Interesting to see discussion on Reddit from r/AmazonFC are pretty negative , wonder if these are genuine employees comment for PR team hired by Amazon
as a union diesel engine mechanic i can guarantee most, if not all these comments are complete PR.
I went on strike about ten years ago to protest mandatory overtime and lack of chemical PPE. the minute we authorized the strike, we had news channels from three states covering us and a billboard up the road that demanded an end to the strike by "concerned" truckers was erected in hours. Every day I could count on at least four emails from various sources, everything from "your union is cancelled" to "union declared illegal" and everything in between including offers to work for more pay but no contract. weekends were nearly a dozen phone calls, mostly robo, threatening pay cuts and layoffs and asking to cancel your healthcare and benefits.
we stuck out 19 days and won, and the very same news crews showed up again with no interviews from us, only management praising their great negotiation effort.
Would union supported/enforced comments count as astroturfing as well? I think it’d be interesting to ban pay for picketing & comments, though I’m not sure it’s enforceable.
If the union pays you because you are not working, and you choose to use that time to talk about how much you value unions on the internet, that's not astroturfing. If the union pays you TO post about how good the union is on the internet, that IS astroturfing.
At one point, amazon had a literal program where warehouse workers could opt to sit at a desk and post propaganda comments instead of doing their normal manual labor job.
Strike pay (at least often) requires picketing to qualify. Unions also often pay people to post comments online and otherwise present the union’s perspective to media or the public. Sometimes these people are listed as unit leaders, or have other ‘union management’ positions.
This seems like something a disclosure would reasonably solve. The anti-union PR posts aren't going to disclaim that they were paid by Amazon to post the comment but the pro-union wouldn't give a shit.
Officially, but Reddit enforcement of rules went to shit about the same time as the rest of the internet. Now they allow whatever brings them money and disallow whatever doesn't.
It wakes a ton of people up rhat thought they could righton,righton with different decorations. Its going to be worse, the moment trump is revealed as a failure when it comes to system takedown ..
Either you think the CEO was an undeserving victim, or you think that only billionaires and their enforces deserve a monopoly on lethal force.
So, what's your take on this recent scenario:
Ukraine assassinated a Russian general that authorised plans for chemical attacks that killed civilians. The general never directly murdered anyone in person, never "pulled a trigger", but was ultimately responsible for many deaths.
Was Ukraine morally wrong in this act? Should they just let someone sit comfortably in a Moscow office and sign paperwork to cause suffering and death in Ukraine? Should they bend over and take it?
If not, why not?
If so, why?
Either way, please explain why Americans should or should not "bend over and take it" where "it" is death to the tune of tens of thousands a year -- orders of magnitude more than killed by that Russian general.
Why not? They are the very real choices people are making.
Some would argue that lethal force is always wrong, even when you're being killed for money. Sorry, sorry... allowed to die without care ... for slightly enriching people that are already very, very, very rich.
Others, like the rebels in Syria, or the defenders in Ukraine, would argue otherwise.
> this statement is just pure mindfuck.
If you've never seen things in this way, you should start.
The billionaires see it that way.
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
These laws, these norms you cling to... these are not designed to protect you.
> I'm not going to condone lynching or vigilante killings in any civil context.
Things stop "being civil" when death at an industrial scale becomes wildly profitable, legal, protected, and enforced by violent police.
The same police that will stand outside a school for an hour and tackle parents who do try to protect the lives of their own children.
> We're at civil war already,
You are, you just haven't noticed.
In case you do notice, you'll realise you're on the side that's losing because while you wring your hands in fear of things turning violent, the other side has been feeding your side into a meat grinder for profit at an industrial scale.
My Boomer Dad was a Teamster. I remember there was a several-weeks-long (might have even been months-long?) strike when I was a kid, probably around the late-70s. Shit was real. One day I saw him loading baseball bats and clubs into the trunk of his Buick before he left the house. I was just a kid; I had no idea what was going on. I asked him about it later in life and he just said, "That's how it was back then. We had to fight for what we wanted." And he was being literal. He talked about people who were even suspected of crossing the line or talking to management would get a severe beatdown. He even said people would harass management and their families. Dudes would sit outside their homes, just to intimidate them. And, he said they rarely got punished because the cops supported their union and would look the other way. Different times.
our local PD was union at the time. we never got any overt support but there were a few kind gestures. on a cold morning an officer dropped a box of chemical hand warmers by the dumpster and made it very clear he was disposing of them because they were "the wrong size" and he wouldnt be back today to check on them. about three days later his supervisor made a trip to the dumpster and left out a box of donuts and a big take-out coffee jug, warning us we absolutely shouldnt consume them after he left as the donuts were the made the wrong size and the coffee was too hot.
reddit is no longer a good place to try and get a pulse on general sentiment. comment section is filled with bots and the front page has the most random content i have ever seen, like occasional random creep shots of celebs that get like 3,000 upvotes that gain more transaction than current events.
I used to use search engines with the "site:reddit.com" keyword to get more genuine reviews about products and services. Now it more than not leads to posts where the top comment is some gpt'ed text with a clear referral link and far more up votes than an obscure subreddit on some niche object would warrant.
It's interesting, because I know a few warehouse workers, and they all sing the praises of the job (all in the Bay Area). But yet I can see what the conditions are. I feel like every warehouse is a semi-independently run fiefdom and some are run a lot better than others.
Two things can be true:
- A particular class of job may be very challenging, or worse
- The same class of job may be the best available option for some folks in some regions
And, of course, some folks may have a good experience even while others do not.
It will have more business people asking about robots, other than that I doubt it will. Amazon don't even care if the packages are late because of this, they still get your purchase.
they truly don't care. I had an order that was supposed to be delivered tuesday by 8pm (delivery guarantee!) but at 8:10 switched to "now arriving Dec 27th". The person I chatted with gave me a $10 amazon credit and refused to even acknowledge my (much more expensive for them) solution that since all the items in my order were showing "delivery by Dec 19th" they should resend everything Prime. They still have my money even if I don't have Christmas presents, and I need to go through the hassle of returning it - when I eventually get it.
> don't even care if the packages are late because of this, they still get your purchase.
Not at this time of the year. If something doesn't have a pre Christmas delivery, it won't be bought in many cases. Or even if it does, people may hear about the strike and not risk it.
It'd be the delivery thad' be late, not the delivery estimate on the order page. The potential impact here would be related to how many newly triggered returns happen due to the gift arriving after Christmas.
i used to work on bezo's fc automation back in 2012 to 2016, they've been they'd been talking about "lights out fc" being just around the corner since since those days. if anything we had adjacent teams that were working on temp worker and worker scheduling systems, "people management" systems that had more interest from leadership. imo a lot of the automation stuff ended up being real timid and imo really was to juice valuation.
Amazon is only well run for the shareholders and executives. It is not well run for the people filling the boxes. It seems down right sadistic. Like the executives don't even see them as people.
And they sent me a 43" Samsung TV when I ordered a 42" LG OLED. How the hell can their many billions of dollars of IT investment not automatically scan the barcode on the box or weight the box or use computer vision and notice this error before they sent the wrong TV out?
A couple of years ago, my (now) wife ordered her mother a battery case for Christmas because she had seen the same one at our apartment and mentioned wanting one. Since it was ordered using the gift wrapping options, we didn't open it when it arrived, and she gave it to her mother to unwrap. Her mother was quite confused when she unwrapped her gift and found a sushi-making kit. It's become a recurring joke in our family now that we need to check any gifts ordered from Amazon in advance to avoid accidentally giving someone a sushi kit.
If you buy this [0] Startech 25U open server rack (unsure about other sizes), there is a non-zero chance you’ll receive a pallet of them – 9 in total – for the price of one. It’s a running joke in r/homelab. It happened to me, and then I found out it happened to a lot of people.
Also, for this reason, it’s somewhat common to see them for sale at a steep discount in r/homelabsales. Only makes sense if you’re within driving distance, but hey – cheap rack.
The amount of leverage workers have is proportional to how hard it is for the company to replace them. Replacing unskilled workers isn't that hard so those workers don't have much leverage.
The only real solution is to become skilled workers. Which, almost ironically, is to do the thing the company threatens to do -- find a way to automate work like this, so the people working at the warehouse are robotics technicians etc.
> Isn't Amazon getting to the point where they're having trouble finding employee candidates they haven't previously fired?
This apparently happened somewhere in a rural area with a small local population. It's obviously not going to happen at a warehouse in, say, New Jersey.
And to the extent that it actually happens somewhere it's not like their response would be hard to predict. Calculate how much they would have to increase local wages to expand the candidate pool enough, see if this is less than it costs to move the warehouse somewhere with a larger pool of workers, if not then move the warehouse.
Notice that Amazon warehouse workers get paid more than minimum wage. This is why. Unskilled workers don't have zero leverage, they just don't have much.
it's likely not the case here but more powerful unions can block non-union scabs from taking the jobs of striking workers (in that this is usually part of the contract the union has with the employer). at scale, unions have a lot more power to affect things
but the point is it's not about worker skill when unions are at sufficient power levels
When unions get to be that size is when they get captured by organized crime and other interests, because then they're acting as a de facto government and susceptible to the same corrupting influences but without the (by no means perfect but far better than nothing) safeguards we put on governments in modern democracies.
This is also why corporate monopolies are a fiasco and need to be prevented as well.
The general rule is "prevent any one group from consolidating too much power". If someone's solution is "let our group consolidate a huge amount of power" they're admitting they're the villains.
What's funny is even if you hate unions, surely the demographics who frequent HN at least has a solid grasp of the capital investments and R&D costs necessary to "replace them with robots" - We are talking about delivery station roles here. You gotta build something that, amortized, can do it for less than $500/day in a climate where Wall Street is putting pressure on tech stocks to control costs. Have at it.
We heard this same argument about automation in food service. Remember when Miso/Flippy was going to put all those $20/hour fast food workers out on the street? Turns out hiking prices was way easier.
> We heard this same argument about automation in food service.
Have you been to a fast food joint lately? Even at peak traffic they have maybe three people working when they used to have 7-10. Now you walk in and you have to order from the kiosk, which is literally the iPhone app on a vertical touch screen. You don't even talk to a human until they hand you the food.
Ordering from a machine actually makes sense, and, crucially, is easy to implement.
Replacing the actual burger-fliping workers, or order-assembling workers is much harder. An adequate robot, even if built with today's technologies, will likely never pay for itself.
this doesn't happen with a literal human flipping burgers replaced with a robot flipping burgers. It's complex drinks made with a button push instead of mixed by hand, more of the delivery chain pushed to the left of the restaurant, like Tim Horton's making all the donuts in factories and "finishing" them in store instead of hiring bakers, shifting traffic to drive through, and gig-delivered take away. Having customers order and queue up, etc. There are way less employees and they are only doing the "hard" work, massively parallelized.
That might be what you see but during your rush shifts you're looking at 10+ at places like McDonalds with 6-7 during less busy shifts and those 6-7 people are busting their asses. Churn has also jumped way-up post-COVID. A bunch of once-reliable food service workers moved up the labor value chain and left the industry and this has left the F&B industry with some pretty major staffing problems.
Fast food - like McDonalds - have followed through with this. They now have a single human register and much smaller kitchens, and 1/2 their business is take out. It's not all automation; a lot of it is factory prep and shifting the work on to customers & gig workers.
That's fine, this is the natural and expected response to labor getting more expensive. The bad outcome is when government steps in to artificially push wages down.
Almost none of it is automation. McDonalds invested in a fully automated fry machine but they basically don't get deployed because thanks to COVID "labor shortages", they all figured out a much better strategy:
Just have fewer employees and make them do more work. It doesn't matter how much people bitch about wait times and product quality on twitter, they still buy. Americans love to bitch about things on the internet, but they still wait in the drive through line for tens of minutes for "fast food" that is demonstrably worse than it was five years ago.
Americans have comprehensively demonstrated that they are unwilling or unable to just, not fucking buy stuff. Despite all the rhetoric about the economy suffering before the election, even here on HN (which coincidentally disappeared the day after the election, how about that...) we are seeing record breaking holiday consumer spending. It's fucking insane how willing Americans are to just throw money at companies that are outright hostile to them. I cannot fathom the unwillingness to not buy stuff that the average American has.
Quality, service, value, all of it will continue to degrade until US consumers finally figure out that you have an OPTION to, you know, not buy worthless trash. When PepsiCo basically doubled their prices in the past couple years, for products that are literally colored water and automatically cooked potato chips, which had near zero increase in cost of inputs, PepsiCo called it "inflation". In France, the news ran articles about clear price gouging by PepsiCo. In the US, Americans blamed it on Biden, somehow, including Americans who literally grow and sell the potatoes PepsiCo buys and therefore KNOW that PepsiCo did not pay more for those inputs, and KNOW that Biden has zero input on the prices anyone in the chain charge. It's insane to me how unwilling my fellow countrymen are to just consider they might be taken advantage of by business.
They correctly figured out customers could tolerate slower times for fast food because a significant chunk of their orders are delivery and pickup, so having it take 7 minutes instead of 3 won't really be noticed by the consumer.
(off topic) I was thinking today about how robots should throw packages to each other. It'd be faster and it's all the things robots are great at: hand-eye coordination, weight and holding angle, and group coordination.
> If the world doesn't need a particular task to be done by humans, then the task should be performed by robots.
The problem is, our society isn't ready for that shift, not even close. Employment opportunities for the low skilled have all but gone down the drain - there is a reason why Walmart, Amazon and the other usual suspects love to set up shop in devastated communities: they have a captive audience that has no other realistic opportunities for gainful employment and thus is much, much less likely to resist when faced with exploitative and/or abusive conditions.
Warehouse work and logistics in general is the last employment opportunity many of these people have, and while it being replaced by robots may be better for society as a whole (if one follows the belief that all work should be done by machines so that humans can follow their individual interests), just standing by idling around while the markets enforce the shift is going to be a political disaster.
Everyone cheering for automation and AI always says "oh we'll just implement UBI" but none of them ever seem to actually be working to help make that happen; I doubt we will get a glimpse of that until things get bad enough for CEO-murder to be a much more common thing.
UBI at this point is entirely a political decision to be made by the legislators. How do you expect others to "actually be working to help make that happen"?
I worked for a Walmart store as a young man. It was well run, and they were adamant that you took your breaks throughout the day. I faced no exploitative or abusive conditions and was well paid.
This is the same experience a friend of mine had working for Walmart for a couple years, until they moved earlier this year. I suspect each location is going to vary, though, just like any chain store.
Yeah, but manufacturing picked up a lot of the slack... until that went down the drain when China came, so Amazon et al picked up the slack, but now there is nothing left.
The US Navy is rebuilding to fight a war with China. There are jobs available in the shipyards, mostly unionized. It's tough work, probably harder and more dangerous than an Amazon warehouse.
>It's tough work, probably harder and more dangerous than an Amazon warehouse.
My buddy who is a union welder at a shipyard doesn't have to piss in a bottle to make his quota. His job is fucking fantastic, thanks to the union, and the hardest part of it is navigating controls around what the navy allows civvies to touch.
It's predominantly a lot of professional work by tradies, NOT grunt work. Use the proper PPE and you probably won't even have any lasting injuries or bodily damage. Take your time and follow the rules and you won't even be the cause of death for a hundred sailors like with the Thresher.
>> the hardest part of it is navigating controls around what the navy allows civvies to touch.
Well, that and using the proper PPE so that you probably won't even have any lasting injuries or bodily damage and taking your time/following the rules so that you probably won't even be the cause of death for a hundred sailors or coworkers.
Compare that to putting the wrong shipping label on the package. I'd rather piss in a bottle than be a welder, to be honest.
The US Navy, like all parts of the DOD, knows that the best way to build support for any weapons system is to have part of it manufactured in a Congressman's district. The most unsinkable projects are built, little by little, in 435 districts.
So, yes, the shipyards need to be on the coast. But much of the material on the inside of the ship may be built elsewhere.
>while it being replaced by robots may be better for society as a whole (if one follows the belief that all work should be done by machines so that humans can follow their individual interests)
While "robots" are a fairly recent concept, the advancement of human civilization has been predicated on ever increasing efficiencies of human labor.
> While "robots" are a fairly recent concept, the advancement of human civilization has been predicated on ever increasing efficiencies of human labor.
Agreed. But in general, the efficiency gains got redistributed to the people - usually, by (bloody) revolutions and strikes.
Across the Western world, we haven't seen any meaningful progress in that redistribution in a fucking century - the 40 hour work week got introduced around 1926 [1]. Instead, all we got was that women now get exploited by employment providers as well, so the pool of available labor power virtually doubled, driving down wages while over the last few decades housing costs exploded and the demand for labor went down, further driving down wages. It remains open if the rise of pacifism and "non-violent action" in general that has happened in parallel in the same timeframe was coincidence, causation or consequence.
We are in for a wild ride over the next years. Luigi will not be the last one of his kind, I think this was just the start...
Is that really the case? So far all the examples I've seen were closer to "change X caused people to shift to another type of job, or to a new area opened up by X". Very recently some creative work has been impacted by LLMs, but apart from that, are there real stats on the intellectual work being taken over?
Amazon warehouse work pays almost $20/hour where I live, which is well above the federal minimum wage and more than almost every other company in the area for this type of work. This is a living wage.
"should be replaced with robots"
I also think it's funny we are having this discussion. When songwriters and other creators were complaining about piracy in the 2000s, the general response from the tech community was that this was the future and you didn't deserve to earn a living.
$20/hr still isn't much money and you can only survive, note I'm not saying thrive here, on that amount in the poor areas in America.
There are very few jobs that actually pay well in America nowadays, and the ones that do tend to be congregated in few geographical areas and require extensive schooling.
The vast majority of Americans deserve more money.
Also check your priors, there are many musicians that do not complain about piracy and even partake in it (see Trent Reznor being part of oink/what, or Dead Kennedys encouraging people to record music on their tapes). I know many musicians that would upload their music on private trackers, regardless of what their label wanted or said.
> The vast majority of Americans deserve more money.
This is pedantic but I strongly dislike when people say anyone deserves anything.
I support an equitable system that allows citizens to move up in economic class (which we don't currently have) but I don't subscribe to the idea that everyone inherently deserves anything.
That puts you at odds with the tradition of natural rights. The Declaration of Independence says everyone deserves life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The Declaration of Independence doesn't actually say that. It says that everyone is endowed with certain unalienable rights including the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness whether they deserve it or not. Just like people have the right to free speech or a jury trial in front of their peers, whether they deserve it or not.
The distinction is important because whether someone deserves something is a normative statement while having the right is a descriptive statement.
What you deserve because of your right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is up for debate.
its "have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", not "deserves" which is entirely different. Go to your boss and tell them you deserve a pay raise.
No, I don't think so. You specifically rejected the idea that everyone inherently deserves anything. Objectivists would agree, but I don't think Ayn Rand would have been popular with Jefferson.
Perhaps you could clarify - what do you mean by "everyone", and what do you mean by "anything?" Does everyone deserve UBI? Do workers deserve disposable income? Do the homeless deserve housing? Healthcare? Food? An attorney, if arrested? Do children deserve college? High school? Primary school? Orphanages?
You can't say that nobody inherently deserves anything, then say I'm intellectually dishonest when I take you at your word.
"There are very few jobs that actually pay well in America nowadays, and the ones that do tend to be congregated in few geographical areas and require extensive schooling"
There are plenty of blue collar jobs that don't require schooling and can make a comfortable living. If you are talking about a job anyone with a pulse can get? This won't ever pay well.
"I know many musicians that would upload their music on private trackers, regardless of what their label wanted or said."
All the indy artists I knew ended up having to get out of the business because they couldn't sell their music anymore (people would just download it and expect it for free) and making money from live performances are mostly controlled by large corporations.
Piracy only hurt independent artists and forced all of them with talent to sign with large labels to make a decent living.
Again, with piracy, you want no protection for the artist (and even justify why taking their music, without asking, is fine). Yet, you want the unions to collude with the government to force corporations to halt all technological advances, so workers don't lose their jobs.
Can you please name a single city in the US where you can easily live on $20/hr that isn't stricken with massive poverty?
I find it insulting that you don't think Americans, especially those that work, don't deserve dignity through their labor in having a meaningful life. Especially when they work for one of the richest companies in the world.
A livable wage is a wage a husband can make to raise a family, including housing, food, transportation, schooling, etc.
$20/hr is about $40k/yr. Using 30% towards housing, that means they can only denote $12/yr to housing, or $1k/month. At current interest rates, that translates to a $150,000 house.
What can you get for $150? There's nothing in any area I've looked that was actually habitable ever since the government's COVID debacle.
I think your standard for a living wage is way, way too low. We should be able to comfortably afford food, housing, and medical care at minimum - both without spending most of your paycheck, to be able to afford it during periods of joblessness, and with a retirement at a reasonably young age. You cannot do this at $20/hour, and the only reason this isn't the normal standard is incredible greed and capitalism.
I don't think it's worth considering the comparison.
But sure, maybe working at a distribution center pays well enough where you're located. Likely that's not the case where these strikes are happening. It's expensive out there.
Also, what you wrote gives the impression of "I've got mine already so I don't care what happens to you."
Everyone deserves the opportunity to earn a livable income, but not all jobs can or should be paying a "living wage." Some jobs by their nature are part time and some people only want to work part time.
That doesn’t seem like a contradiction. Full time jobs should offer livable wages, part time could offer less. However, you can’t do some shenanigans like force workers to be part time by making them work less than 40 hours a week just so they don’t get classified as full time.
What is a livable wage? That differs if someone is living with their parents, or if they have 3 kids and are living alone and the sole earner in the family.
My unscientific view is a person working 40 hours a week should at least be able to afford a modest home, fresh food and other ordinary expenses. If a job pays less than that and needs to be topped up by some kind of public assistance then we should think of that as a subsidy to the business rather than welfare to the employee.
There’s many facets to the eco only tho. Why blame Amazon for not paying a livable wage instead of blaming the government and NIMBYs for shitty planning and not building enough housing? If housing and healthcare cost 1/3 of what it does today wouldn’t this be more of a living wage?
Negative. All jobs should be paying liveable wages. One off type of jobs for 'this and that' sure, but showing up every day and expectation for deliverables or being on time? Absolutely, pay a liveable wage. Too many Ferrari, BMW, new speed boat from the PPP loans greed to show that employees mean nothing. All jobs deserve liveable wages. We should be advocating for a more peaceful society.
Some large number of them have been "agitated". You can't acknowledge that propaganda exists which is capable of manipulating people into doing things they wouldn't do on their own (or that they shouldn't do), and then say that the left does not create that sort of propaganda.
They're striking not for better wages, but so that some local or state politician wins an election in 2026.
Yeah, they're being agitated alright... by horrible working conditions, declining real wages, and the people who apologize for it and pretend they're all bots or something rather than real people with real interests that are every bit as deserving of respect as some corpo's bottom line.
Anyone thinking this is a one time thing and is going to blow over hasn't been paying attention.
To start with, any definition that ends with a constant number is wrong. The living wage in an area depends on the cost of living in that area. I don't have that number on hand, but I expect it to be included in any discussion of what people should get payed.
After that, we need to ask how much profit a person should be allowed to make on their labor.
Healthcare, decent sized apartment, 5 weeks of paid vacation, free or easily affordable pre school, overtime pay, decent schools and free college, is a good start. Then some left over on top after essentials so you aren't living paycheck to paycheck.
So you acknowledge that the job should be done but the people doing it deserve to live in squalor even though they work a full time job. Just for corporate profit and your convenience.
Just so you know, all things I listed are things most people in Western Europe already have. Including employees of Amazon and McDonald's.
Here's my perspective. Not exactly related, but I hope you understand how I think:
If I am a small shipping company, and all I need is someone to wrap boxes and store them, and the load isn't much, then should I be paying them full time for the job? Heck, should I pay them a living wage? No. I pay them the value of the job.
Obviously, we need a certain minimum wage because nobody deserves to get scammed and make 10 cents a day, but at the same time, this push for all these benefits isn't realistic. I wish it was, but it isn't.
Obviously, my example is different from Amazon, but this is more a business owner perspective.
I don't know, but I think it is unfair to put all responsibility onto the business owner. In theory, a job is an agreement where you work for someone, and they pay you. Certain benefits may be required depending on circumstances, but making companies provide so many benefits is not a fair option.
Keep in mind, I'm not opposed to companies providing benefits, but I think regulating this would create more trouble than good.
We let businesses exist for one reason, so people can actually live (and I say let, because it is society - that is, its individuals - that has a put a system in place whereby such entities can exist and do what they do). If a job doesn't pay enough for that, the business isn't worth keeping around from the society's point of view. Workers should be paid decently, no matter what — profits or no profits. If an industry or company can't afford to pay fair wages, it’s not worth having, plain and simple.
