is the point to get NYT and BuzzFeed clicks? Is it to get more attendance at the 'how you can get rich selling on Amazon' conferences? For better or worse, is it to show how a certain demographic is making a lot of money?
I'm not a fan of these articles..
> If you left out the religion
Are you saying that if they left out the interesting part it wouldn't be interesting?
It’s interesting that a extremely disproportionate number of Orthodox Jews sell on Amazon. The mesh (as opposed to clash) of religion and modern technology and culture makes the article meaningful.
This type of article panders to a couple audiences:
- 'Gee, those super religious Jews who I though are technologically deficient.. well they are really quite capable and successful selling on Amazon'
- 'Those Jews are making a lot of money selling on Amazon'
I have issues with both of those responses
So you assume only bigoted responses to anything that mentions religion, meaning you have issues with any mention of religion at all. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There seem to be quite a few people on this forum that both find this article interesting, and don't fall into the enumerated thought buckets.
I, a Jew, don't think either of those things and do think this article is interesting and has merit.
Sometimes it's just cool to see how people different from ourselves live their lives.
"Ourselves?"
As a Litvack Jewish person who goes to a Hasidic Minyan some of "us" are those people. ;-)
Weird phrase to get agitated about but I never said anyone wasn't...
I do believe you have misread this. "Ourselves" is used because "me" would not be correct, but really the meaning is "me the author" in that sentence. I would suggest a more generous re-reading.
Halevei the most Litvish comment here.
"ourselves" as in from the perspective of the person writing that comment, people who are different than them. No need to get defensive.
It's a piece on how a group with particular cultural and societal constraints is enabled by technology. Seems like a story to me.
it's interesting because it gives insight into a culture and community we typically don't have access to. the point isn't amazon - the point is the hasids.
Any story or comment about Jews coming up with a clever way of making money feels anti-semitic to me.
Perhaps you weren't aware that the reason Jews have for a long time been so engaged in commerce is that long ago they got kicked out of their homeland and so many of them weren't able to support themselves any longer with their traditional occupations of farming and herding. So it is not that there is something greedy about Jews, they are just, like everyone, trying to survive.
I'm aware that. I'm saying the article feels like a trope or playing to a stereotype. Maybe I should read the Buzzfeed article, which someone mentioned displayed more sensitivity.
maybe because you're projecting? it's a local culture piece (it's in the ny region section). for better or worse the hasids are large component of ny culture.
Projecting? Have you spent any time on 4chan?
Yet another example of how a decentralized free market has innumerable and unexpected positive outcomes, such as letting a restricted and insular community become prosperous and self-sufficient. Don't be fooled by calls to allow the government to take over tech - this outcome would never have been centrally planned by any bureaucrat.
article is behind paywall
Just disable JS on the page.
Good advice for almost all pages.
Seems like an unusually large percentage of posts on Hacker News are behind paywalls, some soft, some hard, some with a maximum free articles per time-unit. I peruse most of the top stories daily and can't read a good number of them making me have to just read the comments to get a sense of the article. It is seriously annoying. I wish there was some kind of flair or warning on these posts.
You can block JavaScript on a site basis and read it. There might be some multimedia you sometimes miss but its good if you just want to read the text.
I think HN should have a rule that if someone puts up a link that is behind a paywall, they should give some way to get around it. Like they should make the first comment a set of instructions, like disable JS or an alternative link.
Or you could just ignore things you aren’t willing to pay for, instead of expecting to be able to steal them.
The problem with that is I would have to subscribe to a hundred different publications, and a new one every few days.
If I could buy a subscription that covered all online publications, and for a reasonable price, I would be quite happy. As it is I already have 5 print subscriptions.
archive.fo You're welcome.
I'm with you.
Mods currate the front page, so everything I read here seems like an advertisement.
We curate the front page for interestingness (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Advertisement has nothing to do with it. If there's a class of articles you're seeing here consistently that you don't think gratifies intellectual curiosity, I'd like to know what they are. Usually the trouble is that users don't all share the same curiosity, but it's possible that we need to make a change somehow.
We also try to make sure that hard-paywalled articles don't appear on the front page, though that's gotten complicated because those publications work differently for different users.
Thanks, keep up the good work.
I agree with the other user that mentioned it would be nice to have some indication of hard or soft blocks. I realize that wouldn't be easy, especially to be completely accurate with, but even if it was done for a subset of sites that often appear it would be a nice feature.
god forbid people get paid for their work