On top of fair pay, companies owe their employees more. Businesses don't exist in a vacuum—they're tools we use to make life better for everyone. The entire economy is just a system we built to serve people, not the other way around.
Right now, companies often act like mini-dictatorships, where the tradeoff — giving up freedoms in exchange for money — ends up hurting society even if it props up the economy.
In short: if a company isn't contributing positively, it's failing at its purpose and should either disappear, or forced to fulfill its role.
My ex wanted to go work at a veterinarian's office. Several in the area had openings, but one significant caveat:
Each was offering only part-time hours (16-24h) but required "full-time availability".
That is not an fair exchange of effort.
Small business owners all too often (as much as they are also a valuable part of the community) think that they are entitled to far too much of their employees, and seem to think they have some inherent right to not just their business, but to their desired profit margins.
One local business here closed recently with this self-centered, presumptuous and tone-deaf message:
> It is so sad to see that our dream with all its potential has collapsed because the community was not willing to support it.
I understand your frustration with these unfair offers, and I am not supporting that. In your case, you make an unfair generalization of small business owners and base your explanation of it.
In theory, if one employer offers a job with great benefits, they will win over the employer with not as many benefits. Clearly, that wasn't happening in your example.
Unless you're the only one selling a product that people need and want to buy you're going to be undercut by your competitors that aren't paying for these things either as that is how it works in America. Quite expected when there's no worker shortage so companies have to compete for workers, but that's not the kind of competition capitalists want.
In most of Europe workers wouldn't have to worry about any of that, everyone enjoys the basic package. So your competitors wouldn't be able to undercut you on price by not providing healthcare and thus force you to do the same.
Is it the best system for startups, corporate profits and the stock market? Obviously not but people are happier.
Thank you for your response. I hope I'm not misunderstanding here, but enlighten me if I am.
I wish all the benefits are possible, but it isn't feasible because different countries function differently, and I think your point explains it much better than I could have explained it.
America and Europe are different places, with different economies and as a result have different luxuries they can afford and costs they must bear. This means it is easier to offer benefits in Europe than America.
> Healthcare, decent sized apartment, 5 weeks of paid vacation, free or easily affordable pre school, overtime pay, decent schools and free college, is a good start.
This is literally the (by-law) standard of living for people with full time jobs with employment contracts[1] where I grew in Italy... that's not Silicon Valley, but one part of Italy that has been depressed for many years. (It's also the second top region in Italy by life expectation, that's between the 6th and 7th place in the world ranking by country) So much that in this very town Amazon is building a new warehouse that opens next year.
[1] Granted, permanent positions are rare; but permanent or temporary positions do offer this stuff by law. Fake contracts (partita IVA) and the gig economy exists there too.
Free college almost... public universities tuition fees are 500-4000 EUR per year, depending on the location and prestige.
I don't think it's a question of who deserves what. They deserve a living wage. The kids deserve to get their presents on time. I deserve a pony. The question is how whether to see it as a smart tactical choice to get that they "deserve" or a cynical move to strike when they get maximum publicity and do maximum damage.
I would apply the term "cynical" to the decisions made by Amazon's management which create the working conditions that compel their workers to strike, while providing top 1% compensation to themselves.
These people are just doing what they have to do to survive. If anything, going on strike a truly desparate move. Insinuating that they are childishing in doing so (as if they feel they "deserve a pony") on the other hand, seems simply -- snide.
You're going to have a bad time if you plan your strike at the most opportune time for your company.
Whether or not striking is good for society is a separate discussion, but striking when you have the most leverage over your company makes the most sense for those striking to get what they want.
Just to add to this, the point of laborers striking is to show the company the value of their labor. If laborers not laboring means profiteers not profiting, it's good for the laborers' negotiating power because the profiteers really want to profit.
Had to buy some simple toolkit today. It was 5 bucks on Amazon, but I decided to find a local store that sells it. Same price btw.
I think we should be a bit more aware about the impact of ordering everything through Amazon. Not only regarding delivery, but also the message it sends to local stores.
I've had this exact sentiment for many years but... what are we supporting really?
Is it because you want a distributed network of inventory across the country near you in case of emergency?
Is it because you like talking to someone when doing purchases?
Is it because you think someone is doing a societal good by parking money in inventory they brought near you?
Is it because you just don't like someone doing it more efficiently and getting "too" rich? ie dislike of big corporations?
Like I feel like I should want to support local business but it is way less efficient and I can't really convince myself that I'm not just repeating something my parents also said.
I found myself gravitating back to local stores after years of buying essentially everything on Amazon because local stores at least to some degree curate their inventory while Amazon increasingly does not. If you're looking for a specific product that doesn't matter as much (although Amazon also has counterfeiting problems). But if you're just looking to browse what's available in a certain category of product, Amazon is nearly unusable. You'll almost certainly find dozens of Chinese companies with randomly generated names selling what are essentially copies of the same product with no good way to pick one or even tell if they're any good (reviews being basically useless on Amazon these days).
Because they don't have the same unlimited inventory capacity, local stores have to put at least some effort into selling products with some base level of quality and focusing on the products most likely to sell in each category. Local stores are by no means perfect here, but they're vastly better than Amazon in this regard. And it's especially important because finding good independent product reviews on the internet these days is also a challenge, and even where they exist they're not reviewing whatever no-name Chinese brand Amazon is selling anyways.
While the junk item situation on amazon is real, I can't agree with this take about local stores. I find that local stores tend to have random crap that they want to sell rather than high-quality items.
I just searched for a Wifi Extender on Amazon. This [0] particular model has 3.6k reviews, and is the first option after "Amazon's Choice" Must be good, right? How about we scroll down to one of those reviews [1]. Oh, looks like it racked up a bunch of reviews for being a washing machine hose, and then changed product SKU.
You see the #1 option has 36K+ reviews. Looks pretty solid to me.
Yes, you can purchase pages and change the product, it's a known scam that I agree Amazon should crack down on. That still doesn't change the fact that there are super-popular items that are usually way better than what you can purchase locally.
I didn’t ignore the advice - I showed a link to a popular product that has thousands of almost perfect ratings that is readily available on amazon.
An even better way to do it is don’t use Amazon for discovery, and only buy stuff you’ve researched off the site. But walking into Amazon to buy something is just as likely to land you with crap as going into your local shop and doing so.
Yes, exactly my experience as well. And the more of a mom and pop store that it is, the worse this problem tends to be. I have actually audibly laughed out loud for a second before catching myself when seeing some of the prices.
Ironically, it's the big chains that seem to be the best on this. They have some curation and their pricing is usually a little higher than What I'll see on Amazon but isn't outrageous.
The big exception is anything edible, such as groceries. Anything edible on Amazon is going to be wildly overpriced. For edible items I definitely go to big chains that are local
It has been surprising to me for years that people put up with this, I find it really terrible as a shopping experience. Like shopping in the worst dollar store you’ve ever been in that’s also the size of a city and loaded with ads, except you can’t actually touch the products or smell the pervasive scent of cheap plastic while you browse. And they want you to pay a subscription!
Shopping from retailers that employ actual buyers feels like a real upgrade.
What you are supporting is local sustainability. The world would be better off with less global trade and more local productions. Local productions means a stronger community and more visibility for business practices, because it's more sustainable.
If a global business decides to just toss all the plastic it uses it in its backyard you'll never notice because it's 2000 miles away. If Amazon decides to treat their workers unfairly, you'll never notice. But you'll notice if a local business does it because you'll be walking in there every day. There's a level of accountability.
In my grandpa's village everything was local production and commerce but they all lived way worse than me and my friends that get paid through remote companies and spend our money online. It's incredibly unclear to me why a super poor and undeveloped local economy is better than a specialized globalized one. In my country there was a dictatorship with protectionism and when we opened things got way better, not worse.
Regarding me not noticing crimes, I think we have police and regulations for that.
> In my grandpa's village everything was local production and commerce but they all lived way worse than me and my friends that get paid through remote companies and spend our money online.
(1) That is because technology also takes away components of life that one can enjoy without being rich such as accesss to nature and local food production.
(2) The global economy is only so "good" because it takes advantage of the commons in poorer places. We simply should not have the capability to do that. You only benefit off the suffering of others.
On (1), I grew up behind the iron curtain in a pre-internet age next to a village (no TV, no organized entertainment). The typical non-working activity there was not to enjoy the beauty of nature (as farmers they were fed up with it) but to be bored, get drunk and start fights with anyone non local. When the economy opened up in late 1980s anyone who could ran out to cities.
I will take technology and some globalism any day. My 2c.
That's the thing that I see a lot of. I grew up in Africa, and was exposed to extreme poverty, since as far back as I can remember.
People living poor don't like it. They may have accepted it, and may have learned to deal with it, but they don't tend to like it. They want out, and generally jump at the chance to do so.
People in richer communities may have fantasies about "living closer to nature," but that doesn't usually involve things like shooing rats off your kids at night, or having your house collapse, when there's a 3.0 earthquake.
People in poorer communities may have unreasonable expectations of what having money will bring, and we often see poor people that get rich quick (think Lotto "winners"), having pretty miserable lives.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.
I picked a place to live that's close to nature, right across my back fence from millions of acres of public forest. I love it here. Poverty is not required. I commute to work via Starlink and most nonperishables are delivered to my front porch by UPS, mostly from Amazon. It's green on both sides of my fence, and it's a choice that normal people, who can work remotely, can make if they value it. My house is far cheaper than one in a city and local costs are lower. Amazon deserves credit for making such a lifestyle easier, and if we can export more of it, that sounds like an advance.
I understand the joy of your choices. I live in an old mill town that has had multiple Renaissances. I consider myself lucky because I live at the edge of the town and have a 10,000-square-foot lot that is in the process of intentionally rewilding. My house wasn't necessarily cheaper than other houses. It's much more living space, fewer neighbors, and roughly the same cost per month as a three-bedroom apartment closer to where my partner works.
The downside is that she has a 1 1/2 hour commute. Not because of distance but because of congestion. She is willing to take public transit, except it takes roughly twice as long to take the train, then a bus, then another bus, then a third bus, and not be able to do errands during the day or on the way home.
That is all well and good and a setup I totally understand. Now that I am in the US I like that my home is 15 steps away from a good-sized network of forest trails. Nature is good. But it is good because of technology: unlimited potable water, plenty of energy to keep my home warm, electricity and internet and cars to get me to the downtown or an airport when I feel like it.
But my opponent, to whom I responded, wants to "severely restrict technology". And this is what I have beef with. Those folks tend to be from rich countries and want to freeze things at their current, comfortable for them, level. They do not want to give up the running water, swear off vaccines and antibiotics or go through dental work without painkillers. Which is where a large part of the world would be stuck under this "technology restriction".
False dichotomy. Both situations are bad because both are predicated on lack of wisdom. A lack of wisdom in a poor place implies brawls and wanton violence. A lack of wisdom in a rich, technological age implies resource destruction and climate change.
Wisdom combined with restricted technology would be ideal, such as with the Amish. They have their problems but they show that a technologically restricted society is best. Note: I am not arguing for NO technology, but severely restricted technology.
Who is going to do this "severe restriction of technology"? The people themselves, as you write, do not want to do it.
And anytime a self-appointed elite start doing "what is best for the people" against their will, police repression and labor camps are also on the menu. Nah, I will take my freedom, including the freedom to make mistakes.
You assume the people always won't. There's a growing amount of skepticism towards technology and it's quite possible people will begin to hate it. I myself intend to spread the word about the dangers of technology to the best of my ability.
Ok, let's restrict the technology. What's the end goal?
Because 1 billion years from now, even if humanity is back to before the wheel technology plants will have disappeared and the oceans evaporated due to the sun.
If we want Earth originated life to have a chance to go over this bump something will have to go forward.
I find myself falling into this line of thought a lot: why should we make tradeoffs that favor the earth instead of hyper-accelerating progress to get off of it in preparation for its inevitable demise?
But isn’t the entire universe also going to meet its end as well, in an anticlimactic heat death? To overcome that, a civilization would have to reach universe-level Kardashev-like energy utilization capability, which would necessarily consume every particle in the universe, including themselves. It seems infeasible and unwise.
Maybe it would lead to the next big bang… but that still is a death and rebirth.
I think ultimately folks that support post-earth transhumanism operate on a notion that they themselves or their direct descendants that they will know and love in their own lifetimes will benefit from this space-colonial survivalist utopia. But IMO the reality is that if it is even possible, it would only happen long, long after they and everyone they could know or imagine are dead. It would likelier be accomplished by a society and civilization that they would hate and believe should be exterminated, due to the tradeoffs that would have to be made to accomplish it.
It’s essentially an individual’s desire to live forever and avoid death, projected onto the human race. I’m not convinced it would actually be nice to live forever. Better to focus on how to make the short time we have be as good as possible. IMO the idea of eternal life leads to all sorts of perversions of the now in exchange for an assumed eternal afterward.
> I find myself falling into this line of thought a lot: why should we make tradeoffs that favor the earth instead of hyper-accelerating progress to get off of it in preparation for its inevitable demise?
Get off and go where? Anywhere we could go is a million times worse for human habitation than post-demise Earth.
I think the idea is: assume sufficient technological advancement to be able to reach or even create countless other essentially exact replicas of earth? Barring that, plenty of ideas have been floated along the lines of extraterrestrial colonization and/or intergenerational spaceships.
I’m not arguing strongly in favor of “getting off it” so I’m not going to make much effort defending the position.
But I can imagine scenarios where we have to leave earth with intergenerational ships and only then acquire the ability to terraform, harness a star’s energy or travel at light speed.
(2) They where literally describing a poor area being better off with global trade.
Economies of scale and local advantages make the world better off. There’s no advantage to growing bananas in greenhouses in Iowa when you can grow wheat and trade with Panama.
Off the top of my head, the advantage in having bananas grown near you verses imported from Panama is that they are possibly fresher. This is assuming they can grow in your area and are in season of course. Produce is a special case in this regard locally sourced can potentially be healthier.
That is to say everything isn't objectively always 100% better with globalization and specialization at least not until come up with faster methods of shipping.
You can grow bananas in Alaska, but you can’t simply plant them outside. Thus my example assumes greenhouses built to a large enough scale to handle trees which is a major economic and environmental cost.
Comparative advantage applies to a huge range of things not just bananas. You could mine cobalt basically anywhere at extreme expense, but everyone is better off when that happens in locations that naturally have extremely high concentrations of cobalt.
That local trade involves taking advantage of the commons (putting CO2 in the atmosphere) to make it work. In my opinion, we do not have the right to take that advantage.
More CO2 is produced manufacturing and maintaining those greenhouses than shipping fruit from tropical locations.
So no, in this case local production is simply worse for the commons. More broadly things that cost dramatically more are generally worse for the environment in subtle ways.
Locally sustainable goods becomes really limited very quickly. You don’t just lose foods but technology as most of the periodic table becomes unavailable, even low tech items like salt needs to be imported into most areas.
On the other hand even occasional imports supports global trade and a dramatically higher standard living. The option to decarbonize global trade is exists, ‘local’ is more feel good nonsense than an actual path forward.
Well for one, lots of my local economy would just involve trade and helping community members for free, creating local community gardens, etc. Quite a lot can be possible with very little.
>my local economy would just involve trade and helping community members for free, creating local community gardens, etc. Quite a lot can be possible with very little.
Isn't this basically collectivization, which empirically has been shown to a massive failure? Without a monetary incentive, it's hard to get people to actually do stuff rather than lying on their couch and watching tiktok.
The first point is true, but most people do not choose it.
I do not think your second point stands. Almost the entire world is financially better off than it was in the past. Lots of third world economies are visibly richer than they were a few decades ago. Whose suffering are they benefitting from?
> The first point is true, but most people do not choose it.
Because they lack wisdom and human beings en masse operate on instinct, not wisdom.
> Almost the entire world is financially better off than it was in the past. Lots of third world economies are visibly richer than they were a few decades ago. Whose suffering are they benefitting from?
The classic reply of the economist. It's because the industrial world measures better off with variables like "life expectancy" and "money".
But a longer life does not a better life make, nor does money always equate to better off.
For example: if I could live next to a beautiful national park and walk there every day, that would be more valuable to me than a million dollars but living in a huge city. How does the prevailing evaluative mechanism account for that?
>The classic reply of the economist. It's because the industrial world measures better off with variables like "life expectancy" and "money".
I'd take arguments with objective metrics over handwavy arguments involving vibes, because with the latter you can make whatever argument you want with them and it's impossible to refute.
>For example: if I could live next to a beautiful national park and walk there every day, that would be more valuable to me than a million dollars but living in a huge city. How does the prevailing evaluative mechanism account for that?
You can ask for how much people are willing to pay for access to such a scenery and put a dollar value on it, or try to infer it based on housing price patterns (eg. house next to national park vs equally rural house next to corn fields).
> I'd take arguments with objective metrics over handwavy arguments involving vibes, because with the latter you can make whatever argument you want with them and it's impossible to refute.
You can define other concrete metrics. Distance to wild nature for example. That's concrete.
Also, there has been a visible improvement in living standards in third world countries. More money does not mean people have a better life in a rich country because there are diminishing returns on having more money. In a country where most people are a lot poorer and desperately need more money, more money does mean better off.
I am pretty sure people who can afford a proper house instead of a slum stack, or have a proper toilet, etc. are better off. As I said, there are visible improvements in the lives of the very poor.
"For example: if I could live next to a beautiful national park and walk there every day, that would be more valuable to me than a million dollars but living in a huge city."
That is your preference. Many people prefer living in a big city.
Also, what about how good your conditions of life are next to the beautiful national park? A nice house in a big city with good food and leisure time vs a shack in the beautiful place, hard work to grow a barely adequate amount of food?
The prevailing evaluative mechanism would note that you could take that million dollars, invest it in a 4% annuity, and move next to the national park of your choice with $40,000 in your pocket every year for the rest of your life. Indeed, there's a whole movement called FIRE of people who do things like this.
But there's also people like me, who say that sounds great but don't really mean it, because it's cringe to admit that you care about money.
The last 40 years have seen enormous economic growth outside the G7 to the point that North America and Western Europe no longer dominate the global economy.
Vice president Vance marrying a woman from India was a look into the future. The rich elite know what's happening.
That is the other extreme that is also bad. In economies like that protectionism supports inefficient local production - favouring some people at the cost of others. It is designed to funnel money away from some people to others.
The dominance of the economy by a few big companies also has the same effect - elimination of competition.
Where were the police and regulations when Boeing's products killed hundreds of people? Last time I checked, nobody among top management went to prison for that.
That's what "too big to fail" corporations can get you: failed products, anti-competitive environment, regulatory capture, no responsibility.
Getting fined for a few (hundred) million dollars is not responsibility, it's chump change for multi-trillion dollar corporations.
You can have "global business" that aren't "too big to fail". If anything, if you're pro-competition, blindly buying local has the same anti-competitive effects, because you're protecting the local firm from competition from elsewhere.
We have police and regulations but they only apply to the country you are in.
Most of the cheap stuff we buy is from other countries, they don't have the same regulations and protections that we have, hence part(not all) of the reason they are cheap.
Take a look at the cheap chargers on Amazon for example, marked as UL listed but you open them up and you see a circuit that is liable to start a fire. Someone reports it, the vendor vanishes and then there are 5 more listings under different names. See also the lead paint on toys scandal and poison pet food/treat scandals.
> What you are supporting is local sustainability. The world would be better off with less global trade and more local productions. Local productions means a stronger community and more visibility for business practices, because it's more sustainable.
This is true for the extreme minority of products that ARE produced locally.
If you buy a screwdriver from the privately-owned DYI shop around the corner it will have been produced in the same Chinese factory and shipped by the same boats and trucks as the one you'll buy from Amazon.
You're not at all supporting local sustainability, you're just paying more to add one more middleman.
Well, also, if you don't support Amazon, then you don't support the growth of a large company like Amazon which is one more component of the collection of big corporations that are exactly those responsible for globalization in the first place.
Globalization is one of the best things that has ever happened to humanity.
It allows whoever is willing to understand the peoples of the world share way more than what makes them different. Globalization, specially through the internet, but trade as whole, is my personal bet on what could "end all wars". In fact it is the first necessary step for the philosophical parts of the communist manifesto that are salvageable, the parts about the global coalition of common peoples working on shared goals and with similar baseline prosperity.
It is only good if you take a short-term, human-supremacist view of the world. If you consider all life to have worth independent of its value to humanity, then globalization is a horror. And then globalization and the industrial society is the cause of climate change, so it's only good in the short-term.
If by "short-term" you mean "until we stop killing each other in massive wars" (I doubt we can eliminate individual murder), I guess I agree, but by my estimation that will take several centuries at least. If by short term you mean before that, I doubt that we can agree. I'm talking about something that to me is already so far in the future that it was strange to hear "short-term" as a response to that argument!
Regarding human-supremacist view, I hadn't seen that expression before but if I interpret it correctly, I would say that describes a great big majority of the world population and I believe anyone would have a really hard time making this case to anyone on the street. I respect the moral purity in a way, but I think it's wildly impractical to call people around you human-supremacists, when like I said we are still not totally in agreement that things like wars should not happen. We say we do but there's never not been wars in our history. I don't know man, I feel like you're too deep in this rabbithole of morality to be able to have a normal discussion about getting a lightbulb at the local store when you start calling other people human-supremacists. But I do enjoy the banter!
Well, when I see people dump their shit into the homes of animals, then I think that comes from an attitude of human supremacy. When I see pristine forests cut down for profit but laws protecting the homes of people, that's human supremacy.
My goal is not to get most people to like me, or agree with my views. I fully acknowledge that I am a fundamentalist in the sense that I have a few axioms (all life is equal and technology must be regressed) and I have a zero compromise policy on that. Of course, unfortunately, to make a living I must participate in some of our atrocities.
I don't think it's necessary either, that I conform and discuss as others. There is no shortage of conformists. Either our destructive ways will stop, in which case I am working to bring them down through my writing, or I will fail. It's something I believe in and nothing will change that.
You have probably never in your whole life been to a forest that's more than a few hundred years old. Even the Amazon was largely managed by humans with fire prior to about the 15th-16th century.
> technology must be regressed
This is a morally deranged axiom. The life-giving benefits of so many technologies can't be overstated.
It is a bad thing. And you say it like it's a dichotomy.
And I could certainly get most of the comforts of modern life with 5% of the force of globalization. House, food, bed, some reading material, etc. I don't really care for technology, and I use it because it's part of my work and livelihood. BUT, I could easily be just as happy living a simpler life.
Believe me, I've already thought about it. I could be pretty much as comfortable with WAY less global trade. Most people buy way too much clothes, use way too much technology, none of which makes life more comfortable.
> Hell, without globalization you wouldn't even be able to do your job, where do you think your Nikon's, Canon's and Sony's come from?
(A) My point is that if there were other forms of labor, I wouldn't be less comfortable.
(B) Again, I'm arguing for a reduction in global trade, not an outright ban. My point is that it needs to be reduced.
Is it hypocritical to complain about your government even though they make the country that you live in? Of course, I'm using the resources I have, but I could be equally comfortable in a different world. My argument is that our current world is not necessary and not optimal.
Please get off the internet then, destroy your computer and go live on a farm. I don't say this to be an antagonist but it is what you yourself is suggesting others do.
I am not advocating for a simpler life off grid. If I were, I would disconnect now. I am advocating for the destruction of technology because it destroys nature. And sometimes, you need to use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house.
> BUT, I could easily be just as happy living a simpler life
Put your money or your comfort where your mouth is.
> if there were other forms of labor, I wouldn't be less comfortable.
Yes you would be. My grand parents all farmed and my grandfather was born in a cabin with a dirt floor and no electricity. His mother died in child birth, which was common at the time. He lost siblings to disease. His life was brutally difficult.
Let's face it, you're a math PHD and a photographer, you aren't made of the same stuff as people who clawed potatoes from the ground to avoid starvation. You have no clue what that actually means and you come here to lecture us about the comforts you yourself cling to. It's disgusting.
More false dichotomies. Technophiles love them. The choice isn't just between modern global capitalism and a dirt floor. It's just that you have a strong emotional attachment to technology and can't see a way out.
It isn't an emotional attachment, I just clearly see that lots of technologies lean on one another and you can't easily pick an choose which ones to abandon and the clock simply does not roll backwards. Every material good that isn't made of material near at hand relies on trade and specialized skills. The humble pencil is shockingly complicated to produce, as you can see in the 1958 essay "I, Pencil". If you want something truly useful to a life above meager dirt-bound poverty like say antibiotics you need big supply chains, complicated machinery, and packaging that in and of itself requires its own inputs and machinery. It's all related.
Your anti-humanist rants are frankly disgusting and morally revolting. Also, who goes around calling themselves doctor? Skimming you substack, I'm really impressed by the inability of a mathematician to string together logical arguments, "Five myths about technology" might be the most sophomoric and poorly argued blog post I've ever read arguing against technology.
For example, your claims that "Technology, in other words, grows and feeds on the medium of global humanity" is totally unsupported by your argument and fails in its basic understanding of peoples' revealed preferences. You argue by simple example, but fail to come up with anything more convincing than whatsapp usage in Brazil or cars in general. It's lazy writing and lazy thinking. Waving away cures and treatments for rare diseases by saying "such people are in difficult situations due to modern technology" is beyond foolish. You could name dozens of genetic hereditary diseases that have laways existed that were a death sentence two generations ago. Type 1 diabetes comes to mind.
Thank you for your input. You're right, and one day I hope to be elevated to your level of rationality and logical thinking. It's an honour to receive input from someone like you.
This is a common sentiment especially in Germany, but Hannah Richie in Not the End of the World shows multiple studies where the impact of CO₂ from transport is negligible for most foods. Other factors like what we decide to eat play a much greater role.
Your plastic example is a reasonable example, but I could also counter that if plastic is the problem then locally isn't necessarily more sustainable. Local farmers can also wrap their products in plastic. In the end, the plastic is there to increase the shelf life. Even most local products will need to have a shelf life of a few weeks. It's unreasonable to demand farmers stop batching their produce and instead demand they carry a few apples to the market each day.
Plastic SIGNIFICANTLY reduces waste. Freakanomics also pointed out that locally grown can have worse carbon footprint than food shipped around the world.
It's clearly not as black and white as you paint it. Local production uses the same materials that global production uses due to pricing. As long as transportation is cheaper than local production this will stay the same due to simple economics.
Also accountability is the same there, shops just buy their material regardless of working conditions and whatsoever. At least companies can be regulated based off of that.
The error is too systematic to say "just produce local".
To add to this, local production means that money can be moving through local financial institutions, with larger balances, which provides more liquidity to the community.
Those financial institutions hire local people. Other local businesses use the same financial institutions.
It's not about "simple economics". This isn't a supply and demand curve. It's about what a higher cash flow/economic output can mean for the subjective quality of life in a community:
- More jobs
- Higher wages
- Improved public services (schools, roads, healthcare)
- Increased property values
Tons of people in these comments talking about the shitty rural experience while seeming to miss the irony in "big cities are so much better" -- big cities started as small cities.
It's a start. As I always say, practices such as encouraging at least _local involvement_ is a start. Of course, another necessary step is revolution to bring down large companies.
The products sold in local stores are never produced locally. It's national or international products, just like on Amazon.
Buying from local stores pays the salaries of local salesmen, that is a benefit for the community. But wouldn't the community benefit better if they did a job that was needed instead?
local production happens in China though. if you live anywhere else, most of the stuff you can buy off Amazon was made in China. the local shops will ultimately buy it from China too.
Your ideas of how the world work are just patently false. A lot of local farms use large amounts of plastic everyday, its quite common to use plastic sheets to cover the ground when planting. You think you would know they are just dumping it into the pit on their land?
Global trade is one of the best things to happen to the world, it has improved the lives of many. All your advocating for is going back to a time which you did not live it but you romanticize. I suspect it was not as romantic as you make it out to be.
Yes, minimum wage jobs for the locals, most of the profit goes to Bezos.
When you shop at locally-owned stores the money goes to a local small business owner, truly staying local.
Look up how walmart used to destroy small town economies by bankrupting all the local businesses and converting all those previously middle-class shop owners into minimum wage jobs at walmart.
Most of the profit is distributed to a wide variety of shareholders in the form of rising share prices, reflected in things like retirement accounts. In other words, a lot of that profit goes to grandmas across the country with their money in a Vanguard retirement fund. Including grandmas in your local community.
And you really think the local shopowner kept all the profit in their community? E.g. they didn't send their kids to college in another state? Or build a house with materials sourced from all over the country?
It's a whole lot more complicated than you seem to think.
> And you really think the local shopowner kept all the profit in their community? E.g. they didn't send their kids to college in another state?
Imagine spending money and having that money allow people in your local community to afford college.
Then imagine thinking that’s a bad thing.
Obviously it’s complicated, but the gist is longer money stays in a local area, the better off that area is going to be.
It’s better for money to leave my town so that my neighbor’s kid could go to college than it is for me to get two day shipping on a new game console.
A pathological case could be made that every dollar that you keep in town is a dollar someone spends outside of the town.
That’s a valid argument in theory, but in reality that doesn’t happen.
People go to local businesses and spend money. Local bars, specialty markets, farmers markets, etc.
GP definitely did not say he thinks having people in the local community afford college is a bad thing. That's quite a straw man. Their point about the money quickly leaving the local economy is valid. If the shop owner is making a reasonable wage at the end of the day, then I think the local effect is good. Doubly so if they employ people from the local area. However, if the shop owner is getting rich and most of those profits are going into a fat bank account, then it makes no difference to the local economy. If helping the local economy is really your goal, I think there are much more efficient ways.
That said, I do mostly agree with you. Where we might differ is that I don't accept paying significant markup to shop local. If an item I want is available locally and is close to the same price as online, I will go local every time for exactly the reasons you mention: to help the local economy. But I have a low tolerance for The outrageous markup that most Small shops insist on applying. In my opinion, those shops probably should go out of business by being non-competitive. That would open up some room for a less greedy retailer to come and be more of a service to the local community.
> if the shop owner is getting rich and most of those profits are going into a fat bank account, then it makes no difference to the local economy
While arguably not ideal I would also argue that is still better than the same profits being captured by an increasingly centralized corporation many states or countries away.
Local millionaires using a bank will incentivize that bank keeping branches open in town, which can help other locals more easily maintain savings accounts. I personally make a point to use at least one locally incorporated bank for similar reasons.
Even something frivolous like a local millionaire buying a powerboat stimulates the economy because the infrastructure that is required to maintain that keeps a demand for other jobs open and keeps money flowing.
Now I’m not saying powerboats are intrinsically good. All I’m saying is that if someone is going to buy one with the profit captured from running a business selling eg home goods, it’s better for a local economy for a local to do it vs a Bay Area Bezos a thousand miles away.
You seem to have missed my point entirely. I'm not saying that's a bad thing -- but I'm saying that by your logic, you seem to think it is.
You're looking at money like it's some kind of zero-sum thing that ought to be hoarded by every local community. You say:
> but the gist is longer money stays in a local area, the better off that area is going to be
That is contrary to all standard economic theories of free trade. The entire engine of economic growth is that when communities trade between each other, everyone's standard of living goes up.
The economy theory you seem to be promoting is what is known as mercantilism [1], which has been thoroughly discredited.
Circulating money broadly is a good thing. You don't need to worry about it leaving your local area, because it comes back according to whatever goods and services you produce! You don't need to hoard it locally.
> it comes back according to whatever goods and services you produce
Extractive industry like Amazon kill the local producers and siphon the money out of smaller areas and concentrate it in richer areas. When there are no local producers or wealth left, what is there to circulate or trade?
Amazon is an Internet-myelinated version of the Wal-Mart effect, with more packaging waste.
> When there are no local producers or wealth left, what is there to circulate or trade?
If that were true, then sure it would be a problem. But I don't know of many communities in the US where there are literally no jobs, nothing being produced at all. Where economic activity is zero.
Some jobs go away and new ones arise. And remote work makes it easier than ever for jobs to move from cities to smaller areas.
Can you really show that Amazon has had a net effect of shifting wealth "out of smaller areas" and into richer ones? Especially when you consider the amount of money it saves people in smaller areas, which makes them more wealthy than they would be otherwise?
I cannot. I am operating on an assumption that each dollar that goes to Amazon vs a local producer is an opportunity cost for the community’s long-term wealth. Saving a few bucks here and there on individual purchases seems like short-term thinking and small potatoes. Scaled up, that is what lead to rust belt decay after offshoring so much manufacturing. I know a lot of ink has been spilled on the effects of walmart and dollar stores on local economies, but I will also admit that I have not done any legwork to vet the hypotheses or conclusions, or if I have, I’ve forgotten and wouldn’t be able to produce any citations. As far as I can get in systems thinking with the initial conditions I know, which is assuredly a small subset of the totality of reality, the concentration of ability to produce and purchasing power is dangerous for those in the leaf nodes. I’m always interested to see more data proving me more right right or wrong on this.
- market diversity matters, and we have a more functional market with many smaller actors
- similarly, a smaller local actor is more accountable for their behavior
- efficiency comes mostly from cutting things, some of which mattered (eg, individual buyers at companies do more due diligence on the product than Amazon)
- it’s better that every community have a local moderately rich person than one super rich person nationally, eg, in terms of charity to your community
- politics remains local and hence tractable
- smaller organizations have less of a “frozen middle”, which creates numerous problems with national scale organizations
There’s probably more reasons if I really stopped to think about it.
> you just don't like someone doing it more efficiently
For some value of "more efficiently". I mean if the most efficient way to work is to have delivery drivers pee in a bottle and warehouse workers develop RSIs, who am I to complain? Someone else's dignity is a small price to pay in order to get a 3% rebate on some commodity.
Of course I have, but I also don’t have much choice.
I mitigated it by having my first smartphone last 12 years, and I am now using the company-provided one in order to avoid a second buy. Not ideal, I’ll admit. I hope that, by the time I need a change, I can use a pinephone and convince my company that I only need a rsa otp or a yubikey.
But is that really related to the thread?
> At least in the USA we have some semblance of a Labor Department etc...
Any local alternative to amazon will also have it, and less execs/lawyers whose only job is to make them irrelevant.
When you spend money at businesses which are owned by people that live in your community, more of that money continues to circulate in your area. It's better for the local economy, if only marginally, and therefore better for you.
This is more important for businesses that produce and capture a larger amount of value, like locally owned restaurants vs corporate owned chains, but any little bit helps at least a little.
(Of course if you're a rootless corporate mercenary who goes wherever work takes you, with no long-term stake in the place you live, then it doesn't matter at all.)
It's less true in retail (of non locally made goods), here the margins are in the supply contract (think the volume discounts on alibaba or Sam's club).
It's likely that a mega retailer like Walmart generates this margin in their supply chain, bulk land/space and pays out, in total more via wages and benefits (particular possible with the scale of healthcare costs and benefits programs like scholarships)
This is an interesting take. I'm not sure it's true but I will look it up. My knee-jerk reaction is that most large purchases already siphon your money away (home, car, travel), and overthinking where to buy a random small object for the house makes no difference, but I hadn't considered the locality of money circulation!
Amazon discusses that every dollar of salary produces $2.5 of local economic activity, eg, because their workers buy coffees that then pay the salaries of baristas who then…
That money comes from many communities and is distributed to a handful; and I think it would be interesting to quantify the loss of economic activity from Amazon moving money out of a community.
Honestly it's interesting to me that this is a novel take to you. I believe it is a generally understood, if not acted on, principle.
Money sent off to Detroit or Japan for your car is as good as lost to your community, but as I said even a small amount of money spent locally will help your local community a small amount, which is more than none. Even eating at a locally owned McDonald's franchise is slightly better than eating at a corporate owned store. That difference is probably too small to be worth looking up who owns a McDonalds, but if the choice is between McDonalds or some local diner then it doesn't require any time spent looking it up.
> it is a generally understood, if not acted on, principle
I think you'd be surprised to realize how much that's not actually the case.
If you google the "Preston model", you'll find a lot of material waxing lyrical about the government of a lone city in England that actually dared to follow that principle in their procurement strategies. They are doing well, but the fact that it feels revolutionary for mainstream sensibilities shows that those principles are still very unknown to most.
(I should add: the principle of locality is not always a good thing, because there are scoundrels everywhere. Again in England, the regeneration of massive swaths of land previously used for steelmaking is being done through well-connected local businessmen and corrupted politicians, and it is a shameful rip-off for the taxpayer. If a national government had done that, the relevant minister would have faced the sack; but it's ”old boys” from the area, the national press is not interested, and so it's just business as usual.)
Amazon doesn't have any extra power post-local stores. If Amazon ups their prices then the local stores reappear. In some weird future where Amazon completely obliterates small businesses it might take a few years, but it'd take more than a few years of good prices before that from Amazon to get to that state. The manufacturers always have strong incentives to defect from an AWS dominated equilibrium. They want middleman prices to be low, it means they move more goods and make more money.
Although I should stress I like the idea of buying local. If the money goes off to some exotic foreign place it is less likely that I will get my hands on it later on. Better to live in a wealthy community than a poor one, etc. Local capital is local prosperity.
> is doing a societal good by parking money in inventory they brought near you?
Yes. That generates sales taxes. That generates property taxes. That pays for insurance. That pays for upkeep which is hopefully provided by a local contractor. Where this cycle repeats.
> and getting "too" rich? ie dislike of big corporations?
Yes. The money actually doesn't bother me, it's the access to unrestrained political influence it buys you, and big corporations monopolize labor pools and result in worse outcomes for working conditions and wages. Where this story starts.
- local retailers offer better jobs, and often better benefits. The work you do stocking at Menards is much better than sorting boxes at Amazon
- support local repair vs repurchasing. This cuts down on the upstream demand and does wonders for local small-business economies. And again, provides better jobs than sorting boxes.
- Efficiency is great! But what is Amazon efficient at? They have maximized the speed and convenience of delivery. Once stated that way it's obvious there must be tradeoffs. One of those tradeoffs is the shit work. In one dist center, a guys entire job was to wheel odd shaped boxes from one side of a warehouse to another. Whenever you order a big or weirdly shaped box, that guy moved it. Even he hates that job. It's meaningless, non social, provides no transferrable skills.
- ultimately what your parents were talking about is how one chooses to shape their local economy and jobs market. I want to buy from companies that I would want my friends and family to work for.
To disagree, local "mom and pops" often don't offer better jobs or benefits, or meaning.
Historically, in the US, these shops and restaurants often depended on underpaid (often children of the owner) labor, offered no benefits, and had no safety net in case of owner or business failure.
On average, today, starting wages at McDonalds, Walmart, or your "local" Amazon warehouse are 25-50% higher than local restaurants and retailers for rural America (which more typically pay minimum wage). And benefits, a local mom and pop is less likely to account for paid sick/vacation days, retirement savings, healthcare coverage, and workplace insurance (in some cases, a disability or workplace injury would make the business unprofitable + less oversight).
Comparing Amazon to an average rural main street coffee shop or craft store isn't fair.
But you're right I suppose, if your choice is employee number 3 at a tiny thrift store for half the pay, I'd choose Amazon too. But I'd probably want my kids to work at Target stocking shelves rather than Amazon hauling boxes.
Of course a tipped minimum wage is less than a McDonald's non-tipped wage. It's disingenuous to make the comparison. Just as a bus boy at a local restaurant, I took home more money than my friends who worked at major chains.
>- local retailers offer better jobs, and often better benefits.
Is this backed by empirical evidence? I've also heard that small local companies have worse labor conditions, because they're small and fly under the radar compared to multinationals. One incident of an Amazon delivery driver peeing in bottles (even if they're technically working for a local subcontractor) is enough to show up on the New York Times. The same isn't going to be true for some local firm. Moreover, it's possible that "local retailers" targets a more upmarket segment compared to national chains. When I think "local retailers", I think small boutique shops in gentrifying neighborhoods. Obviously those stores will have better working conditions than Amazon, but it's not as if we got rid of Amazon, it'll get replaced by boutique shops, or that most people would be better served by them.
I was wrong to imply "local" since that conjures images of things like a main street one window shop with 3 employees. Obv their benefits are lower.
I had in my head things like Target, Best Buy, or more social, occasional-customer-interaction-based work. It's just those mega corps are local. Also the large retailers like Home Depot, Menards, etc. At least those aren't as soulless and monotonous. By "local" I meant "brick and mortar" etc.
But I'm out of the edit window so, best to ignore it.
There are many replies already, but one point that hasn't been mentioned:
The local store pays their taxes — local and national taxes. Amazon is big enough to evade these, or where possible, pay small amounts only in Luxembourg, Delaware etc.
Amazon pays sales taxes, which makes up a big chunk of the local business' tax burden anyways. Moreover, the retail division Amazon barely makes any money, so any taxes on profit going to delaware or whatever is probably minimal (as % of your spend).
If the retail division of Amazon barely makes any money, why hasn't it been cut or spun off so that the company can concentrate on the things that it is really good at and are more profitable?
This is an insightful breakdown, though I think it leaves out the option I would have chosen. A small business run by a human who is physically present is going to make different decisions that are better for the community.
I have to say though I have evolved a bit in this perspective as I've come to realize that these small business owners can be every bit as greedy or even more. Especially there are a lot who are just fundamentally incompetent at business and try to make up the difference by extracting it from their employees, willfully ignoring labor laws in ways a large company would not dare. A large company is a big target surrounded by people who want a piece of the action and often must tread carefully as a result.
I've personally never worked in such a position, but I have heard absolutely crazy stories from people who have, things like demanding that commission only sales people come in hours early to do unpaid work like cleaning unrelated to their job title, "fining" people $75 for checking their phone while "on the clock" (again in a commission only job), constantly helping themselves to their employees paycheck finding things to "charge" them for, and just generally being a menace and treating employees like they personally owned them. Their ego and sense of entitlement go completely wild. The owners I have known personally will brag about cheating on their taxes while railing against the government, running an atrociously inefficient business that they talk about as if it's some sort of charity. In many cities there's a whole good old boy network type system in place that's no less corrupt and ugly than whatever you want to say about companies like Amazon.
A hyper-efficient system is inherently fragile: if something happens to any part of it, it has a big ripple effect all over the place, because there's no slack anywhere. More resilient systems always have some redundancy that helps them cope in a case of failure. If you think about societally optimal setup, it likely should include a mix of systems, from very efficient to very resilient. Something about eggs and baskets.
>Is it because you just don't like someone doing it more efficiently and getting "too" rich? ie dislike of big corporations?
That’s such an odd way to paint it.
When people live in a system with millions of quettallionaires and the bilion left are mere millionaires where 1 unit of currency is enough to buy the best meal in town with all towns in the world equally provided in services, the system won’t see much strikes happening soon.
When people live in a system where a small cake is growing at a slow rate and a few hundreds people are cornering always more of it at an accelerating rate, all the more when the extraction rate of the cake is known to exceed the cake regeneration rate, the system is well on its road for repeated strikes or even bloody social movements.
Ok, these allegories are two possible points in a spectrum. Which scenario is most likely to be closest to the world as its perceived by most people out there?
People don’t love or hate big corporations and riches out of the blue. If there are given room out of the vivid feeling that their life is a day to day struggle to survive, most people can perfectly demonstrate nuances in their judgment.
For me it’s that last one and also wanting more of my money to flow through my community. I don’t want to live in a world where 10 trillionaires control everything. I already tried to avoid Amazon but Bezos blocking the Post from endorsing a political candidate as we descend into extreme oligarchy was the last straw.
Given that Bezos has announced plans to donate $1M to Trump’s inaugural fund, supporting local businesses helps keep money out of the hands of fascists.
It's because the absolute centralization of business in one entity is almost indistinguishable from Communism. For now it may appear that Amazon is cheaper/more convenient, but in the long run this type of monopoly leads to worse products and services.
"All the downsides"?! I find living in the US to be quite different from what I've seen of life depicted in current/past communist countries.
It sure seems to me as if there were a few additional downsides in those communist countries that I don't see to anywhere near the same degree in the US.
Under communism, workers own the means of production and all of the profit their labor creates. Centralizing business into a single private monopoly whose profit is entirely controlled by shareholders is the exact opposite of communism.
You're correct that monopoly leads to a degradation of products and services, but that's a flaw in capitalism (specifically the myth of the self-regulating free market ideal that eschews proper regulation in favor of the "invisible hand.")
I needed some 3D printing filament a few days ago. Shopped around locally and the absolute cheapest was ~$50. Amazon was $17 with next day shipping.
The overheads of physical retail stores makes it all but impossible for them to compete with online shopping. I’d love to “support local” but I don’t have the expendable income to spend double/more on everything.
What we ideally need is more “local online businesses”, but that seems to be very rare outside of niche hobby/craft type stuff.
I'm spoiled by having a local Microcenter here in Houston. Not always the cheapest filament, but it's often competitive enough. Inland is as good as any other brand I've tried, and in some cases, I prefer their colors.
Xyltech is also in Houston, and they don't have a typical retail operation, but you can place an order and pick it up.
Polymaker has a Houston warehouse, and while you can't pick it up, a number of SKUs actually ship from there.
Often I buy bulk purchases of Sunlu from Aliexpress. Usually takes about 8 days to get to me, but at around $11/KG for PLA+, it's a great price.
It turns local businesses into showrooms for Amazon, and that is a failing business model.
I do not patronize Amazon. But f I did, I would pick a margin - let's say 20% - and resolve to buy locally when the price is at least that close to the online price.
> But f I did, I would pick a margin - let's say 20% - and resolve to buy locally when the price is at least that close to the online price.
Focusing on the price is a complete misunderstanding. Just looking at my recent amazon purchases. I have bought 3mm and 2mm thick brass sheets, 0.8mm endmills, a set of dwarven miner minis, and a highlander cow shaped slipper. I have no clue which shop would even hope to have these things. I could get on my bike and go to all the hardware shops around me in the hopes that maybe they have endmills, or all the department stores and walk up and down to see if they have the slippers I'm thinking about. And I would be still without brass sheets and dwarven miners.
Or I can from the comfort of wherever I am browse a wild selection of things and get them for reasonable price. I bought the miner minis while physically situated in a coffee shop waiting for my friend to return from the washroom. Just because I happened to have a minute to think about what I need for our next DnD session. That is insanely convenient.
When all the business does is order from the catalog shipped from China and stock a shelf it’s not that worrisome when they die.
Businesses that should be able to sustain themselves are things that have additional experiences and services. Food, coffee, sports shops with fittings or lessons, bike shops with repair rooms, art galleries that are fun to browse, clothing stores that you can touch and try on, stuff crafted locally that is tangibly better than something mass produced, etc.
> The overheads of physical retail stores makes it all but impossible for them to compete with online shopping.
As a purely-theoretical thought experiment, this may be true.
As a blanket statement about prices in the real world, this is not correct.
There are many stores around me here in San Francisco who absolutely do have prices that are close to (and sometimes lower than) "e-tailer" prices. If stores in SF can meet or beat "e-tailer" prices, I find it hard to believe that stores in Bum-fuck Nowhere, USA can't ever do the same.
I think it's a mistake to look at the % price difference instead of the dollar price difference. It's a $33 dollar difference. Which is not much if you are a busy person, but a lot if you have time to shop around. If you're buying a motorcycle and it's $6200 at your local dealer and $6100 a couple of towns away, then you'd consider that difference negligible.
Every local business should be a "local online business" as you suggest. But most business owners don't give a fuck and are happy to see Amazon crush them. Why?
I used to try to support local business, but frankly it's such a waste of time to go looking for products that they never have in stock, ward off annoying salesmen who never have a clue if you actually need help, and dealing with bad return policies. The price difference is but icing on the cake.
You should check out Protopasta! Their prices aren't rock bottom ($30 for a 1kg spool of PLA) but the product is really good and if you happen to live near the warehouse you can pick up your order on the same day
You basically can't buy couple-dollar things on Amazon, which is rather annoying. F.ex. I wanted a fiberglass pole, 5/16" diameter. I could buy 10 for $20. Home Depot had one for $3.50.
Should I spend 15 minutes each way driving (carbon emissions) to the store and waste 1 hr of my time in this case, when it can be delivered to me tomorrow? I definitely want to support local, but the cost/benefits are not as clear in this case.
Which are definitely more efficient than having every individual that needs something hop in a car and drive for 20+ minutes. One delivery person with goods for 100 people in their truck is literally one truck replacing one hundred drivers. It is absolutely much more efficient carbon wise. All of the warehouses and 18 wheelers exist either way, since the local shops still need all the same supplies, although presumably more widely distributed.
The only way it works out is if people buy much less, which given prices would be much higher, they likely would.
They didn't exist prior to Amazon deciding to offer 2day delivery, that's my point. Why else would they invest all that money, when they could use the already existing services that deliver to people's houses fairly quickly: FedEx, UPS and DHL or the slightly slower but goes everywhere every day USPS?
Your one person is a truck delivering to 100 homes ignores the fact that at least 80% of the people in those homes have a car that they use everyday, often passing a grocery store and most other local shops.
There are studies about this. I don’t know how good they are or what specific scenarios they apply to (urban vs rural vs rural are all different calculations). But what I’ve seen is it’s about 14 items you’d have to buy before going to the store yourself is more efficient than shopping online.
You really need to consider the reality outside of your own bubble of concern. Especially as your bubble doesn't even extend beyond the door of your house, since you don't understand that the Amazon delivery driver is also driving and also spending his time.
The product is delivered the same distance, whether it is from "Producer -> Amazon warehouses -> Customer" or if it is "Producer -> Retail warehouses -> Customer". An Amazon delivery car with a bunch of products to deliver is the equivalent of OP filling up his car with purchases when shopping in town.
The key is “filling up his car”. Most trips for most people aren’t like that. There is a tipping point for which it’s more efficient to order online. One study I saw said it takes 14 items before driving yourself is more efficient (of course the calculus is different for every car and route).
>An Amazon delivery car with a bunch of products to deliver is the equivalent of OP filling up his car with purchases when shopping in town.
Right, but if you want something in 2-3 days (which amazon provides), you need to make a dedicated trip. Even if timing wasn't a factor, at best doing a consolidated errand run allows you to visit a handful of stores, whereas an amazon delivery van delivers to dozens of houses in your neighborhood in one trip.
Is there to believe that logistics network has worse emissions compared to logistics networks for brick and mortar stores? At least for me, most of the amazon packages' tracking shows up as departing from a local warehouse, so I'd imagine most of the fast delivery time comes from pre-positioning goods in warehouses near buyers, rather than shipping packages across the country using planes or whatever.
Most existing retailers did not own or run a private logistics network, they would use XPO, R+L, Old Dominion, etc.
In order to get that amazing fast delivery time, Amazon had to create their own system. The creation of that system, created a large amount of Carbon emissions at it's onset just with the requisite vehicles require to make it happen. It also set off an arms race between logistics enterprises to try and deliver the same performance, leading to further emissions.
>The primary function of Amazon Air is to transport Amazon packages from distant fulfillment centers that are outside of Amazon's local ground linehaul network for a specific area.
They have their own air cargo service for shipping packages between Distribution centers. They wouldn't invest in that unless they had enough volume to make it profitable.
I get that it is easy and convenient but please don't try to claim that it is ecological.
Amazon used to be the cheapest in almost every category, but more and more, I find that places like Harbor Freight beat them. I even bought a pricey resin printer and a wash and cure station the other day; Microcenter had them beat by $100+.
I don't think people buy on Amazon because it is the cheapest, they buy on Amazon for convenience. EVERY SINGLE TIME I buy something from someone else (talking online here) I painfully regret that decision (didn't arrive on time, didn't arrive at all, shipped in multiple shipments, one arrived, two didn't and yet order is showing as delivered -> this is just small sample of what I have seen just in the last say 6 weeks). My wife and I have been trying all year to purchase as much as we can on other e-commerce websites but in often (always) ends up like these examples above...
Harbor freight also has much more consistent quality and no fake name brand items. It’s funny because they used to be synonymous with low quality- but now they seem to have the highest quality tools you can easily buy as a consumer.
You do realize that an electric Amazon van delivering hundreds of packages to your neighborhood pollutes a lot less than you taking your G-wagon to the local store, right?
> but also the message it sends to local stores
"You're obsolete", which is true? Local stores are usually more expensive, carry less inventory, require you to go there or charge delivery fees, have inexistent or predatory return policies, etc. It's simply a worse experience in every way.
There was a time where this was compensated by the vendors having wide knowledge about the subject that they were selling items for, but it's not the case anymore, so really, what's left to local stores?
I don't know why people have this tendency to romanticize outdated and objectively worse in every way things just for the sake of "tradition".
Ignoring the tone of your comment, I agree with you in a way, but I also wonder if that has something to do with where I live.
The US suburbs don't really have what I would call "local stores," just big, well known corporate stores. So, when making the choice of where to buy Product X, my options are giving my money to Best Buy, Walmart, Ikea, Kroger, etc...or Jeff Bezos, whose online empire offers slightly more convenience than the others because I don't have to drive if I can wait a day or two.
There's no family-owned businesses to hurt here because they were all chased out by the Big Box stores years ago. Heck, I remember when they filled in the pond I learned to fish in as a kid just to put up that Walmart. Sure, Amazon can be held up as contributing toward the death of the small business, but those wheels were spinning long before Bezos was selling books out of a garage or whatever mythology we want to accept.
I don't like Amazon. I don't like the idea of one entity having that much influence and control over my consumer habits. I don't like that the business model is just drop-shipping in a trenchcoat of digital services. I don't like that their workers are basically treated as third-world labor.
But I do have to admit that they have won the game and as a result, I have to use them. I wish it were otherwise, but we're past the point of no return, on that. We all gave them permission for this to happen by patronizing it for years, even down to the mistreated workers who keep applying for those jobs knowing full well Amazon's employment reputation. Amazon did not kill small business. Consumers did, ever suckered by savings and convenience.
Thing that I hate most about amazon is how it turned into the western version of aliexpress.
Completely flooded with terrible products, you know the ones (badly translated, titles that are a list of keywords, ai generated everything, clearly and badly edited product images, ...)
Like I'm at a point where I order like 5-10 products a year from amazon, mostly cause I can't get them elsewhere for reasonable prices. Everything else I buy in other online stores or physically.
> Amazon can be held up as contributing toward the death of the small business
Amazon does more than most of those to let you buy from small producers, which also feature in their catalog. The volume SMBs ship on Amazon was in the double digit billions per year when I worked there — and is probably higher now.
Consumers killed family owned stores not because they didn't like them(though true in some cases), they killed them because things were getting expensive and they didn't want to lose their standard of living.
At one point in time, Wal-mart's big thing was they sold Made in America. Then they pivoted to cheap junk, their pivot occurred as jobs moved from the US to Mexico and China.
Consumers weren't completely suckered by savings and convenience; although that was some of it, they were trying to make their ever smaller budgets stretch further.
> I also wonder if that has something to do with where I live
I live in the center of London and out of the 200 non-household goods orders I have on Amazon this year I don't think I would have been able to find even 20% of them in local stores.
Actually even when I do go in a store and find an item I need, I scan the barcode on the Amazon app and saw that it's usually a LOT cheaper on Amazon (like, 30% cheaper for the exact same tool).
Add to that what I mention in my previous comment about return policies, travel time, etc. and there's absolutely no reason not to order on Amazon, even if you're in the ideal place to go to local stores.
I have 400 orders on Amazon this year (I think that means I have more than 400 unique items since one order can be more than one items, but it's probably around 450 items total so not far off).
Of those, I probably have a good portion which is household goods as I mentioned, like soap in bulk, soda cans in bulk, etc. which is cheaper than any other option (especially because I don't have a car in London).
If I ignore all of those, and take only recent orders that I paid for, here are 5 items that I can't buy, or at least wouldn't know where to even begin looking for, in central London:
- A luggage and suitcase scale
- A monitor arm
- A good shower filter for hard water (not the crap that doesn't actually filter anything which you can easily find anywhere)
I can't imagine the level of consumption that leads to more than one online purchase every day. You must have a constant mountain of cardboard at your home.
But anyway, shops selling luggage are common. They probably sell scales too. Argos, Tesco and Ryman have them.
Electronics shops like Currys have monitor arms, as well as office supply shops.
I won't guess what a good shower filter is.
Office supply and electronics shops also have label printers.
Moth repellent is available from large supermarkets, DIY stores and hardware shops.
All of these are also available online from British companies that pay their fair share of taxes.
400 actually, and there are 12 more days to the year.
I just don't buy anything in brick and mortar shops, except food and drinks. Just out of convenience and price, not for ideological reasons or anything.
The number of orders is also inflated by things I listed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42463417 and by the fact that one project can be many orders. I built a NAS, and it was split over 10 orders, basically one per component when the price was right.
> But I do have to admit that they have won the game and as a result, I have to use them.
Try ordering direct from the manufacturer's website. A surprising-to-me number of companies have set this up, and it's what I often do if I know what I want and Newegg isn't selling it for a reasonable price (or at all).
Unfortunately, Amazon policies prohibit them from selling their product any cheaper on their own website than they do on Amazon. This essentially guarantees that Amazon will always be cheaper, so there's not much point in going to the manufacturer's website where you don't get prime, you don't get the same guarantees, and you pay at best the same and at worst a whole lot more.
It's quite an evil genius policy on the side of Amazon.
what kind of a law would you put in place here to make this illegal? and who would it cover? amazon has a business, yes? and if you want to do business with amazon you have to abide but those rules. you can also just NOT do business with amazon - sell your shit at another place, done deal. too many times here on HN we see people say what you say - let's just add mooooooar laws (these would have to be FEDERAL to make any sense) and have government involved in as many things as possible... it is just wrong although in theory you can say this is unfair - but certainly should be be illegal... like saying apple charging 30% wig should be illegal :)
The laws of our economy are not there to serve a few large companies. They are there to serve us, people, most of all. Do you think that markets will collapse if we had more fair rules for big companies?
Not nonsense of course but if what Amazon is doing is breaking any of the antitrust laws we have in place there is a machinery for that already - the government can take this up if they feel like Amazon is breaking antitrust laws. The problem is - whatever "issue" someone has with something amazon is doing it inevitably ends up here on HN as "oh that should be illegal..." you start putting every little thing you don't like into some federal laws and pretty soon you are China... it is a fine line to walk on...
> The laws of our economy are not there to serve a few large companies. They are there to serve us, people, most of all.
In some theory maybe - not in any reality... this sounds more like the way China is organized, not United States :) I personally wish this was true...
> Do you think that markets will collapse if we had more fair rules for big companies?
This depends - who is making the rules?! This is always easier said than done - you think that whatever "rules" you put in place is what "everyone/majority/..." wants but of course you'd be wrong. And again - who is making the rules? The politicians who spent over 70% of their fundraising for their next election... and during those fundraisers the donors are ... well not me and you but Amazon, NRA... and they will get their way... The system is stacked against you and you can talk fantasy like "oh the economy should work for the little guy..." or reality...
no doubt... the question remains whether what is being discussed in this thread falls under an antitrust law breach though? and if it does not (it does not) would it make any sense to add it (I will argue it does not)
The conditions under which you can do business are governed by law. For example, you can't require that employees enter into a contract for eternal servitude, even though that too could be explained away as "if you want to do business with the company you need to follow their rules". So why exactly would a pricing scheme like this be uniquely difficult/undesirable to outlaw? It seems pretty straightforward to me.
you are comparing something as crazy as “eternal servitude” with company saying “if you want to use our platform you cannot price gouge on it”??! how is paying more on amazon than elsewhere “better for consumers and needs to be regulated”??! so weird we are discussing this at all…
> amazon has a business, yes? and if you want to do business with amazon you have to abide but those rules.
And if you want to do business (at all) you have to abide by the local laws. In an ideal democratic world, those laws would be set by the people and for the people.
Can you make an argument outlining how Amazon's anti-competitive rules help the society, and why their behavior should be tolerated in an ideal democratic society?
> And if you want to do business (at all) you have to abide by the local laws. In an ideal democratic world, those laws would be set by the people and for the people.
which law is amazon breaking and if there isn't one (there isn't, otherwise there would be lawsuits we are all aware of) what's the law going to look like?
> Can you make an argument outlining how Amazon's anti-competitive rules help the society, and why their behavior should be tolerated in an ideal democratic society?
not sure what "democracy" has to do with anything? we don't really have a system in place where we go to a referendum and make decisions like this. whether or not amazon's anti-competitive rules help the society or not is on the society to decide. you have a choice whether to use amazon services and if you are so anti-amazon no one is forcing you to use their services. if amazon is doing something is illegal based on today's laws there is a machinery to bring lawsuits against (by the government itself or otherwise).
You should reread the comments you have replied to, as you clearly haven't understood what was written.
A law would be fairly simple — it would forbid a marketplace or retailer from influencing the price of goods sold outside their marketplace/shop.
There are already laws regulating pricing in some places, e.g. selling below the manufacturer's recommended retail price, or preventing selling products below cost to attract customers.
> You should reread the comments you have replied to, as you clearly haven't understood what was written.
I sure have
> A law would be fairly simple — it would forbid a marketplace or retailer from influencing the price of goods sold outside their marketplace/shop.
This type of law would make no sense, you are basically saying "I can price gouge the customers on your platform while providing the same product cheaper on mine." That is a F'ed up as it gets...
> e.g. selling below the manufacturer's recommended retail price
This is completely a different thing - if Amazon is actually telling retailers "hey, you want to sell this for $100 but you can't, you need to lower this price" that should 100% be illegal - Amazon should not be telling anyone what the price of their product should be. But that is 1000000% different from Amazon telling same companies "you cannot use our platform to price gouge people and sell your shit for more than you are selling elsewhere."
You're right. The most environmentally-friendly solution is to truck, train, or ship things into stores in big cities and let people walk or take public transit to get their things.
I'm not sure how you imagine that ordering direct from a manufacturer works, but I'm certain that most of them have their goods in big warehouses and use major delivery services to get those goods to you, much like they would get those goods to an ordinary store.
Goods are going to be shipped, flown, and trucked around. Until we invent macro-scale teleportation, there's no reasonable way to stop doing that entirely.
Apple Pay has raised my confidence level about buying directly from smaller internet sites. Since those sites don’t get my raw credit card info when I use Apple Pay, I don’t have to worry about whether they’ve implemented CC handling well (most have not).
I've used PayPay a lot over decades, starting with when they were mainly a way of paying on eBay, but I haven't thought of them as "making the rest of the web an alternative to Amazon". Perhaps that's because PayPal didn't achieve the same market penetration. Or because I didn't perceive them as providing the same level of service, or ease of use — for example, they haven't made shipping as easy (or if they have, I'm not aware of it).
And no, my post is not an "ad" *eyeroll*. There seem to be several competitors active in a maturing ecosystem. I don't have experience with them them to the level that I'd feel comfortable citing them, but I regret not mentioning them if it would have made the point more effectively. If PayPal, or Google Pay, or some other provider has served that role for you, I'm glad.
I was talking about buying from online merchants. I’m less familiar with the security implications of chip-and-pin or contactless card for in-person transactions. Do those technologies prevent the merchant from getting raw CC info?
Rightly or wrongly, I worry less about the security implementations of hardware point-of-sale terminals than the security implementations of small websites.
I mostly prefer Apple Pay for in-person transactions because of anonymity — my understanding is that it makes it harder for companies (other than Apple) to track my purchases.
> An enabled EMV terminal reads and verifies the card information contained in the embedded chip when inserted into the slot of the payment terminal. Like using the magnetic stripe, card data is then processed for payment authorization; the key difference is that the chip card generates a one-time code for each transaction while a traditional magnetic stripe card does not.
So, the merchant doesn't get the raw CC number; they get a transaction token.
This doesn't prevent someone from reading the CC account number off of the physical card, but unlike swiping a stripe, the act of purchasing via an EMV token means that the CC account number doesn't enter the system.
Bank of America automates the process of creating virtual cards for your account when you set up contactless payments such as Google Pay. It is not an anonymous service as the bank still keeps the transaction records and iirc, will occasionally sell or relinquish the data on request to 3rd parties or enforcement agencies.
Apple Pay is set up as a front for my credit card, which is a Visa card I get through my credit union. Whether it's Apple Pay or Google Pay (or PayPal, or others), I think the card provider is always going to have full records — in addition to the payment channel provider. So I should have said "(besides Apple or my card provider)" rather than just "(besides Apple)".
Yes mostly. The cell phone wallets were the convenience difference that caused merchants to upgrade their POS systems to support contactless. Before that there just wasn't much reason for merchants to change their existing card infrastructure. Now customers feel inconvenienced if they have to use a credit card.
I find it interesting because in my lifetime the UK went from magstripe (falling back to a carbon copy of the card with signature) to chip and pin, to contactless, and now smartphone. A lot of upgrading while the US just skipped it.
I live in a big city and unfortunately the local price gouging has gotten out of control. It's now often 50% cheaper to buy basics like aluminum foil and cereal on Amazon compared to even the discount dollar store.
Once, when polled by HR, I noted that it should be more efficient for many different people in a given neighborhood to place orders, and for one delivery truck to run through it dropping off packages even if somewhat fuel-inefficient, than for that myriad of consumers to make separate trips even if using fuel-efficient vehicles.
Stores should not try to "out-Amazon" Amazon --- I buy my groceries from a store which is 1 mile away, and usually stop on the way home from work --- if I need something over the weekend or on a telework day which won't wait, I walk or ride my bike unless there is some other errand which needs to be made. Similarly, I prefer to shop the local hardware store (bike-distance) for hardware and tools (when suitable ones are available, if not, then it's Harry Epstein, or Jim Bode, or a trip to Woodcraft, or an on-line order).
Folks forget what life was like before Amazon --- there were occasions when I drove all around multiple towns looking for one connector because I didn't want a project to wait for a special order and 6--8 weeks delivery --- my kids were amazed when we came across my copy of the book: _U.S. Mail Order Shopper's Guide: A Subject Guide Listing 3,667 Unique Mail Order Catalogs_ by Susan Spitzer
If I don't need to drive to the "local" store, then the local store is miles better than Amazon especially if it has the choices you need. The problem is: 1. many times they don't have exactly what you need but Amazon does and 2. if it requires a ride, then both are no longer 5 bucks.
Most of the time it's not the same price, and most of the items are not in local stores. I know because I comparison shop, and 90% of the time I end up ordering from Amazon, because it's still the quickest and cheapest way to get things.
I agree, in almost all cases there is a store nearby that sells it - and if not I probably won’t need it that bad.
But for me it is an ideological thing - I absolutely loathe Amazon and it’s practices; I just have to visualise how I insert my money into Bezos gaping asshole and my desire to shop at Amazon is rapidly diminishing.
But I think ordering stuff when you are able bodied is immoral as well - not super immoral but you should always feel a little bit bad if you order stuff that you could’ve picked up yourself.
Also the distances in my country are tiny, if you live in the outback with 200km to the next neighbour it’s a different story
For me it is also something ideological but even from an economic point of view I never buy on Amazon, this is my reasoning:
You buy it cheaper but you are generating a debt, it's like buying on credit: somewhere someone is being exploited or a natural resource is being overexploited, and you will pay for it in the future, with a poorer environment socially, economically and naturally.
Everything comes back. I once read that I don't know which tribe made decisions that were good for the next 7 generations, well, buying on amazon is a decision that is not good even for the current generation, you will probably see the consequences in your own or your children's life.
We are taxed for road repairs. It's a common tax on gasoline here in the United States; and, yes, there is a known issue around this with electric cars and some efforts in place to try and rectify it.
Many states recapture those lost taxes via vehicle registration surcharges for EVs. (For example, Texas charges $200, which is consistent with what a truck or SUV would pay driving around 12k mi/yr)
Amazon employing people creates a lot of taxes. Don't forget everything's taxed, not just corporation tax. Every employee generates income tax, employee tax, if they invest their money the interest is taxed, almost everything they buy from a shop has VAT, fuel they purchase is taxed, everything they buy has a higher price because that business has to pay tax and so do its employees, ad infinitum. There's tax everywhere, and the roads will still be there if none of those people had jobs and weren't paying any tax.
There is no such thing as "employee tax". Usually, what exists is a scheme for some of the employee's salary to be paid in the form of retirement schemes, health care, etc. It's not a tax to subsidize unrelated things. Likewise, the income tax is not there to pay for the company's use of collective amenities, it's there to pay for the citizen's use.
In the end, if your company doesn't pay all the stuff that other companies do, it's freeloading, and the society would most likely be better off with another company getting the business.
> There is no such thing as "employee tax". Usually, what exists is a scheme for some of the employee's salary to be paid in the form of retirement schemes, health care, etc. It's not a tax to subsidize unrelated things.
I didn't say it was to subsidize unrelated things; in fact it's more the other way round, where state pensions, and state employee pensions, public healthcare etc are just paid for, and the money comes from whence it comes.
I don't understand the dichotomy. Local stores can exist and their taxes can pay for things, but the Amazon HQ also exists and can pay for things. And its employees likely pay the higher taxation bands as well, although I could be wrong.
The local stores still support those higher-paying roles, though again probably more locally — the local accountant, the local lawyer when they need one, the local IT company.
The Amazon HQ is great for Seattle and Luxembourg, but money spent there is gone from my local (or even national) community.
This is mostly the case from imports, though, isn't it? Anything you import rather than buy locally is money leaving the country. That seems to be by far the bigger effect if that's what you're concerned about. Ireland's situation, if I understand it correctly, is still to pull corporation tax from Amazon sales in Europe, just at a lower rate. So Ireland is going to be a massive net beneficiary, even if you only take into account the corporation tax paid by Amazon and not the larger effects (other taxes; infrastructure investment; etc).
I’ve found that the rise of Apply Pay as a payment mechanism on random sites has been helpful in getting me off of Amazon. Often it’s just as easy to order something direct if they have Apple Pay (or ShopPay, but I have other issues with them) and the same price as Amazon. Plus discoverability is awful on Amazon anyways.
Still don’t get the Whole Foods return ability when not shopping from Amazon, but not punching in my credit card number to random sites has been enough to get me to move 50% of my shopping to retailers direct.
I live in a big city and the last few years especially it's very easy to see the cost of that approach to delivery. Residential streets are clogged with double parked amazon vehicles, I can't go three blocks in the bike lane without having to get into traffic to go around one. If they can't figure out the apartment buzzer in a few seconds they just ring them all, I'm buzzed multiple times a day even if I don't use amazon.
It has made life worse in small but tangible, concrete ways. I don't need it that fast, probably neither do you. You can blame enforcement or the individual drivers or whatever but I think that's a cop out. Amazon demands efficiency of its drivers, this is what efficiency looks like.
I've gotten a lot of free stuff from Amazon. Shipped duplicate products to me? Just keep the other. Food bottle slightly cracked and leaked in transit? Keep it and we'll send another.
I was even able to get another 30% off an already sale price for a Kindle because my old one (>5 years) died, and they couldn't fix it.
Not justifying any particular actions on their part, but their customer service has been above and beyond and other major retailer I've interacted with.
> Food bottle slightly cracked and leaked in transit? Keep it and we'll send another.
Hah, I have the opposite experience. My shampoo bottle leaked and filled a bubble wrap. Amazon said, "We'll send a replacement, but you need to return this." After discussing it, I went to the UPS Store for the return. UPS, reasonably, refused to accept it.
Had to debate this for far too long with another customer service person before they would agree that "We don't really want a ziploc bag of shampoo back".
You not only have to consider the money spent on shipping it back to them at their own cost but also then deciding whether the product is still in good enough condition to be resold or most likely it would just go wholesale directly to a business that sells returns at a cheaper price and they handle that checking / repackaging. That by itself still probably costs money to handle. At Amazon scale, all of that together is a lot of money.
If the amount of profit they made from selling to you is offset by all those costs, why not let the customer keep it and get free goodwill and repeat business?
Mine is 5 minutes away. Two kiosks plus a person is always on site. The most I've ever had to wait for the person is 30 seconds -- all they do is scan the QR code and take the item. So I guess it's YMMV.
Until the person enters something wrong on the screen, and you get emails claiming you will be billed if you don't return the item, and you end up spending a few hours with Kafkaesque customer service, repeatedly, over the course of weeks, interrupting multiple days with time-sucking aggravation.
Unless Mr. Bezos has been putting on a disguise, and secret-shoppering his own company, I have a suspicion he has no idea how much his Leadership Principles have been eroded in the last few years. I don't think metrics will tell you that, when your staff has been conditioned to desperately make their metrics look good. The short-term quantitative metrics will be hit, at least on paper, and everything else will be neglected or outright cannibalized.
To me, the key feature of Amazon is the fast delivery with Prime. Do other merchants offer fast delivery often enough?
Regarding credit cards, I started using privacy dot com for virtual, merchant-locked cards. It protects against (rare) card details leaks, but, of course, does not give you any points or cashback.
The local Target and Home Depots all offer same day pickup and delivery. For our house, that's taken 90% of the business away from Amazon.
What's ironic is we still make purchases on Amazon that don't require their fast shipping. We're just conditioned to expect it. I'm thinking TVs, books, project supplies, art, etc.
>What's ironic is we still make purchases on Amazon that don't require their fast shipping. We're just conditioned to expect it. I'm thinking TVs, books, project supplies, art, etc.
Realizing this was what made me quit Prime years ago, and eventually drive down my Amazon purchases to just a handful of times a year. For the most part, there's really not much of a difference if I get a book tomorrow vs. four days from now, or if I get it from Amazon or from the nearby Target. But there's a lot of infrastructure built up to satisfy this admittedly frivolous expectation of fast delivery.
Are there cases when rapid delivery is necessary and valuable? Absolutely. Are those cases the norm? Not in my life, by an overwhelming margin.
I love that I can click "Get it tomorrow" filters, and see the search results visibly change... and not a single one is actually going to be here tomorrow.
The same is true with two-day Prime. Even if you get to the item, all of a sudden, it's gone.
I think their argument is that it's "Prime" shipping (not two-day), so if their eco-get-it-in-a-week-option is available, that's still a variant of Prime.
Do you actually care that much about fast delivery?
My Prime membership ended 3 years ago. These days I just put items in the cart, and place order whenever it reaches $35. If I need an item in a hurry -- which rarely happens -- I go to a store to buy it.
This barely affected me, and I ended up with much fewer impulse purchases.
What's funny though is that the "standard" delivery often takes 5 calendar days. But AliExpress shipments can take as few as 8 calendar days. I ended up spending even less -- well, if the items are manufactured in China, why not just order on AliExpress where you get the same/similar items and pay less.
> well, if the items are manufactured in China, why not just order on AliExpress where you get the same/similar items and pay less.
Yep, I've come to see it as a general rule that, if the item on Amazon is sold under one of those all-caps gibberish brand names, the same exact item is almost always on AliExpress for 30-50% less.
Sometimes I'll even browse Amazon for a product I'm about to buy on AliExpress simply because their reviews are much better than Ali's. Someone wanna write a greasemonkey script to replace the AliExpress reviews with Amazon ones when browsing AliExpress? :)
I really wish there was a non-rush way to order with a guaranteed delivery moment.
Usually I'm not in a huge hurry, and I would happily wait a few days extra if it means workers don't have to pee in a bottle during their night shift. However, a "3-5 days" delivery means there's a pretty decent chance I won't be home and have to go to the other side of town to pick it up - and that's incredibly annoying. So I end up choosing next-day delivery and order it when I know I'll be home the next day.
Why can't I just place an order on Monday with a guaranteed delivery on Saturday? Ordering on Friday with a guaranteed delivery on Saturday is already possible, so what's stopping them?
Generally when I order something it's because I need it now and I live at the ass end of nowhere, so it's too inconvenient to find a decent store that sells what I need at a decent price (if that exists at all nearby).
I think the biggest issue is just the uncertainty. I've been ordering at other places lately and it's just ... frustrating that I have no idea if it'll take them a day or three days to process before shipping.
What Prime did for me, which didn't start with but was emphasized by COVID, was that if I needed/wanted many items I could just order them from Amazon with fairly prompt delivery rather than putting them on a shopping list. I'd probably get them quicker than I'd have gotten around to going to the store and probably save at least 30+ minutes into the bargain.
> Do you actually care that much about fast delivery?
I care about knowing when it's going to arrive. I don't necessarily need next day delivery, but if something says 2-3 day delivery that doesn't mean it will arrive in 3 days, it means it will arrive 3 days after it's shipped. Which for some major UK retailers can be 3-5 days. All of a sudden your delivery window is 2-8 days.
Also, much of the stuff I buy off Amazon is the sort of "crap" you make a single trip to the dollar store for - lightbulbs, wood filler, bin liners. They're the sort of things that I kind of need when I need them, or shortly after. My parents are the sort of people who will spend 20 minutes doing a quick round trip to the nearest dollar store/supermarket to get one thing, twice a week. I order it on amazon, and know it'll be there by the weekend for me to do whatever I need to do with it.
This is true. DHL asked me to delay my shipping because of Black Friday chaos and it was a bunch of crap that I didn't really need immediately so I delayed it for a week.
Most of the time, when I order something on Amazon, it's because something broke and I need to fix it, or something is running out, or there's some other time-sensitive need.
I rarely buy big-ticket items, and these can definitely wait.
It's really hard to beat Amazon just because of logistics. Amazon tells me if it'll arrive tomorrow or the day after if I order now and I can be 99% sure that it'll be processed today or tomorrow and it'll arrive as expected.
Anybody else? I have no idea how long it'll take them to process my order, how long it takes for it to be processed by DHL/DPD/GLS and how long the actual delivery will take.
Hm, I have an active order right now. I ordered three things simultaneously on December 15 with a stated delivery date of December 20, also called out by the website as "arrives before Christmas".
One of those things shipped the next day and is currently reported to be arriving tomorrow, which happens to match the stated delivery date.
The other two have yet to ship, but their delivery date has slipped to "December 21 - 24".
Realistically, they look unlikely to arrive before Christmas, and Amazon seems to feel no need to honor their contract.
What's your control group? Would other online retailers fare better or worse than this? Most of the time, other online retailers are worse in my experience.
Amazon is much worse on shipping than pretty much any other online retailer. The norm is that the retailer tells you when the thing will arrive, and it arrives on time. The norm for Amazon is that they advertise a deadline they don't plan to meet, and when they slip that deadline, they alter the shipping speed displayed on your order.
A long time ago I assumed that Amazon removed shipping speed options from their ordering process because, if you itemize shipping separately from the cost of the good, the customer can demand a refund on shipping when you don't provide what you sold.
My current theory is that it's a side effect of deciding they needed to provide shipping in-house instead of buying it from reliable sources. They replaced shipping they could control with shipping they couldn't control, and so they stopped letting you specify the shipping speed you needed. But for some reason they continued advertising shipping speeds they knew they couldn't provide.
It's the complete opposite for me here in Germany based on recent experience ordering from Amazon and other online retailers. It almost always arrives when Amazon says it will. I literally just received a package from an Amazon courier in an Amazon truck, something that I ordered late yesterday.
Update: between my comment above and now, Amazon has marked the other two items shipped, and un-slipped the expected delivery date back to the 20th.
Interestingly, the "shipped" status is matched to a tracking update that says "package left the shipper facility" with no time or location information. All further updates have a location and a timestamp. (Everything is shipped by Amazon.)
It's interesting to me that some people really see fast-delivery as an important feature of e-commerce. In the 20+ years I've been buying stuff online I think maybe less than 5% of the time I have cared about how fast I get something delivered.
Then again I don't have a business that relies on things getting to me fast. I'm just a guy who buys crap online for myself and my family. If I'm getting a book or some electronic doodad it rarely matters to me if I get it tomorrow or in 10 days.
For most Amazon non-business shoppers is getting stuff delivered quickly really an important consideration? I've always assumed that fast shipping, and the importance that Amazon places on it, was at least partly because of their desire for rapid cash flow. That fast shipping was more instituted because of Amazon's accounting needs than because most customers actually needed it. Maybe I'm wrong. It would be nice to hear people's informed opinions on this.
Fast delivery not a daily need for most people, but the dopamine hit is huge, and it makes people buy more stuff. I think an underappreciated factor of amazon's success is how it makes normal people feel like they're the boss, who can slam their fist and get immediate action.
Personally, I feel similarly to you, that most of the time the difference between one day and 1-3 weeks shipping is negligible. However, I think that relies on certain assumptions; I buy most consumable items (food, sponges, soap, etc) in person and almost always have enough to last another month or without buying more. Not everyone does that, some are JITing their daily needs and/or don't have enough free time and energy to make sure everything is always set well in advance (think working single mom, kid needs dress shirt tomorrow for whatever).
Another factor is that, while I travel less than I used to, I do like the schedule deliveries around being at home. Although package theft is not really a factor where I live, I also don't want my mailbox getting overstuffed or a package potentially sitting out in the elements for a week. As a result, I don't lke to order things with an indeterminate delivery if I might have travel coming up. (Which used to be a LOT.)
I think it's less fast shipping, and more reliable shipping.
I ordered a pair of shoes from a major UK high street store earlier this year who advertised 3 day shipping. Fine, I'm going away next weekend. Except, it turns out their guarantee is from dispatch, which is 3-5 days. It was listed in the small print on the order page, but even the order page still had the "Free 3 day shipping" banner on it. Unsurprisingly, they took 5 days to dispatch, and 3 days to deliver. I actually ended up going into the store to buy them, and returning them when I got home.
Amazon, for all it's faults, if they say next day, it's almost certainly going to arrive next day.
> To me, the key feature of Amazon is the fast delivery with Prime
Most websites won't even give you a realistic shipping time (major brands might but the long-tail of online merchants don't). They might say "2-3 day shipping" but that's how long it takes after they ship it, sometimes it can take up a week before they actually ship it. It means than if I buy from anyone but a massive retailer I am rolling the dice on if I'll get something in 2 days or 2+ weeks. Some things can wait 2 weeks but when I'm moving between my house and my parent's house (I visit often) it's really hard to remember "2 weeks before I move locations I need to start directing packages at the other location". The two locations are 3hrs+ apart so I can't just pop over and pick up something sent to the other place.
I was just looking at buying “The Great American Mail Race”, which is sold directly by USPS. They charge $16.45 for the shipping and don’t even provide the shipping speed! It could be anything from next day to next month- it’s not mentioned. And that’s from USPS’s own website! How does the USPS not think to consider sharing the shipment priority with the customer during checkout? Insanity.
Prime is almost always next day, occasionally same day delivery for me, FWIW. B&Q (home depot equivalent in the UK) can occasionally be the same as ordering off of aliexpress.
In the UK, the only place that I've found beats Amazon for delivery is Argos. For some utterly insane reason, they do their own delivery logistics from my nearest store and it can only be a fleet of vans sitting waiting for an online order to come in. I've _regularly_ had orders delivered in about 15 minutes from them (which is about how long it takes to drive to the nearest store).
I don't dislike typing in my credit card numbers because I'm worried about the number leaking (This is the US, I hand my card to strangers a half dozen times per week), I dislike it because I have to go find my wallet and fill out a long form. Apple Pay is nice because I can slap one button on the top right of my keyboard.
Except basically none of them store the CVV and so even if I use them, I still have to go get my wallet. And many cannot fill out the varying expiration date fields correctly.
1Password fills out CVV. I sometimes have problems with zip code and state drop downs, or with weird validation that prevents filling. I just copy and paste CVV from 1Password. Better than typing out the number.
There is on browser thought. It doesn’t work on mobile so I usually wait until at computer which is better anyway.
The speed is nice, but for me it's more about the reliability. For example, a few years ago when my router broke I decided to try something else (Newegg I think) and after several weeks it just never arrived and I got a refund. Found the exact same model on Amazon and it arrived two or three days later, without Prime and without issues.
I just don't ever have the problems with Amazon that people complain about online.
For the most part these days, Amazon seems like a fast way to ship goods from Alibaba in the one to two day time frame.
For a lot of other stuff, it feels like they've lost their edge on price and shipping.
Often my main reason for using Amazon is that it reduces the friction associated with buying for more retailers. For example worrying about data breaches, being put on spam email lists, etc.
For me, the fast shipping is at a point where more reliability would be better than the current speed of delivery. If it's on time, I'd prefer to get a package in two days than have it delivered at 10pm in one. If it's behind the deadline, I'd prefer a more realistic deadline than emails about slipping on the schedule.
Why do you care about providing your credit card number to order something? You're not liable for fraud and most banks will replace the card quickly. In 25 years of having credit cards and using them extensively online I've had them compromised only a few times. It's really not something to worry about.
"not punching in my credit card number to random sites"
Not sure about OP, but for me it's about convenience. My pet peeve is credit card forms. Do you know what % of websites I've used that have at least minorly broken credit card forms? It's literally 99%.
Random common issues that are annoying but can be fixed:
- autocomplete doesn't work at all
- autocomplete only fills in half the fields
- autocomplete only fills in 1 field at a time
- autocomplete doesn't interact correctly with the rich widgets they provided for date picking or zip code
- autocomplete doesn't play well with js validation, which is only on callbacks for typing. Now I have to go backspace and re-insert the last character of every field so it doesn't think it's blank
- my town name has a ' in it. complete fucking crapshoot on whether sites DEMAND or HATE the '.
Common issues that are complete fucking messes that can't be fixed:
- javascript between fields fights over edits between them and I can't get the form simultaneously filled out correctly
- rendering issues on mobile leaving fields not visible
- autocomplete doesn't work and I've for some reason forgotten my CVV again and don't want to go get my wallet
I could go on and on. It's amazing how hard it is to get this right and how obviously nobody tests the flow where PEOPLE GIVE THEM MONEY which as I understand it is the primary purpose of these places.
I don’t use autocomplete, but a large number of sites feel the need to reinvent how a credit card form should be displayed. I do not care for your innovation. Put it in the same layout as the physical card. Plus the large number of sites that have broken tabbing (does not work or seemingly jumps to fields at random).
You know they print them right on the card right? How hard is it to punch in 20 characters and a name and billing address? Talk about first world problems.
Maybe it's just me, but why would you want too have autocomplete for CC forms enabled? Personally, on these very rare consciously chosen occasions where I decide to give my CC number to another entity, I prefer to copy it from my banking site and never save it anywhere, neither locally nor in a cloud.
Can you name some specific sites where this is an issue for you? I've had nothing but good experiences buying online, in the US at least.
Every single site I've bought from has the same boring and functional checkout experience, whether it's Stripe Checkout, Google Wallet, or Shopify. They're practically all the same, and they all work fine.
>You're not liable for fraud and most banks will replace the card quickly.
It's enough of a pain in the ass that most people would rather not deal with it at all. An extra layer of security to help it not happen is a very nice benefit.
Let's say you're a small EU-based merchant accepting payment for international orders via Stripe. An incoming iDEAL payment costs €0.30 / transaction. An incoming credit card payment? €0.25 / transaction, plus 2.5% of the transaction value. On top of that, you as merchant are charged €20 for every chargeback! And those additional costs are of course passed on to the customers because they will raise all prices by 2.5% to make up for it.
There is no free lunch. You are implicitly buying fraud insurance on every order and paying 2.5% for it.
For me it is 2-3 times a year, which is a major pain. I have to switch every billing service over manually. Sometimes bills lapse. I have even had replacements stolen from mail and used.
I used to do that until I got screwed a couple times.
I bought something for $2k, it was bad, shipped it back, and "we never received it".
UPS had collected signature, went to correct place.
Tried to resolve it amicably, they dragged their feet, and finally I asked amex for a chargeback. and... some deadline was elapsed and they wouldn't refund.
long story short, with amazon, every single problem was resolved, with very little friction.
That said, amazon is horrible for name brands. They have basically pushed value of brands to zero. Everything comes from UPPERCASENONSENSE brand, searches seem to be 99% sponsored results, many 5.0-star reviews seem to be fake. ugh.
Shopify has helped a lot too. Having all my info on their platform with a checkout that’s familiar really helps. Plus their app to track everything is nice - although could do without all the spam.
Well the first step is retailers and manufacturers needing to de-normalize this practice of playing continual games with pricing. These days if I see a "good sale" (aka non-sucker price) on something I'm in the market for, I will hit buy and then make the actual purchase decision over the next few weeks. Or if I'm unsure how many of something I will need, I will buy extra and then figure out how many I need later. Because I'm sure as shit not going to buy one or two for an honest price and then feel like a sucker later when I end up needing more but they've got me over the barrel. My main consideration is whether I've already got pending returns using the same method, or if I'm making a new task for myself.
It feels like this is part of a larger dynamic where companies are basically arbitraging consumers' feeling bad about waste and environmental destruction to increase their own bottom line. Like Target is abjectly terrible at packing items in boxes, such that things often get crushed in shipping. So then you're left with the dynamic of either complaining and accepting that return/resend creates a bunch more waste, or just shrugging off the damage they've caused (willfully, at this point). Now that I've seen the pattern, I just call that bluff too.
> Free returns aren't free. We need to de-normalize this practice of people buying so much junk just to immediately return it.
One of the things you lose from online shopping is sizing. Shoes run in different sizes, lengths, widths. How do you suggest you order shoes to find the right size if shopping online?
If your solution to the problem is “don’t do the thing you want to do” it’s never going to work. It’s not just shoes, it’s all clothing, lots of tech (ever bought a device only to find out it doesn’t actually do what it’s supposed to do?), lots of homeware goods. You’re basically saying don’t shop online.
If you think retailers are dumping every pair of shoes they get returned, you’re wrong by the way.
> lots of tech (ever bought a device only to find out it doesn’t actually do what it’s supposed to do?)
No, because I don't buy the cheap no-name junk off Amazon. It's pretty rare for me to encounter returns for stuff like that, because I already try and avoid supporting the e-waste game from the get-go. But I would say if you honestly tried to get a good and it wasn't what was advertised that's a good reason for a return.
But acting like the majority of returns are things which weren't as advertised is ignoring reality. Look no further than sibling comments here where that user openly acknowledges buying more than needed regularly and returns the rest. They're not alone with this; tons of people behave in this way. Buy something, decide later they didn't really want it/need it, return it. Decent chance it went to the trash. It's not worth it for the retailer to actually inspect and restock it.
> If you think retailers are dumping every pair of shoes they get returned, you’re wrong by the way.
Not all of them, just most of them.
Buying a dozen shirts and returning 10 of them because in the end you just didn't like the fit, you probably sent 5-7 otherwise fine articles of clothing straight to the landfill. Maybe a few of those will make it to some "donation" scheme, which will probably send half of those "donation" bound goods to the landfill. Then the last few will get put on a boat in a giant pile of goods, dropped off to some poor part of the world, and have a 50/50 chance of being worn by someone there or just become another piece of trash floating around.
Buying five pairs of shoes and returning four of them probably sent 2-3 pairs to the landfill. The rest are probably following that same flow above.
> Do you honestly think retailers are throwing away 50% of their returned stock?
For lots of categories of goods like apparel, yes. Its far cheaper for them to trash the item than spend all that money on the reverse logistics of actually analyzing the item. Other categories are probably more like 20-30%.
Both your links are related to amazon for cheap items, not e.g. high street retailers that are managing their own stock and inventory. Do you think Office [0] are chucking 4 pairs of New Balance trainers in the trash? No.
These links are not just about Amazon, but Amazon is overrepresented here due to the high percentage of their overall online sales.
And if Amazon can't get it to work with their already centralized logistics, smaller retailers probably have an even harder time with the reverse logistics.
> Do you think Office [0] are chucking 4 pairs of New Balance trainers in the trash? No.
Sure. If it costs them more to handle the return than what their margin on the goods would be, why would they reprocess it? Of that original sale say a $100, they probably only got $5-10 or so of original profit. And that was with the optimized supply chain getting it in to the original warehouse. So now they have to figure out the return shipping to the processing center, pay for inspections on the item, probably pay to re-ship to a warehouse, pay to re-stock it, and then for a lot of items list it as open box (if its anything that could have been plugged in to the wall it cannot be sold as new in the US), and then have all the regular costs of selling the item again.
Or they just eat the loss and increase prices a few percent and send it to "energy recovery". Or they "donate" it and claim they gave $100 worth of goods to charity. Or they sell the lots of returned goods for a few bucks a pound at the place where the returns were originally mailed to.
I returned some hardcover books that were intended as gifts, but the corners got banged up in shipping (because why bother doing something right when you can make it up in scale?). Perfectly usable items, but I obviously wasn't going to pay the new condition price for items they damaged with incompetent handling. When I brought them to return, the clerk just stuck the Amazon return label right in the middle of the front dust jacket. I doubt that's getting resold.
That's not an option for a lot of people. For example, the vast majority of physical shoe stores simply don't carry my size. There is literally only a handful of stores in my country I could go to - and I don't even have an incredibly unusual size!
Physical stores increasingly cater to the average. They would rather stock 20 different items in 5 sizes than 10 different items in 10 sizes. All of the long-tail stuff is only available online, so you are forced to buy online.
I don’t understand why all these comments are about who buys or doesn’t buy at Amazon. The article is about unionization and strikes. I expect a conversation about the merits of unions and their negotiation tactics. In my opinion, events like these will just accelerate job elimination. The goal of a logistics company is to be reliable. Humans are unreliable and more so when they are purposely and collectively unreliable. I’ve lived in a country with very powerful unions and it sucks— miss every 5th flight because the union decides to strike.
> I don’t understand why all these comments are about who buys or doesn’t buy at Amazon.
The logical connection is as follows: Bezos decided to optimize everything to its limits, including human behavior, to the very limits of law. To literally track every movement of employees and abusing the power the company holds over them. This is an ongoing process that we are all painfully aware of. Because of that, there is a growing negative feeling towards them that causes people not to give them their money. That's why instead of unions we are talking about boycotting Amazon.
> In my opinion, events like these will just accelerate job elimination
Sure, probably. The jobs that can be automated will eventually be automated. But while they're still needed, I'd hope they have some basic protections and decent wages.
If my online shopping costs go up 0.5% but now a thousand workers don't have to have the mental stress of "I really need a pee break, can my metrics take the few minute hit this week or will I lose my job and go homeless?", I'll take that trade in a heartbeat.
Most companies’ largest expense is labor/wages (usually somewhere on the order of 25-50%), and profit margins are usually on the order of 0-5%. Increasing pay or benefits substantially would increase costs by a lot more than 0.5%.
Sure, 0.5% is hyperbole on my part. Sorry. It's not like a 20% bump in costs for these workers would result in a 20% bump in prices or anything like that.
Their margin on that retail item is probably 30-40% of the cost of that product though. Let's assume the workers' benefits and wages in question here are 35% of Amazon's costs. If there was a 20% increase of that labor cost, that's going from 35% to 42% of the total share of costs, or an increase of 7% of the total costs. But that's 7% of the 30-40% of their markup. For a product with a 40% markup and they were to just pass that entire cost along to the consumer, it's a 1.6% increase in price.
So like in this hypothetical, which is not anywhere near real numbers for Amazon, we could give these workers a 20% benefit bump for increasing prices 1.6%.
I don't understand how you got down from 7% down to 1.6%. I think you are not counting COGS as an expense, and that's where the error comes from. If your assumptions are otherwise correct, I think you'd get roughly a 7% increase in prices to sustain the 20% bump in wage expense.
I am including COGS in this; that's the retail price minus the markup. The markup is all the rest of Amazon's costs, of which I agree wages for workers are probably somewhere around 30%ish.
Are you suggesting the warehouse worker's benefits and pay is really 25-50%+ of the final purchase price of the good?? That'd be an extraordinarily high amount of cost.
Yes, though I am including delivery and support staff with warehouse workers (basically everyone who is working 'on the floor'). More than half of their employees are categorized as "laborers and helpers", and there are a number of other categories that seem similar. https://assets.aboutamazon.com/64/79/d3746ef14fd99cc6be94532... (I only found this after your latest comment).
The largest categories of employees tend to dominate most companies' cost structures. I would like to run some numbers to see what the likely distribution is here, but the annual filings are quite sparse (in terms of income statement details), and I don't have the time to do an extensive analysis.
The merits of unions, not always but their goals are, multiple. a/ compensation and working conditions leverage in negotiations b/ structure that can directly address all sort of issues the employer don't care about and isn't obliged to deal with.
That it makes your service experience particularly painful is exactly the goal, bad (or better, no) customers experience hurts the employer, guaranteed.
I have found a lot of great content available in Libby and Hoopla. I use my local library card, but am also able to get a card from a nearby larger city library, and between the two I have access to a lot of content and very soon in a lot of cases.
> The world's second-largest private employer employs 1.5 million people. While that's a lot, it's a decrease of over 100,000 employees from the 1.6 million workers it had in 2021. [...] While Amazon is bringing on hundreds of thousands of robots per year, the company is slowly decreasing its employee numbers.
This is the discussion which we need to be having, and one which has been put off since Jimmy Carter failed to put a tax into place on computers so as to budget for worker re-training for folks whose jobs were eliminated by computers.
Instead, you had situations such as the type compositors unions bargaining for sinecures for their members, rather than participating in, and informing the usage of the new systems, contributing to a decade of ugly "Desktop DTP".
On-going automation should reduce the total number of hours which humans need to work to ensure that humanity is housed, clothed, fed, &c. --- why aren't we talking about reducing the workweek? See recent story in Tokyo:
Or, if the U.S. gathered together all the money used for Disability, SSI, WIC, Unemployment, Welfare, Social Security &c. _and_ their administration and overhead, there would be a significant amount of money --- would that be sufficient to fund a Universal Basic Income?
using estimates online, the sum of the cost of those programs is somewhere around $4 trillion. who is ubi for? if it's all us adults, then that's somewhere around 250m people.
That’s because of the lack of a union. Companies can’t just remove benefits that are in a union-bargained contract. (Assuming that would have been one.)
I do not know the rationale, but this is the flip side of collective bargaining: if someone makes a bad deal on my behalf I can no longer deal directly with my employer.
Hard for me to imagine any cases where the union does a worse deal on your behalf than you did yourself. Maybe you're talking about only compensation? Unions bargain for more than just compensation: better healthcare, parental leave, more sick days, caps on hours worked, etc.
In aggregate unions exist to get a bigger share of a company's profits for its workers. (Instead of executives and investors)
But if you have examples, I'd love to read about them.
> I also don't see how developers have any link with contract negotiations with warehouse workers?
Developers obviously have no direct impact on labor conditions of the warehouse workers. However, all the time-tracking, logistical optimizations, employee monitoring systems, etc. that enable Amazon to squeeze every bit of efficacy and profit out of these warehouse workers had to come from somewhere/someone.
I believe by contributing to companies that are as highly unethical as Amazon, developers are supporting entities that enforce and perpetuate such awful labor practices conditions. I am not assigning personal blame to any developer directly, but I do believe that as developers we need to be more considerate of the downstream ethical impacts that our work may have on others.
Just a reminder that if you search for "Thank my driver" on Amazon you'll get $5 donated to your most recent delivery driver at no cost to you. You can do this once per delivery, for every delivery, for the few weeks leading up to the holidays.
Not any more, apparently. Now all they get is a pat on the back.
"As of December 10, 2024, we have received more than 2 million "thank yous,” concluding the promotion offering $5 per "thank you" to eligible drivers. You can continue to thank your drivers and we will share your appreciation with them."
Looks like they no longer get the tip. This is what I see:
As of December 10, 2024, we have received more than 2 million "thank yous,” concluding the promotion offering $5 per "thank you" to eligible drivers. You can continue to thank your drivers and we will share your appreciation with them.
There seems to be a cap per local area. My area hasn't donated any money for the past week or so. It just says a thank you will be given to the driver. I presume it's because enough people used it to max out the allotment in our zip code(?).
Are they specifically calling for a boycott, though? Or just striking? (Because if it's the latter, getting orders that go unfulfilled may actually help their cause.)
So what you're saying is we should order a bunch of stuff and then cancel at the first sign of a delay in fulfillment so amazon loses more by waiting it out?
I am just curious who still orders anything today with delivery expectation to get it before Xmas. From my experience the delivery drivers are today delivering tons of stuff ordered a week ago and they are so overloaded, that todays order might come only in January.
Back in my day, everything was 6 to 8 weeks for delivery from catalogs (Sears Christmas Wishbook, anyone?) and the carriers were far less accessible when it came to tracking packages and whatnot than they are today. Honestly, those times seem like a cold-sweat nightmare, now. Speaking as an old man who regularly shakes his fist at passing clouds, I'm pretty damned happy with the current delivery times, even if they are occasionally a few days late. Those folks are out there breaking their backs for us and we'd best not forget it
Speaking from personal experience: people with ADHD, who don't have their shit together but desperately want to avoid disappointing the people they care about. People who then get hoodwinked by the bald faced lies everybody from Amazon right through to the courier staff will tell you about projected delivery dates and "oh, gosh, sorry, you know we just attempted delivery but couldn't get in!" (while you're sitting in front of the building)
My solution for this is to keep gifts for the people I buy presents for in mind throughout the year, and buy things as I come across them, then, when it's time to wrap, my wife and I lay things out and decide what actually gets gifted, excess gets set aside for upcoming birthdays (which are both fortunately early in the year, Jan. and March) or possibly even the next Christmas, then come April I start in on the process again.
I'm glad that works for you! The challenge with executive function issues is that it can be literally impossible to reliably do things like that in advance! Especially months and months in advance. It's also a challenge to delay gratification; when I find something that really speaks to me about someone, I really just want to give it to them straight away.
As a result I think I place a pretty low value on events centred around gift giving -- and yet I live in a society, etc.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonFC/comments/1hhips1/amazon_te...
Interesting to see discussion on Reddit from r/AmazonFC are pretty negative , wonder if these are genuine employees comment for PR team hired by Amazon
as a union diesel engine mechanic i can guarantee most, if not all these comments are complete PR.
I went on strike about ten years ago to protest mandatory overtime and lack of chemical PPE. the minute we authorized the strike, we had news channels from three states covering us and a billboard up the road that demanded an end to the strike by "concerned" truckers was erected in hours. Every day I could count on at least four emails from various sources, everything from "your union is cancelled" to "union declared illegal" and everything in between including offers to work for more pay but no contract. weekends were nearly a dozen phone calls, mostly robo, threatening pay cuts and layoffs and asking to cancel your healthcare and benefits.
we stuck out 19 days and won, and the very same news crews showed up again with no interviews from us, only management praising their great negotiation effort.
I would love for astroturfing to be illegal and heavily enforced.
Would union supported/enforced comments count as astroturfing as well? I think it’d be interesting to ban pay for picketing & comments, though I’m not sure it’s enforceable.
If the union pays you because you are not working, and you choose to use that time to talk about how much you value unions on the internet, that's not astroturfing. If the union pays you TO post about how good the union is on the internet, that IS astroturfing.
At one point, amazon had a literal program where warehouse workers could opt to sit at a desk and post propaganda comments instead of doing their normal manual labor job.
Strike pay (at least often) requires picketing to qualify. Unions also often pay people to post comments online and otherwise present the union’s perspective to media or the public. Sometimes these people are listed as unit leaders, or have other ‘union management’ positions.
This seems like something a disclosure would reasonably solve. The anti-union PR posts aren't going to disclaim that they were paid by Amazon to post the comment but the pro-union wouldn't give a shit.
As an aside, on Reddit a similar thing is disallowed (brigading other subreddits in an organized way)
Officially, but Reddit enforcement of rules went to shit about the same time as the rest of the internet. Now they allow whatever brings them money and disallow whatever doesn't.
I dream of the day where honesty is rewarded... sigh
I feel that the Luigi Mangione case is making more people aware of this type of dynamic.
It wakes a ton of people up rhat thought they could righton,righton with different decorations. Its going to be worse, the moment trump is revealed as a failure when it comes to system takedown ..
[flagged]
Either you think the CEO was an undeserving victim, or you think that only billionaires and their enforces deserve a monopoly on lethal force.
So, what's your take on this recent scenario:
Ukraine assassinated a Russian general that authorised plans for chemical attacks that killed civilians. The general never directly murdered anyone in person, never "pulled a trigger", but was ultimately responsible for many deaths.
Was Ukraine morally wrong in this act? Should they just let someone sit comfortably in a Moscow office and sign paperwork to cause suffering and death in Ukraine? Should they bend over and take it?
If not, why not?
If so, why?
Either way, please explain why Americans should or should not "bend over and take it" where "it" is death to the tune of tens of thousands a year -- orders of magnitude more than killed by that Russian general.
Either you think the CEO was an undeserving victim, or you think that only billionaires and their enforces deserve a monopoly on lethal force.
Neither choice is valid, and this statement is just pure mindfuck.
It is completely irrelevant what the CEO "deserved". I'm not going to condone lynching or vigilante killings in any civil context.
There's no analogy with Ukraine/Russia, or any actual military conflict.
You whole take here smells like "We're at civil war already, so why not just start lynching people? At least we'll have justice, finally."
Of course there's an analogy. A guy kills a whole lot of other guys and is still killing more - is it okay to kill him so he stops killing more?
For example is it okay to kill Hitler halfway through the Holocaust, or are we normally obliged to wait to tbe end and then put him to a fair trial?
> Neither choice is valid
Why not? They are the very real choices people are making.
Some would argue that lethal force is always wrong, even when you're being killed for money. Sorry, sorry... allowed to die without care ... for slightly enriching people that are already very, very, very rich.
Others, like the rebels in Syria, or the defenders in Ukraine, would argue otherwise.
> this statement is just pure mindfuck.
If you've never seen things in this way, you should start.
The billionaires see it that way.
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
These laws, these norms you cling to... these are not designed to protect you.
> I'm not going to condone lynching or vigilante killings in any civil context.
Things stop "being civil" when death at an industrial scale becomes wildly profitable, legal, protected, and enforced by violent police.
The same police that will stand outside a school for an hour and tackle parents who do try to protect the lives of their own children.
> We're at civil war already,
You are, you just haven't noticed.
In case you do notice, you'll realise you're on the side that's losing because while you wring your hands in fear of things turning violent, the other side has been feeding your side into a meat grinder for profit at an industrial scale.
The Sacklers killed 200,000 of you people and you want to protect their right to lord over you in absolute safety!? https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49718388
> At least we'll have justice, finally."
There's no "we" here.
I live in one of the rest-of-the-world places where healthcare is universal, and you have no justice. Not yet.
If you've never seen things in this way, you should start.
I entertained that way of seeing things at one point, actually.
But I got over it in my teenage years.
I'm glad you like paying into health insurance and getting no medical care
I'm glad you "know" what kind of medical care I've been receiving, and how much I've been paying for it.
My Boomer Dad was a Teamster. I remember there was a several-weeks-long (might have even been months-long?) strike when I was a kid, probably around the late-70s. Shit was real. One day I saw him loading baseball bats and clubs into the trunk of his Buick before he left the house. I was just a kid; I had no idea what was going on. I asked him about it later in life and he just said, "That's how it was back then. We had to fight for what we wanted." And he was being literal. He talked about people who were even suspected of crossing the line or talking to management would get a severe beatdown. He even said people would harass management and their families. Dudes would sit outside their homes, just to intimidate them. And, he said they rarely got punished because the cops supported their union and would look the other way. Different times.
our local PD was union at the time. we never got any overt support but there were a few kind gestures. on a cold morning an officer dropped a box of chemical hand warmers by the dumpster and made it very clear he was disposing of them because they were "the wrong size" and he wouldnt be back today to check on them. about three days later his supervisor made a trip to the dumpster and left out a box of donuts and a big take-out coffee jug, warning us we absolutely shouldnt consume them after he left as the donuts were the made the wrong size and the coffee was too hot.
lol. Bob's donuts in San Francisco has donuts about the size of an apple pie. I wonder if that makes the smaller 3-4 inch ones the wrong size?
It amazes me how things used to make more sense back in the day.
With this line of thinking, I guess lynchings are acceptable too?
When the ruling class captures all the non violent methods of resistance, then perhaps a little bit of lynching may convince them otherwise.
Lynching CEOs would make a lot of sense, so yes.
reddit is no longer a good place to try and get a pulse on general sentiment. comment section is filled with bots and the front page has the most random content i have ever seen, like occasional random creep shots of celebs that get like 3,000 upvotes that gain more transaction than current events.
I used to use search engines with the "site:reddit.com" keyword to get more genuine reviews about products and services. Now it more than not leads to posts where the top comment is some gpt'ed text with a clear referral link and far more up votes than an obscure subreddit on some niche object would warrant.
I still go to /r/meth because it's pure comedy
Amazon actively incentivizes (pays) employees to write positively about their experiences on social media.
It's interesting, because I know a few warehouse workers, and they all sing the praises of the job (all in the Bay Area). But yet I can see what the conditions are. I feel like every warehouse is a semi-independently run fiefdom and some are run a lot better than others.
Two things can be true: - A particular class of job may be very challenging, or worse - The same class of job may be the best available option for some folks in some regions
And, of course, some folks may have a good experience even while others do not.
They sing the praises in the Bay Area? What pay do they get? This is one of the least affordable places in the country
almost none. its time to implement anonymous online id systems.
yea they pay employees and also have bots that do this
Related:
Amazon Teamsters in NYC have voted to authorize a strike
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42436279
10k is about 0.7% of their total employee count. I wonder if this will have any effect.
It will have more business people asking about robots, other than that I doubt it will. Amazon don't even care if the packages are late because of this, they still get your purchase.
they truly don't care. I had an order that was supposed to be delivered tuesday by 8pm (delivery guarantee!) but at 8:10 switched to "now arriving Dec 27th". The person I chatted with gave me a $10 amazon credit and refused to even acknowledge my (much more expensive for them) solution that since all the items in my order were showing "delivery by Dec 19th" they should resend everything Prime. They still have my money even if I don't have Christmas presents, and I need to go through the hassle of returning it - when I eventually get it.
> don't even care if the packages are late because of this, they still get your purchase.
Not at this time of the year. If something doesn't have a pre Christmas delivery, it won't be bought in many cases. Or even if it does, people may hear about the strike and not risk it.
It'd be the delivery thad' be late, not the delivery estimate on the order page. The potential impact here would be related to how many newly triggered returns happen due to the gift arriving after Christmas.
Unfortunately, Moravec's paradox has you jammed up. So for now, negotiate they must.
i used to work on bezo's fc automation back in 2012 to 2016, they've been they'd been talking about "lights out fc" being just around the corner since since those days. if anything we had adjacent teams that were working on temp worker and worker scheduling systems, "people management" systems that had more interest from leadership. imo a lot of the automation stuff ended up being real timid and imo really was to juice valuation.
Of course Amazon cares. They measure fulfillment time religiously.
Amazon is amazingly well run.
Amazon is only well run for the shareholders and executives. It is not well run for the people filling the boxes. It seems down right sadistic. Like the executives don't even see them as people.
And they sent me a 43" Samsung TV when I ordered a 42" LG OLED. How the hell can their many billions of dollars of IT investment not automatically scan the barcode on the box or weight the box or use computer vision and notice this error before they sent the wrong TV out?
A couple of years ago, my (now) wife ordered her mother a battery case for Christmas because she had seen the same one at our apartment and mentioned wanting one. Since it was ordered using the gift wrapping options, we didn't open it when it arrived, and she gave it to her mother to unwrap. Her mother was quite confused when she unwrapped her gift and found a sushi-making kit. It's become a recurring joke in our family now that we need to check any gifts ordered from Amazon in advance to avoid accidentally giving someone a sushi kit.
If you buy this [0] Startech 25U open server rack (unsure about other sizes), there is a non-zero chance you’ll receive a pallet of them – 9 in total – for the price of one. It’s a running joke in r/homelab. It happened to me, and then I found out it happened to a lot of people.
Also, for this reason, it’s somewhat common to see them for sale at a steep discount in r/homelabsales. Only makes sense if you’re within driving distance, but hey – cheap rack.
[0]: https://a.co/d/2WJiDWz
if they really cared the would not have gotten Puralor to deliver my order in the middle of a Canada Post strike.
I wonder that too. They been doing this for a while now around the big shopping holidays. And yet, I never hear about any major disruptions.
Maybe the union needs to change tactics?
The amount of leverage workers have is proportional to how hard it is for the company to replace them. Replacing unskilled workers isn't that hard so those workers don't have much leverage.
The only real solution is to become skilled workers. Which, almost ironically, is to do the thing the company threatens to do -- find a way to automate work like this, so the people working at the warehouse are robotics technicians etc.
Isn't Amazon getting to the point where they're having trouble finding employee candidates they haven't previously fired?
> Isn't Amazon getting to the point where they're having trouble finding employee candidates they haven't previously fired?
This apparently happened somewhere in a rural area with a small local population. It's obviously not going to happen at a warehouse in, say, New Jersey.
And to the extent that it actually happens somewhere it's not like their response would be hard to predict. Calculate how much they would have to increase local wages to expand the candidate pool enough, see if this is less than it costs to move the warehouse somewhere with a larger pool of workers, if not then move the warehouse.
Notice that Amazon warehouse workers get paid more than minimum wage. This is why. Unskilled workers don't have zero leverage, they just don't have much.
Amazon here advertises (and this is several months ago, so not even seasonal) on the radio and local media, without paraphrasing:
"Want a job? Can pass a background check? No interview. Apply today, start tomorrow."
They wouldn't pay for ads if they weren't struggling to hire. If you saw a multi media campaign, that was expensive.
it's likely not the case here but more powerful unions can block non-union scabs from taking the jobs of striking workers (in that this is usually part of the contract the union has with the employer). at scale, unions have a lot more power to affect things
but the point is it's not about worker skill when unions are at sufficient power levels
When unions get to be that size is when they get captured by organized crime and other interests, because then they're acting as a de facto government and susceptible to the same corrupting influences but without the (by no means perfect but far better than nothing) safeguards we put on governments in modern democracies.
This is also why corporate monopolies are a fiasco and need to be prevented as well.
The general rule is "prevent any one group from consolidating too much power". If someone's solution is "let our group consolidate a huge amount of power" they're admitting they're the villains.
I’m not sure why the general sentiment here is that Amazon workers do not deserve a living wage and should be replaced with robots.
All the best to the union, I sincerely hope they meet your demands.
What's funny is even if you hate unions, surely the demographics who frequent HN at least has a solid grasp of the capital investments and R&D costs necessary to "replace them with robots" - We are talking about delivery station roles here. You gotta build something that, amortized, can do it for less than $500/day in a climate where Wall Street is putting pressure on tech stocks to control costs. Have at it.
We heard this same argument about automation in food service. Remember when Miso/Flippy was going to put all those $20/hour fast food workers out on the street? Turns out hiking prices was way easier.
> We heard this same argument about automation in food service.
Have you been to a fast food joint lately? Even at peak traffic they have maybe three people working when they used to have 7-10. Now you walk in and you have to order from the kiosk, which is literally the iPhone app on a vertical touch screen. You don't even talk to a human until they hand you the food.
Ordering from a machine actually makes sense, and, crucially, is easy to implement.
Replacing the actual burger-fliping workers, or order-assembling workers is much harder. An adequate robot, even if built with today's technologies, will likely never pay for itself.
this doesn't happen with a literal human flipping burgers replaced with a robot flipping burgers. It's complex drinks made with a button push instead of mixed by hand, more of the delivery chain pushed to the left of the restaurant, like Tim Horton's making all the donuts in factories and "finishing" them in store instead of hiring bakers, shifting traffic to drive through, and gig-delivered take away. Having customers order and queue up, etc. There are way less employees and they are only doing the "hard" work, massively parallelized.
That might be what you see but during your rush shifts you're looking at 10+ at places like McDonalds with 6-7 during less busy shifts and those 6-7 people are busting their asses. Churn has also jumped way-up post-COVID. A bunch of once-reliable food service workers moved up the labor value chain and left the industry and this has left the F&B industry with some pretty major staffing problems.
This is just not true.
Maybe your area suffers from that, but mine doesn't.
There are robot grocery warehouses in England: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE (5 minutes, Tom Scott video).
Lots of Amazon's stock would be easier, but Amazon also has a greater range of sizes.
Fast food - like McDonalds - have followed through with this. They now have a single human register and much smaller kitchens, and 1/2 their business is take out. It's not all automation; a lot of it is factory prep and shifting the work on to customers & gig workers.
That's fine, this is the natural and expected response to labor getting more expensive. The bad outcome is when government steps in to artificially push wages down.
>It's not all automation
Almost none of it is automation. McDonalds invested in a fully automated fry machine but they basically don't get deployed because thanks to COVID "labor shortages", they all figured out a much better strategy:
Just have fewer employees and make them do more work. It doesn't matter how much people bitch about wait times and product quality on twitter, they still buy. Americans love to bitch about things on the internet, but they still wait in the drive through line for tens of minutes for "fast food" that is demonstrably worse than it was five years ago.
Americans have comprehensively demonstrated that they are unwilling or unable to just, not fucking buy stuff. Despite all the rhetoric about the economy suffering before the election, even here on HN (which coincidentally disappeared the day after the election, how about that...) we are seeing record breaking holiday consumer spending. It's fucking insane how willing Americans are to just throw money at companies that are outright hostile to them. I cannot fathom the unwillingness to not buy stuff that the average American has.
Quality, service, value, all of it will continue to degrade until US consumers finally figure out that you have an OPTION to, you know, not buy worthless trash. When PepsiCo basically doubled their prices in the past couple years, for products that are literally colored water and automatically cooked potato chips, which had near zero increase in cost of inputs, PepsiCo called it "inflation". In France, the news ran articles about clear price gouging by PepsiCo. In the US, Americans blamed it on Biden, somehow, including Americans who literally grow and sell the potatoes PepsiCo buys and therefore KNOW that PepsiCo did not pay more for those inputs, and KNOW that Biden has zero input on the prices anyone in the chain charge. It's insane to me how unwilling my fellow countrymen are to just consider they might be taken advantage of by business.
They correctly figured out customers could tolerate slower times for fast food because a significant chunk of their orders are delivery and pickup, so having it take 7 minutes instead of 3 won't really be noticed by the consumer.
Amazon warehouses are heavily automated and they’re increasing the automation all the time
(off topic) I was thinking today about how robots should throw packages to each other. It'd be faster and it's all the things robots are great at: hand-eye coordination, weight and holding angle, and group coordination.
think of how you do any similar activity; is the slow part walking a short, line of sight distance?
> I’m not sure why the general sentiment here is that Amazon workers do not deserve a living wage and should be replaced with robots
These are two entirely unrelated issues.
If the world doesn't need a particular task to be done by humans, then the task should be performed by robots.
Until that happens, the workers should be treated humanely.
> If the world doesn't need a particular task to be done by humans, then the task should be performed by robots.
The problem is, our society isn't ready for that shift, not even close. Employment opportunities for the low skilled have all but gone down the drain - there is a reason why Walmart, Amazon and the other usual suspects love to set up shop in devastated communities: they have a captive audience that has no other realistic opportunities for gainful employment and thus is much, much less likely to resist when faced with exploitative and/or abusive conditions.
Warehouse work and logistics in general is the last employment opportunity many of these people have, and while it being replaced by robots may be better for society as a whole (if one follows the belief that all work should be done by machines so that humans can follow their individual interests), just standing by idling around while the markets enforce the shift is going to be a political disaster.
Everyone cheering for automation and AI always says "oh we'll just implement UBI" but none of them ever seem to actually be working to help make that happen; I doubt we will get a glimpse of that until things get bad enough for CEO-murder to be a much more common thing.
UBI at this point is entirely a political decision to be made by the legislators. How do you expect others to "actually be working to help make that happen"?
Give money to people working to persuade lawmakers to make UBI happen.
Get your AI-boosting company to spend some of its money buying lawmakers and telling them to make UBI happen.
MCD still needs middle class people to buy their Happy Meals.
I worked for a Walmart store as a young man. It was well run, and they were adamant that you took your breaks throughout the day. I faced no exploitative or abusive conditions and was well paid.
Was this 80s Walmart, 90s Walmart, 00s Walmart? Their corporate culture has changed dramatically into a cutthroat business.
This is the same experience a friend of mine had working for Walmart for a couple years, until they moved earlier this year. I suspect each location is going to vary, though, just like any chain store.
I believe you other than well paid
How long ago?
> The problem is, our society isn't ready for that shift, not even close.
Percentage of US labor force working in agriculture by decade: https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teacher-reso...
1950 was 15.2%, 1970 was 4.7%
Yeah, but manufacturing picked up a lot of the slack... until that went down the drain when China came, so Amazon et al picked up the slack, but now there is nothing left.
The US Navy is rebuilding to fight a war with China. There are jobs available in the shipyards, mostly unionized. It's tough work, probably harder and more dangerous than an Amazon warehouse.
>It's tough work, probably harder and more dangerous than an Amazon warehouse.
My buddy who is a union welder at a shipyard doesn't have to piss in a bottle to make his quota. His job is fucking fantastic, thanks to the union, and the hardest part of it is navigating controls around what the navy allows civvies to touch.
It's predominantly a lot of professional work by tradies, NOT grunt work. Use the proper PPE and you probably won't even have any lasting injuries or bodily damage. Take your time and follow the rules and you won't even be the cause of death for a hundred sailors like with the Thresher.
>> the hardest part of it is navigating controls around what the navy allows civvies to touch.
Well, that and using the proper PPE so that you probably won't even have any lasting injuries or bodily damage and taking your time/following the rules so that you probably won't even be the cause of death for a hundred sailors or coworkers.
Compare that to putting the wrong shipping label on the package. I'd rather piss in a bottle than be a welder, to be honest.
If the only jobs available are to help kill more Chinese people, what does that say about our society?
That's good for the coastal towns that have shipyards, but useless in the flyover states.
Most of my recent business and personal travel has involved flying to "flyover states". But whatever.
People are allowed to move for work. I have. Shipyards are expanding in the Great Lakes region.
https://maritime-executive.com/article/navy-expands-shipbuil...
The shale gas revolution has created a lot of blue collar jobs. The chemicals industry is booming in Ohio.
https://www.jobsohio.com/news-events/news-press/energy-chemi...
The US Navy, like all parts of the DOD, knows that the best way to build support for any weapons system is to have part of it manufactured in a Congressman's district. The most unsinkable projects are built, little by little, in 435 districts.
So, yes, the shipyards need to be on the coast. But much of the material on the inside of the ship may be built elsewhere.
>while it being replaced by robots may be better for society as a whole (if one follows the belief that all work should be done by machines so that humans can follow their individual interests)
While "robots" are a fairly recent concept, the advancement of human civilization has been predicated on ever increasing efficiencies of human labor.
> While "robots" are a fairly recent concept, the advancement of human civilization has been predicated on ever increasing efficiencies of human labor.
Agreed. But in general, the efficiency gains got redistributed to the people - usually, by (bloody) revolutions and strikes.
Across the Western world, we haven't seen any meaningful progress in that redistribution in a fucking century - the 40 hour work week got introduced around 1926 [1]. Instead, all we got was that women now get exploited by employment providers as well, so the pool of available labor power virtually doubled, driving down wages while over the last few decades housing costs exploded and the demand for labor went down, further driving down wages. It remains open if the rise of pacifism and "non-violent action" in general that has happened in parallel in the same timeframe was coincidence, causation or consequence.
We are in for a wild ride over the next years. Luigi will not be the last one of his kind, I think this was just the start...
[1] https://www.cultureamp.com/blog/40-hour-work-week
The problem is, since the beginning of time, all the improvements were in mechanical work, allowing humans to shift towards more intellectual work.
Now the "robots" are replacing intellectual work, and humans have no where to go.
Is that really the case? So far all the examples I've seen were closer to "change X caused people to shift to another type of job, or to a new area opened up by X". Very recently some creative work has been impacted by LLMs, but apart from that, are there real stats on the intellectual work being taken over?
And crucially, we should figure out how to run society without culling unnecessary humans.
Yeah, but at Amazon people will be more concerned of a robot part squeaking for better care than a human yelling for it.
Amazon warehouse work pays almost $20/hour where I live, which is well above the federal minimum wage and more than almost every other company in the area for this type of work. This is a living wage.
"should be replaced with robots"
I also think it's funny we are having this discussion. When songwriters and other creators were complaining about piracy in the 2000s, the general response from the tech community was that this was the future and you didn't deserve to earn a living.
My response is the same.
$20/hr still isn't much money and you can only survive, note I'm not saying thrive here, on that amount in the poor areas in America.
There are very few jobs that actually pay well in America nowadays, and the ones that do tend to be congregated in few geographical areas and require extensive schooling.
The vast majority of Americans deserve more money.
Also check your priors, there are many musicians that do not complain about piracy and even partake in it (see Trent Reznor being part of oink/what, or Dead Kennedys encouraging people to record music on their tapes). I know many musicians that would upload their music on private trackers, regardless of what their label wanted or said.
> The vast majority of Americans deserve more money.
This is pedantic but I strongly dislike when people say anyone deserves anything.
I support an equitable system that allows citizens to move up in economic class (which we don't currently have) but I don't subscribe to the idea that everyone inherently deserves anything.
That puts you at odds with the tradition of natural rights. The Declaration of Independence says everyone deserves life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The Declaration of Independence doesn't actually say that. It says that everyone is endowed with certain unalienable rights including the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness whether they deserve it or not. Just like people have the right to free speech or a jury trial in front of their peers, whether they deserve it or not.
The distinction is important because whether someone deserves something is a normative statement while having the right is a descriptive statement.
What you deserve because of your right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is up for debate.
Does not mean that they deserve a specific fixed income...
its "have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", not "deserves" which is entirely different. Go to your boss and tell them you deserve a pay raise.
I think it's an intellectually dishonest interpretation of my reply
No, I don't think so. You specifically rejected the idea that everyone inherently deserves anything. Objectivists would agree, but I don't think Ayn Rand would have been popular with Jefferson.
Perhaps you could clarify - what do you mean by "everyone", and what do you mean by "anything?" Does everyone deserve UBI? Do workers deserve disposable income? Do the homeless deserve housing? Healthcare? Food? An attorney, if arrested? Do children deserve college? High school? Primary school? Orphanages?
You can't say that nobody inherently deserves anything, then say I'm intellectually dishonest when I take you at your word.
"There are very few jobs that actually pay well in America nowadays, and the ones that do tend to be congregated in few geographical areas and require extensive schooling"
There are plenty of blue collar jobs that don't require schooling and can make a comfortable living. If you are talking about a job anyone with a pulse can get? This won't ever pay well.
"I know many musicians that would upload their music on private trackers, regardless of what their label wanted or said."
All the indy artists I knew ended up having to get out of the business because they couldn't sell their music anymore (people would just download it and expect it for free) and making money from live performances are mostly controlled by large corporations.
Piracy only hurt independent artists and forced all of them with talent to sign with large labels to make a decent living.
Again, with piracy, you want no protection for the artist (and even justify why taking their music, without asking, is fine). Yet, you want the unions to collude with the government to force corporations to halt all technological advances, so workers don't lose their jobs.
Doesn't make much sense here.
> $20/hr still isn't much money and you can only survive, note I'm not saying thrive here, on that amount in the poor areas in America.
That's enough to thrive in lots of places in the USA, in some cases. Maybe not the most desirable places, though.
absolutely not, maybe if you're living with parents and not paying for rent or groceries
Or living by yourself or with a spouse, maybe with a kid. Not everywhere is high cost.
Can you please name a single city in the US where you can easily live on $20/hr that isn't stricken with massive poverty?
I find it insulting that you don't think Americans, especially those that work, don't deserve dignity through their labor in having a meaningful life. Especially when they work for one of the richest companies in the world.
I find it insulting that you're moving goalposts and attributing things to me that I did not say and do not think.
It's what I said in the original comment and it's what I think.
You failing to come up with an answer at least readers will know that you don't have their good conscious in mind.
A livable wage is a wage a husband can make to raise a family, including housing, food, transportation, schooling, etc.
$20/hr is about $40k/yr. Using 30% towards housing, that means they can only denote $12/yr to housing, or $1k/month. At current interest rates, that translates to a $150,000 house.
What can you get for $150? There's nothing in any area I've looked that was actually habitable ever since the government's COVID debacle.
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen people buying in the 100-200 range on r/FirstTimeHomeBuyers. Nit sure where tho.
I think your standard for a living wage is way, way too low. We should be able to comfortably afford food, housing, and medical care at minimum - both without spending most of your paycheck, to be able to afford it during periods of joblessness, and with a retirement at a reasonably young age. You cannot do this at $20/hour, and the only reason this isn't the normal standard is incredible greed and capitalism.
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Minimum wage != Livable wage
I don't think it's worth considering the comparison.
But sure, maybe working at a distribution center pays well enough where you're located. Likely that's not the case where these strikes are happening. It's expensive out there.
Also, what you wrote gives the impression of "I've got mine already so I don't care what happens to you."
Everyone deserves the opportunity to earn a livable income, but not all jobs can or should be paying a "living wage." Some jobs by their nature are part time and some people only want to work part time.
That doesn’t seem like a contradiction. Full time jobs should offer livable wages, part time could offer less. However, you can’t do some shenanigans like force workers to be part time by making them work less than 40 hours a week just so they don’t get classified as full time.
What is a livable wage? That differs if someone is living with their parents, or if they have 3 kids and are living alone and the sole earner in the family.
My unscientific view is a person working 40 hours a week should at least be able to afford a modest home, fresh food and other ordinary expenses. If a job pays less than that and needs to be topped up by some kind of public assistance then we should think of that as a subsidy to the business rather than welfare to the employee.
There’s many facets to the eco only tho. Why blame Amazon for not paying a livable wage instead of blaming the government and NIMBYs for shitty planning and not building enough housing? If housing and healthcare cost 1/3 of what it does today wouldn’t this be more of a living wage?
Negative. All jobs should be paying liveable wages. One off type of jobs for 'this and that' sure, but showing up every day and expectation for deliverables or being on time? Absolutely, pay a liveable wage. Too many Ferrari, BMW, new speed boat from the PPP loans greed to show that employees mean nothing. All jobs deserve liveable wages. We should be advocating for a more peaceful society.
That's fine. Part time jobs can pay a living wage/hr instead.
Uh sure. Then why are they striking? I honestly don't know.
Some large number of them have been "agitated". You can't acknowledge that propaganda exists which is capable of manipulating people into doing things they wouldn't do on their own (or that they shouldn't do), and then say that the left does not create that sort of propaganda.
They're striking not for better wages, but so that some local or state politician wins an election in 2026.
Yeah, they're being agitated alright... by horrible working conditions, declining real wages, and the people who apologize for it and pretend they're all bots or something rather than real people with real interests that are every bit as deserving of respect as some corpo's bottom line.
Anyone thinking this is a one time thing and is going to blow over hasn't been paying attention.
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Define what a livable wage is then. Is it $25/hr? $50/hr? $100/hr?
To start with, any definition that ends with a constant number is wrong. The living wage in an area depends on the cost of living in that area. I don't have that number on hand, but I expect it to be included in any discussion of what people should get payed.
After that, we need to ask how much profit a person should be allowed to make on their labor.
Okay everyone recognizes this is true. Please share a reasonable number for a medium COL city, ballpark.
Healthcare, decent sized apartment, 5 weeks of paid vacation, free or easily affordable pre school, overtime pay, decent schools and free college, is a good start. Then some left over on top after essentials so you aren't living paycheck to paycheck.
Right, but we're talking about Amazon who make billions annually not "lots of companies".
So 6 weeks of vacation, then?
Yea no. I understand the sentiment and agree with it, but not exactly feasible for a lot of companies, especially for the type of job they offer
So you acknowledge that the job should be done but the people doing it deserve to live in squalor even though they work a full time job. Just for corporate profit and your convenience.
Just so you know, all things I listed are things most people in Western Europe already have. Including employees of Amazon and McDonald's.
Here's my perspective. Not exactly related, but I hope you understand how I think:
If I am a small shipping company, and all I need is someone to wrap boxes and store them, and the load isn't much, then should I be paying them full time for the job? Heck, should I pay them a living wage? No. I pay them the value of the job.
Obviously, we need a certain minimum wage because nobody deserves to get scammed and make 10 cents a day, but at the same time, this push for all these benefits isn't realistic. I wish it was, but it isn't.
Obviously, my example is different from Amazon, but this is more a business owner perspective.
If they are working for you full time, but you aren't paying them living wage, how exactly are they supposed to make ends meet?
I don't know, but I think it is unfair to put all responsibility onto the business owner. In theory, a job is an agreement where you work for someone, and they pay you. Certain benefits may be required depending on circumstances, but making companies provide so many benefits is not a fair option.
Keep in mind, I'm not opposed to companies providing benefits, but I think regulating this would create more trouble than good.
We let businesses exist for one reason, so people can actually live (and I say let, because it is society - that is, its individuals - that has a put a system in place whereby such entities can exist and do what they do). If a job doesn't pay enough for that, the business isn't worth keeping around from the society's point of view. Workers should be paid decently, no matter what — profits or no profits. If an industry or company can't afford to pay fair wages, it’s not worth having, plain and simple.
On top of fair pay, companies owe their employees more. Businesses don't exist in a vacuum—they're tools we use to make life better for everyone. The entire economy is just a system we built to serve people, not the other way around.
Right now, companies often act like mini-dictatorships, where the tradeoff — giving up freedoms in exchange for money — ends up hurting society even if it props up the economy.
In short: if a company isn't contributing positively, it's failing at its purpose and should either disappear, or forced to fulfill its role.
My ex wanted to go work at a veterinarian's office. Several in the area had openings, but one significant caveat:
Each was offering only part-time hours (16-24h) but required "full-time availability".
That is not an fair exchange of effort.
Small business owners all too often (as much as they are also a valuable part of the community) think that they are entitled to far too much of their employees, and seem to think they have some inherent right to not just their business, but to their desired profit margins.
One local business here closed recently with this self-centered, presumptuous and tone-deaf message:
> It is so sad to see that our dream with all its potential has collapsed because the community was not willing to support it.
I understand your frustration with these unfair offers, and I am not supporting that. In your case, you make an unfair generalization of small business owners and base your explanation of it.
In theory, if one employer offers a job with great benefits, they will win over the employer with not as many benefits. Clearly, that wasn't happening in your example.
Unless you're the only one selling a product that people need and want to buy you're going to be undercut by your competitors that aren't paying for these things either as that is how it works in America. Quite expected when there's no worker shortage so companies have to compete for workers, but that's not the kind of competition capitalists want.
In most of Europe workers wouldn't have to worry about any of that, everyone enjoys the basic package. So your competitors wouldn't be able to undercut you on price by not providing healthcare and thus force you to do the same.
Is it the best system for startups, corporate profits and the stock market? Obviously not but people are happier.
Thank you for your response. I hope I'm not misunderstanding here, but enlighten me if I am.
I wish all the benefits are possible, but it isn't feasible because different countries function differently, and I think your point explains it much better than I could have explained it.
America and Europe are different places, with different economies and as a result have different luxuries they can afford and costs they must bear. This means it is easier to offer benefits in Europe than America.
Guys, you have to fix USA!
> Healthcare, decent sized apartment, 5 weeks of paid vacation, free or easily affordable pre school, overtime pay, decent schools and free college, is a good start.
This is literally the (by-law) standard of living for people with full time jobs with employment contracts[1] where I grew in Italy... that's not Silicon Valley, but one part of Italy that has been depressed for many years. (It's also the second top region in Italy by life expectation, that's between the 6th and 7th place in the world ranking by country) So much that in this very town Amazon is building a new warehouse that opens next year.
[1] Granted, permanent positions are rare; but permanent or temporary positions do offer this stuff by law. Fake contracts (partita IVA) and the gig economy exists there too.
Free college almost... public universities tuition fees are 500-4000 EUR per year, depending on the location and prestige.
Italy and America are different places, with conditions. Just because one is feasible in one country doesn't mean its feasible in another.
Yeah @rlupi, America is far too poor to afford basic living conditions. /s
But seriously, no US state is as poor as Italy, in GDP per capita terms (Mississippi 50K vs Italy 40K).
It’s not like this is an unstudied concept.
Here is one calculator: https://livingwage.mit.edu/pages/methodology
$20/hr fulltime is ~40k/yr or ~$3300/mo. As just one benchmark: can you find housing in your area for $1100/mo?
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No. Guess we're at an impasse on this topic.
I find it funny that people are trying so hard to explain something to someone who really just wants an argument.
I don't think it's a question of who deserves what. They deserve a living wage. The kids deserve to get their presents on time. I deserve a pony. The question is how whether to see it as a smart tactical choice to get that they "deserve" or a cynical move to strike when they get maximum publicity and do maximum damage.
I would apply the term "cynical" to the decisions made by Amazon's management which create the working conditions that compel their workers to strike, while providing top 1% compensation to themselves.
These people are just doing what they have to do to survive. If anything, going on strike a truly desparate move. Insinuating that they are childishing in doing so (as if they feel they "deserve a pony") on the other hand, seems simply -- snide.
Isn't that the whole point of a strike?
You're going to have a bad time if you plan your strike at the most opportune time for your company.
Whether or not striking is good for society is a separate discussion, but striking when you have the most leverage over your company makes the most sense for those striking to get what they want.
Just to add to this, the point of laborers striking is to show the company the value of their labor. If laborers not laboring means profiteers not profiting, it's good for the laborers' negotiating power because the profiteers really want to profit.
Had to buy some simple toolkit today. It was 5 bucks on Amazon, but I decided to find a local store that sells it. Same price btw.
I think we should be a bit more aware about the impact of ordering everything through Amazon. Not only regarding delivery, but also the message it sends to local stores.
I've had this exact sentiment for many years but... what are we supporting really?
Is it because you want a distributed network of inventory across the country near you in case of emergency?
Is it because you like talking to someone when doing purchases?
Is it because you think someone is doing a societal good by parking money in inventory they brought near you?
Is it because you just don't like someone doing it more efficiently and getting "too" rich? ie dislike of big corporations?
Like I feel like I should want to support local business but it is way less efficient and I can't really convince myself that I'm not just repeating something my parents also said.
I found myself gravitating back to local stores after years of buying essentially everything on Amazon because local stores at least to some degree curate their inventory while Amazon increasingly does not. If you're looking for a specific product that doesn't matter as much (although Amazon also has counterfeiting problems). But if you're just looking to browse what's available in a certain category of product, Amazon is nearly unusable. You'll almost certainly find dozens of Chinese companies with randomly generated names selling what are essentially copies of the same product with no good way to pick one or even tell if they're any good (reviews being basically useless on Amazon these days).
Because they don't have the same unlimited inventory capacity, local stores have to put at least some effort into selling products with some base level of quality and focusing on the products most likely to sell in each category. Local stores are by no means perfect here, but they're vastly better than Amazon in this regard. And it's especially important because finding good independent product reviews on the internet these days is also a challenge, and even where they exist they're not reviewing whatever no-name Chinese brand Amazon is selling anyways.
While the junk item situation on amazon is real, I can't agree with this take about local stores. I find that local stores tend to have random crap that they want to sell rather than high-quality items.
This is my experience too.
Local stores supply the cheapest crappiest version of something, but sell it at full price. This maximizes their profit.
Online, I can actually see from the reviews which product is best, and buy that one.
I spend the same, but get a much higher quality product.
There are so many products only sold on Amazon that have 20,000 reviews because they're so much better than anything you can buy locally.
I'm not talking the random Chinese brands with 50 reviews -- I'm talking the #1 best selling item in each product category.
I just searched for a Wifi Extender on Amazon. This [0] particular model has 3.6k reviews, and is the first option after "Amazon's Choice" Must be good, right? How about we scroll down to one of those reviews [1]. Oh, looks like it racked up a bunch of reviews for being a washing machine hose, and then changed product SKU.
[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Extender-Antennas-Repeater-Wireless...
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Extender-Antennas-Repeater-Wireless...
You're completing ignoring the advice I gave. 3.6k reviews is nothing.
But if you visit the page for the product's category:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/bestsellers/computers/430578031/...
You see the #1 option has 36K+ reviews. Looks pretty solid to me.
Yes, you can purchase pages and change the product, it's a known scam that I agree Amazon should crack down on. That still doesn't change the fact that there are super-popular items that are usually way better than what you can purchase locally.
I didn’t ignore the advice - I showed a link to a popular product that has thousands of almost perfect ratings that is readily available on amazon.
An even better way to do it is don’t use Amazon for discovery, and only buy stuff you’ve researched off the site. But walking into Amazon to buy something is just as likely to land you with crap as going into your local shop and doing so.
Local stores vary wildly in quality, and that's part of the reason they've been pushed aside by the giants.
However, now "local store" includes the giants like Walmart, etc.
Yes, exactly my experience as well. And the more of a mom and pop store that it is, the worse this problem tends to be. I have actually audibly laughed out loud for a second before catching myself when seeing some of the prices.
Ironically, it's the big chains that seem to be the best on this. They have some curation and their pricing is usually a little higher than What I'll see on Amazon but isn't outrageous.
The big exception is anything edible, such as groceries. Anything edible on Amazon is going to be wildly overpriced. For edible items I definitely go to big chains that are local
It has been surprising to me for years that people put up with this, I find it really terrible as a shopping experience. Like shopping in the worst dollar store you’ve ever been in that’s also the size of a city and loaded with ads, except you can’t actually touch the products or smell the pervasive scent of cheap plastic while you browse. And they want you to pay a subscription!
Shopping from retailers that employ actual buyers feels like a real upgrade.
What you are supporting is local sustainability. The world would be better off with less global trade and more local productions. Local productions means a stronger community and more visibility for business practices, because it's more sustainable.
If a global business decides to just toss all the plastic it uses it in its backyard you'll never notice because it's 2000 miles away. If Amazon decides to treat their workers unfairly, you'll never notice. But you'll notice if a local business does it because you'll be walking in there every day. There's a level of accountability.
In my grandpa's village everything was local production and commerce but they all lived way worse than me and my friends that get paid through remote companies and spend our money online. It's incredibly unclear to me why a super poor and undeveloped local economy is better than a specialized globalized one. In my country there was a dictatorship with protectionism and when we opened things got way better, not worse.
Regarding me not noticing crimes, I think we have police and regulations for that.
> In my grandpa's village everything was local production and commerce but they all lived way worse than me and my friends that get paid through remote companies and spend our money online.
(1) That is because technology also takes away components of life that one can enjoy without being rich such as accesss to nature and local food production.
(2) The global economy is only so "good" because it takes advantage of the commons in poorer places. We simply should not have the capability to do that. You only benefit off the suffering of others.
On (1), I grew up behind the iron curtain in a pre-internet age next to a village (no TV, no organized entertainment). The typical non-working activity there was not to enjoy the beauty of nature (as farmers they were fed up with it) but to be bored, get drunk and start fights with anyone non local. When the economy opened up in late 1980s anyone who could ran out to cities.
I will take technology and some globalism any day. My 2c.
That's the thing that I see a lot of. I grew up in Africa, and was exposed to extreme poverty, since as far back as I can remember.
People living poor don't like it. They may have accepted it, and may have learned to deal with it, but they don't tend to like it. They want out, and generally jump at the chance to do so.
People in richer communities may have fantasies about "living closer to nature," but that doesn't usually involve things like shooing rats off your kids at night, or having your house collapse, when there's a 3.0 earthquake.
People in poorer communities may have unreasonable expectations of what having money will bring, and we often see poor people that get rich quick (think Lotto "winners"), having pretty miserable lives.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.
I picked a place to live that's close to nature, right across my back fence from millions of acres of public forest. I love it here. Poverty is not required. I commute to work via Starlink and most nonperishables are delivered to my front porch by UPS, mostly from Amazon. It's green on both sides of my fence, and it's a choice that normal people, who can work remotely, can make if they value it. My house is far cheaper than one in a city and local costs are lower. Amazon deserves credit for making such a lifestyle easier, and if we can export more of it, that sounds like an advance.
I understand the joy of your choices. I live in an old mill town that has had multiple Renaissances. I consider myself lucky because I live at the edge of the town and have a 10,000-square-foot lot that is in the process of intentionally rewilding. My house wasn't necessarily cheaper than other houses. It's much more living space, fewer neighbors, and roughly the same cost per month as a three-bedroom apartment closer to where my partner works.
The downside is that she has a 1 1/2 hour commute. Not because of distance but because of congestion. She is willing to take public transit, except it takes roughly twice as long to take the train, then a bus, then another bus, then a third bus, and not be able to do errands during the day or on the way home.
life is all about trade-offs.
That is all well and good and a setup I totally understand. Now that I am in the US I like that my home is 15 steps away from a good-sized network of forest trails. Nature is good. But it is good because of technology: unlimited potable water, plenty of energy to keep my home warm, electricity and internet and cars to get me to the downtown or an airport when I feel like it.
But my opponent, to whom I responded, wants to "severely restrict technology". And this is what I have beef with. Those folks tend to be from rich countries and want to freeze things at their current, comfortable for them, level. They do not want to give up the running water, swear off vaccines and antibiotics or go through dental work without painkillers. Which is where a large part of the world would be stuck under this "technology restriction".
False dichotomy. Both situations are bad because both are predicated on lack of wisdom. A lack of wisdom in a poor place implies brawls and wanton violence. A lack of wisdom in a rich, technological age implies resource destruction and climate change.
Wisdom combined with restricted technology would be ideal, such as with the Amish. They have their problems but they show that a technologically restricted society is best. Note: I am not arguing for NO technology, but severely restricted technology.
Who is going to do this "severe restriction of technology"? The people themselves, as you write, do not want to do it.
And anytime a self-appointed elite start doing "what is best for the people" against their will, police repression and labor camps are also on the menu. Nah, I will take my freedom, including the freedom to make mistakes.
You assume the people always won't. There's a growing amount of skepticism towards technology and it's quite possible people will begin to hate it. I myself intend to spread the word about the dangers of technology to the best of my ability.
Ok, let's restrict the technology. What's the end goal?
Because 1 billion years from now, even if humanity is back to before the wheel technology plants will have disappeared and the oceans evaporated due to the sun.
If we want Earth originated life to have a chance to go over this bump something will have to go forward.
I find myself falling into this line of thought a lot: why should we make tradeoffs that favor the earth instead of hyper-accelerating progress to get off of it in preparation for its inevitable demise?
But isn’t the entire universe also going to meet its end as well, in an anticlimactic heat death? To overcome that, a civilization would have to reach universe-level Kardashev-like energy utilization capability, which would necessarily consume every particle in the universe, including themselves. It seems infeasible and unwise.
Maybe it would lead to the next big bang… but that still is a death and rebirth.
I think ultimately folks that support post-earth transhumanism operate on a notion that they themselves or their direct descendants that they will know and love in their own lifetimes will benefit from this space-colonial survivalist utopia. But IMO the reality is that if it is even possible, it would only happen long, long after they and everyone they could know or imagine are dead. It would likelier be accomplished by a society and civilization that they would hate and believe should be exterminated, due to the tradeoffs that would have to be made to accomplish it.
It’s essentially an individual’s desire to live forever and avoid death, projected onto the human race. I’m not convinced it would actually be nice to live forever. Better to focus on how to make the short time we have be as good as possible. IMO the idea of eternal life leads to all sorts of perversions of the now in exchange for an assumed eternal afterward.
> I find myself falling into this line of thought a lot: why should we make tradeoffs that favor the earth instead of hyper-accelerating progress to get off of it in preparation for its inevitable demise?
Get off and go where? Anywhere we could go is a million times worse for human habitation than post-demise Earth.
I think the idea is: assume sufficient technological advancement to be able to reach or even create countless other essentially exact replicas of earth? Barring that, plenty of ideas have been floated along the lines of extraterrestrial colonization and/or intergenerational spaceships.
If you are advanced enough to do that, you’re advanced enough to clean up Earth and make it a paradise.
I’m not arguing strongly in favor of “getting off it” so I’m not going to make much effort defending the position.
But I can imagine scenarios where we have to leave earth with intergenerational ships and only then acquire the ability to terraform, harness a star’s energy or travel at light speed.
(2) They where literally describing a poor area being better off with global trade.
Economies of scale and local advantages make the world better off. There’s no advantage to growing bananas in greenhouses in Iowa when you can grow wheat and trade with Panama.
Off the top of my head, the advantage in having bananas grown near you verses imported from Panama is that they are possibly fresher. This is assuming they can grow in your area and are in season of course. Produce is a special case in this regard locally sourced can potentially be healthier.
That is to say everything isn't objectively always 100% better with globalization and specialization at least not until come up with faster methods of shipping.
> assuming they can grow in your area
You can grow bananas in Alaska, but you can’t simply plant them outside. Thus my example assumes greenhouses built to a large enough scale to handle trees which is a major economic and environmental cost.
Comparative advantage applies to a huge range of things not just bananas. You could mine cobalt basically anywhere at extreme expense, but everyone is better off when that happens in locations that naturally have extremely high concentrations of cobalt.
That local trade involves taking advantage of the commons (putting CO2 in the atmosphere) to make it work. In my opinion, we do not have the right to take that advantage.
More CO2 is produced manufacturing and maintaining those greenhouses than shipping fruit from tropical locations.
So no, in this case local production is simply worse for the commons. More broadly things that cost dramatically more are generally worse for the environment in subtle ways.
In the case of bananas, then don't have bananas. Only locally sustainable goods or imports occasionally, not all the time.
Locally sustainable goods becomes really limited very quickly. You don’t just lose foods but technology as most of the periodic table becomes unavailable, even low tech items like salt needs to be imported into most areas.
On the other hand even occasional imports supports global trade and a dramatically higher standard living. The option to decarbonize global trade is exists, ‘local’ is more feel good nonsense than an actual path forward.
Few people would be able to afford much in your local economy.
Well for one, lots of my local economy would just involve trade and helping community members for free, creating local community gardens, etc. Quite a lot can be possible with very little.
>my local economy would just involve trade and helping community members for free, creating local community gardens, etc. Quite a lot can be possible with very little.
Isn't this basically collectivization, which empirically has been shown to a massive failure? Without a monetary incentive, it's hard to get people to actually do stuff rather than lying on their couch and watching tiktok.
Historically, that doesn’t work. It failed in China, North Korea, and in Cuba. It’s a fantasy.
The first point is true, but most people do not choose it.
I do not think your second point stands. Almost the entire world is financially better off than it was in the past. Lots of third world economies are visibly richer than they were a few decades ago. Whose suffering are they benefitting from?
> The first point is true, but most people do not choose it.
Because they lack wisdom and human beings en masse operate on instinct, not wisdom.
> Almost the entire world is financially better off than it was in the past. Lots of third world economies are visibly richer than they were a few decades ago. Whose suffering are they benefitting from?
The classic reply of the economist. It's because the industrial world measures better off with variables like "life expectancy" and "money".
But a longer life does not a better life make, nor does money always equate to better off.
For example: if I could live next to a beautiful national park and walk there every day, that would be more valuable to me than a million dollars but living in a huge city. How does the prevailing evaluative mechanism account for that?
>The classic reply of the economist. It's because the industrial world measures better off with variables like "life expectancy" and "money".
I'd take arguments with objective metrics over handwavy arguments involving vibes, because with the latter you can make whatever argument you want with them and it's impossible to refute.
>For example: if I could live next to a beautiful national park and walk there every day, that would be more valuable to me than a million dollars but living in a huge city. How does the prevailing evaluative mechanism account for that?
You can ask for how much people are willing to pay for access to such a scenery and put a dollar value on it, or try to infer it based on housing price patterns (eg. house next to national park vs equally rural house next to corn fields).
> I'd take arguments with objective metrics over handwavy arguments involving vibes, because with the latter you can make whatever argument you want with them and it's impossible to refute.
You can define other concrete metrics. Distance to wild nature for example. That's concrete.
I did specify financially.
Also, there has been a visible improvement in living standards in third world countries. More money does not mean people have a better life in a rich country because there are diminishing returns on having more money. In a country where most people are a lot poorer and desperately need more money, more money does mean better off.
I am pretty sure people who can afford a proper house instead of a slum stack, or have a proper toilet, etc. are better off. As I said, there are visible improvements in the lives of the very poor.
"For example: if I could live next to a beautiful national park and walk there every day, that would be more valuable to me than a million dollars but living in a huge city."
That is your preference. Many people prefer living in a big city.
Also, what about how good your conditions of life are next to the beautiful national park? A nice house in a big city with good food and leisure time vs a shack in the beautiful place, hard work to grow a barely adequate amount of food?
The prevailing evaluative mechanism would note that you could take that million dollars, invest it in a 4% annuity, and move next to the national park of your choice with $40,000 in your pocket every year for the rest of your life. Indeed, there's a whole movement called FIRE of people who do things like this.
But there's also people like me, who say that sounds great but don't really mean it, because it's cringe to admit that you care about money.
The last 40 years have seen enormous economic growth outside the G7 to the point that North America and Western Europe no longer dominate the global economy.
Vice president Vance marrying a woman from India was a look into the future. The rich elite know what's happening.
Rishi Sunak's wife is a better example: the one in the couple with the money is the Indian heiress not the British former hedge fund manager!
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That is the other extreme that is also bad. In economies like that protectionism supports inefficient local production - favouring some people at the cost of others. It is designed to funnel money away from some people to others.
The dominance of the economy by a few big companies also has the same effect - elimination of competition.
Where were the police and regulations when Boeing's products killed hundreds of people? Last time I checked, nobody among top management went to prison for that.
That's what "too big to fail" corporations can get you: failed products, anti-competitive environment, regulatory capture, no responsibility.
Getting fined for a few (hundred) million dollars is not responsibility, it's chump change for multi-trillion dollar corporations.
You can have "global business" that aren't "too big to fail". If anything, if you're pro-competition, blindly buying local has the same anti-competitive effects, because you're protecting the local firm from competition from elsewhere.
I agree with you: let's just buy our next 747's from the nearest mom-and-pop aviation shop!
We have police and regulations but they only apply to the country you are in.
Most of the cheap stuff we buy is from other countries, they don't have the same regulations and protections that we have, hence part(not all) of the reason they are cheap.
Take a look at the cheap chargers on Amazon for example, marked as UL listed but you open them up and you see a circuit that is liable to start a fire. Someone reports it, the vendor vanishes and then there are 5 more listings under different names. See also the lead paint on toys scandal and poison pet food/treat scandals.
> What you are supporting is local sustainability. The world would be better off with less global trade and more local productions. Local productions means a stronger community and more visibility for business practices, because it's more sustainable.
This is true for the extreme minority of products that ARE produced locally.
If you buy a screwdriver from the privately-owned DYI shop around the corner it will have been produced in the same Chinese factory and shipped by the same boats and trucks as the one you'll buy from Amazon.
You're not at all supporting local sustainability, you're just paying more to add one more middleman.
Well, also, if you don't support Amazon, then you don't support the growth of a large company like Amazon which is one more component of the collection of big corporations that are exactly those responsible for globalization in the first place.
Globalization is one of the best things that has ever happened to humanity.
It allows whoever is willing to understand the peoples of the world share way more than what makes them different. Globalization, specially through the internet, but trade as whole, is my personal bet on what could "end all wars". In fact it is the first necessary step for the philosophical parts of the communist manifesto that are salvageable, the parts about the global coalition of common peoples working on shared goals and with similar baseline prosperity.
It is only good if you take a short-term, human-supremacist view of the world. If you consider all life to have worth independent of its value to humanity, then globalization is a horror. And then globalization and the industrial society is the cause of climate change, so it's only good in the short-term.
If by "short-term" you mean "until we stop killing each other in massive wars" (I doubt we can eliminate individual murder), I guess I agree, but by my estimation that will take several centuries at least. If by short term you mean before that, I doubt that we can agree. I'm talking about something that to me is already so far in the future that it was strange to hear "short-term" as a response to that argument!
Regarding human-supremacist view, I hadn't seen that expression before but if I interpret it correctly, I would say that describes a great big majority of the world population and I believe anyone would have a really hard time making this case to anyone on the street. I respect the moral purity in a way, but I think it's wildly impractical to call people around you human-supremacists, when like I said we are still not totally in agreement that things like wars should not happen. We say we do but there's never not been wars in our history. I don't know man, I feel like you're too deep in this rabbithole of morality to be able to have a normal discussion about getting a lightbulb at the local store when you start calling other people human-supremacists. But I do enjoy the banter!
Well, when I see people dump their shit into the homes of animals, then I think that comes from an attitude of human supremacy. When I see pristine forests cut down for profit but laws protecting the homes of people, that's human supremacy.
My goal is not to get most people to like me, or agree with my views. I fully acknowledge that I am a fundamentalist in the sense that I have a few axioms (all life is equal and technology must be regressed) and I have a zero compromise policy on that. Of course, unfortunately, to make a living I must participate in some of our atrocities.
I don't think it's necessary either, that I conform and discuss as others. There is no shortage of conformists. Either our destructive ways will stop, in which case I am working to bring them down through my writing, or I will fail. It's something I believe in and nothing will change that.
> pristine forest
You have probably never in your whole life been to a forest that's more than a few hundred years old. Even the Amazon was largely managed by humans with fire prior to about the 15th-16th century.
> technology must be regressed
This is a morally deranged axiom. The life-giving benefits of so many technologies can't be overstated.
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It is a bad thing. And you say it like it's a dichotomy.
And I could certainly get most of the comforts of modern life with 5% of the force of globalization. House, food, bed, some reading material, etc. I don't really care for technology, and I use it because it's part of my work and livelihood. BUT, I could easily be just as happy living a simpler life.
Believe me, I've already thought about it. I could be pretty much as comfortable with WAY less global trade. Most people buy way too much clothes, use way too much technology, none of which makes life more comfortable.
> Hell, without globalization you wouldn't even be able to do your job, where do you think your Nikon's, Canon's and Sony's come from?
(A) My point is that if there were other forms of labor, I wouldn't be less comfortable.
(B) Again, I'm arguing for a reduction in global trade, not an outright ban. My point is that it needs to be reduced.
Is it hypocritical to complain about your government even though they make the country that you live in? Of course, I'm using the resources I have, but I could be equally comfortable in a different world. My argument is that our current world is not necessary and not optimal.
Please get off the internet then, destroy your computer and go live on a farm. I don't say this to be an antagonist but it is what you yourself is suggesting others do.
I am working towards that goal, actually. My only reasosn to be on it are economic for now.
That's my point. It feels very hypocritical because you yourself could disconnect today as you suggest in your gospel but you don't.
I am not advocating for a simpler life off grid. If I were, I would disconnect now. I am advocating for the destruction of technology because it destroys nature. And sometimes, you need to use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house.
Hypocrite. Its really sad to see people fall for their own personal gospel that provides them special exclusions.
Yes please, I'll happily pay for the sledgehammer for him to destroy his computer.
That man is the most insufferable person I've seen online in weeks.
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> BUT, I could easily be just as happy living a simpler life
Put your money or your comfort where your mouth is.
> if there were other forms of labor, I wouldn't be less comfortable.
Yes you would be. My grand parents all farmed and my grandfather was born in a cabin with a dirt floor and no electricity. His mother died in child birth, which was common at the time. He lost siblings to disease. His life was brutally difficult.
Let's face it, you're a math PHD and a photographer, you aren't made of the same stuff as people who clawed potatoes from the ground to avoid starvation. You have no clue what that actually means and you come here to lecture us about the comforts you yourself cling to. It's disgusting.
More false dichotomies. Technophiles love them. The choice isn't just between modern global capitalism and a dirt floor. It's just that you have a strong emotional attachment to technology and can't see a way out.
It isn't an emotional attachment, I just clearly see that lots of technologies lean on one another and you can't easily pick an choose which ones to abandon and the clock simply does not roll backwards. Every material good that isn't made of material near at hand relies on trade and specialized skills. The humble pencil is shockingly complicated to produce, as you can see in the 1958 essay "I, Pencil". If you want something truly useful to a life above meager dirt-bound poverty like say antibiotics you need big supply chains, complicated machinery, and packaging that in and of itself requires its own inputs and machinery. It's all related.
Your anti-humanist rants are frankly disgusting and morally revolting. Also, who goes around calling themselves doctor? Skimming you substack, I'm really impressed by the inability of a mathematician to string together logical arguments, "Five myths about technology" might be the most sophomoric and poorly argued blog post I've ever read arguing against technology.
For example, your claims that "Technology, in other words, grows and feeds on the medium of global humanity" is totally unsupported by your argument and fails in its basic understanding of peoples' revealed preferences. You argue by simple example, but fail to come up with anything more convincing than whatsapp usage in Brazil or cars in general. It's lazy writing and lazy thinking. Waving away cures and treatments for rare diseases by saying "such people are in difficult situations due to modern technology" is beyond foolish. You could name dozens of genetic hereditary diseases that have laways existed that were a death sentence two generations ago. Type 1 diabetes comes to mind.
I could go on, but you disgust me.
Thank you for your input. You're right, and one day I hope to be elevated to your level of rationality and logical thinking. It's an honour to receive input from someone like you.
No one care what a smug fanatic like you thinks.
This is a common sentiment especially in Germany, but Hannah Richie in Not the End of the World shows multiple studies where the impact of CO₂ from transport is negligible for most foods. Other factors like what we decide to eat play a much greater role.
Your plastic example is a reasonable example, but I could also counter that if plastic is the problem then locally isn't necessarily more sustainable. Local farmers can also wrap their products in plastic. In the end, the plastic is there to increase the shelf life. Even most local products will need to have a shelf life of a few weeks. It's unreasonable to demand farmers stop batching their produce and instead demand they carry a few apples to the market each day.
Plastic SIGNIFICANTLY reduces waste. Freakanomics also pointed out that locally grown can have worse carbon footprint than food shipped around the world.
It's clearly not as black and white as you paint it. Local production uses the same materials that global production uses due to pricing. As long as transportation is cheaper than local production this will stay the same due to simple economics.
Also accountability is the same there, shops just buy their material regardless of working conditions and whatsoever. At least companies can be regulated based off of that.
The error is too systematic to say "just produce local".
To add to this, local production means that money can be moving through local financial institutions, with larger balances, which provides more liquidity to the community.
Those financial institutions hire local people. Other local businesses use the same financial institutions.
It's not about "simple economics". This isn't a supply and demand curve. It's about what a higher cash flow/economic output can mean for the subjective quality of life in a community:
- More jobs - Higher wages - Improved public services (schools, roads, healthcare) - Increased property values
Tons of people in these comments talking about the shitty rural experience while seeming to miss the irony in "big cities are so much better" -- big cities started as small cities.
It's a start. As I always say, practices such as encouraging at least _local involvement_ is a start. Of course, another necessary step is revolution to bring down large companies.
The products sold in local stores are never produced locally. It's national or international products, just like on Amazon.
Buying from local stores pays the salaries of local salesmen, that is a benefit for the community. But wouldn't the community benefit better if they did a job that was needed instead?
> It's national or international products, just like on Amazon.
Yup. If you go to a souvenir store in a remote town (say Kiruna, Sweden), you will typically find local themed products manufactured in China.
> Local productions
local production happens in China though. if you live anywhere else, most of the stuff you can buy off Amazon was made in China. the local shops will ultimately buy it from China too.
Your ideas of how the world work are just patently false. A lot of local farms use large amounts of plastic everyday, its quite common to use plastic sheets to cover the ground when planting. You think you would know they are just dumping it into the pit on their land?
Global trade is one of the best things to happen to the world, it has improved the lives of many. All your advocating for is going back to a time which you did not live it but you romanticize. I suspect it was not as romantic as you make it out to be.
One big reason is it keep money local.
When you buy from a non local business, that money leaves your towns microeconomy.
It’s part of why dollar stores destroy low income areas.
When I buy from Amazon, it pays local warehouse workers and local delivery people.
Amazon is a big employer in a lot of local communities.
Yes, minimum wage jobs for the locals, most of the profit goes to Bezos.
When you shop at locally-owned stores the money goes to a local small business owner, truly staying local.
Look up how walmart used to destroy small town economies by bankrupting all the local businesses and converting all those previously middle-class shop owners into minimum wage jobs at walmart.
> most of the profit goes to Bezos.
Incorrect. Bezos only owns 8.8% of Amazon.
Most of the profit is distributed to a wide variety of shareholders in the form of rising share prices, reflected in things like retirement accounts. In other words, a lot of that profit goes to grandmas across the country with their money in a Vanguard retirement fund. Including grandmas in your local community.
And you really think the local shopowner kept all the profit in their community? E.g. they didn't send their kids to college in another state? Or build a house with materials sourced from all over the country?
It's a whole lot more complicated than you seem to think.
> And you really think the local shopowner kept all the profit in their community? E.g. they didn't send their kids to college in another state?
Imagine spending money and having that money allow people in your local community to afford college.
Then imagine thinking that’s a bad thing.
Obviously it’s complicated, but the gist is longer money stays in a local area, the better off that area is going to be.
It’s better for money to leave my town so that my neighbor’s kid could go to college than it is for me to get two day shipping on a new game console.
A pathological case could be made that every dollar that you keep in town is a dollar someone spends outside of the town. That’s a valid argument in theory, but in reality that doesn’t happen.
People go to local businesses and spend money. Local bars, specialty markets, farmers markets, etc.
GP definitely did not say he thinks having people in the local community afford college is a bad thing. That's quite a straw man. Their point about the money quickly leaving the local economy is valid. If the shop owner is making a reasonable wage at the end of the day, then I think the local effect is good. Doubly so if they employ people from the local area. However, if the shop owner is getting rich and most of those profits are going into a fat bank account, then it makes no difference to the local economy. If helping the local economy is really your goal, I think there are much more efficient ways.
That said, I do mostly agree with you. Where we might differ is that I don't accept paying significant markup to shop local. If an item I want is available locally and is close to the same price as online, I will go local every time for exactly the reasons you mention: to help the local economy. But I have a low tolerance for The outrageous markup that most Small shops insist on applying. In my opinion, those shops probably should go out of business by being non-competitive. That would open up some room for a less greedy retailer to come and be more of a service to the local community.
> if the shop owner is getting rich and most of those profits are going into a fat bank account, then it makes no difference to the local economy
While arguably not ideal I would also argue that is still better than the same profits being captured by an increasingly centralized corporation many states or countries away.
Local millionaires using a bank will incentivize that bank keeping branches open in town, which can help other locals more easily maintain savings accounts. I personally make a point to use at least one locally incorporated bank for similar reasons.
Even something frivolous like a local millionaire buying a powerboat stimulates the economy because the infrastructure that is required to maintain that keeps a demand for other jobs open and keeps money flowing.
Now I’m not saying powerboats are intrinsically good. All I’m saying is that if someone is going to buy one with the profit captured from running a business selling eg home goods, it’s better for a local economy for a local to do it vs a Bay Area Bezos a thousand miles away.
> Then imagine thinking that’s a bad thing.
You seem to have missed my point entirely. I'm not saying that's a bad thing -- but I'm saying that by your logic, you seem to think it is.
You're looking at money like it's some kind of zero-sum thing that ought to be hoarded by every local community. You say:
> but the gist is longer money stays in a local area, the better off that area is going to be
That is contrary to all standard economic theories of free trade. The entire engine of economic growth is that when communities trade between each other, everyone's standard of living goes up.
The economy theory you seem to be promoting is what is known as mercantilism [1], which has been thoroughly discredited.
Circulating money broadly is a good thing. You don't need to worry about it leaving your local area, because it comes back according to whatever goods and services you produce! You don't need to hoard it locally.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism
> when communities trade between each other
> it comes back according to whatever goods and services you produce
Extractive industry like Amazon kill the local producers and siphon the money out of smaller areas and concentrate it in richer areas. When there are no local producers or wealth left, what is there to circulate or trade?
Amazon is an Internet-myelinated version of the Wal-Mart effect, with more packaging waste.
> When there are no local producers or wealth left, what is there to circulate or trade?
If that were true, then sure it would be a problem. But I don't know of many communities in the US where there are literally no jobs, nothing being produced at all. Where economic activity is zero.
Some jobs go away and new ones arise. And remote work makes it easier than ever for jobs to move from cities to smaller areas.
Can you really show that Amazon has had a net effect of shifting wealth "out of smaller areas" and into richer ones? Especially when you consider the amount of money it saves people in smaller areas, which makes them more wealthy than they would be otherwise?
I cannot. I am operating on an assumption that each dollar that goes to Amazon vs a local producer is an opportunity cost for the community’s long-term wealth. Saving a few bucks here and there on individual purchases seems like short-term thinking and small potatoes. Scaled up, that is what lead to rust belt decay after offshoring so much manufacturing. I know a lot of ink has been spilled on the effects of walmart and dollar stores on local economies, but I will also admit that I have not done any legwork to vet the hypotheses or conclusions, or if I have, I’ve forgotten and wouldn’t be able to produce any citations. As far as I can get in systems thinking with the initial conditions I know, which is assuredly a small subset of the totality of reality, the concentration of ability to produce and purchasing power is dangerous for those in the leaf nodes. I’m always interested to see more data proving me more right right or wrong on this.
I’m not suggesting an entire economic system based around hoarding money. There’s no “money should never leave your local town” ideas here.
I’m saying that as a single pragmatic person in the current world we live in, it’s better to spend your money locally.
We don’t live in a world where any community is self sufficient, money comes and goes, but for many towns, it just goes.
As you said, this stuff is complicated.
An individual choosing to spend money at local businesses is not what makes a mercantile economic system.
I don’t think “efficiency” is the only priority.
A few reasons:
- market diversity matters, and we have a more functional market with many smaller actors
- similarly, a smaller local actor is more accountable for their behavior
- efficiency comes mostly from cutting things, some of which mattered (eg, individual buyers at companies do more due diligence on the product than Amazon)
- it’s better that every community have a local moderately rich person than one super rich person nationally, eg, in terms of charity to your community
- politics remains local and hence tractable
- smaller organizations have less of a “frozen middle”, which creates numerous problems with national scale organizations
There’s probably more reasons if I really stopped to think about it.
> you just don't like someone doing it more efficiently
For some value of "more efficiently". I mean if the most efficient way to work is to have delivery drivers pee in a bottle and warehouse workers develop RSIs, who am I to complain? Someone else's dignity is a small price to pay in order to get a 3% rebate on some commodity.
you have no issues using iphone/pixel/whatever you got based on how those are manufactured? you gonna buy your next phone from a local producer?
At least in the USA we have some semblance of a Labor Department etc...
Of course I have, but I also don’t have much choice.
I mitigated it by having my first smartphone last 12 years, and I am now using the company-provided one in order to avoid a second buy. Not ideal, I’ll admit. I hope that, by the time I need a change, I can use a pinephone and convince my company that I only need a rsa otp or a yubikey.
But is that really related to the thread?
> At least in the USA we have some semblance of a Labor Department etc...
Any local alternative to amazon will also have it, and less execs/lawyers whose only job is to make them irrelevant.
When you spend money at businesses which are owned by people that live in your community, more of that money continues to circulate in your area. It's better for the local economy, if only marginally, and therefore better for you.
This is more important for businesses that produce and capture a larger amount of value, like locally owned restaurants vs corporate owned chains, but any little bit helps at least a little.
(Of course if you're a rootless corporate mercenary who goes wherever work takes you, with no long-term stake in the place you live, then it doesn't matter at all.)
It's less true in retail (of non locally made goods), here the margins are in the supply contract (think the volume discounts on alibaba or Sam's club).
It's likely that a mega retailer like Walmart generates this margin in their supply chain, bulk land/space and pays out, in total more via wages and benefits (particular possible with the scale of healthcare costs and benefits programs like scholarships)
This is an interesting take. I'm not sure it's true but I will look it up. My knee-jerk reaction is that most large purchases already siphon your money away (home, car, travel), and overthinking where to buy a random small object for the house makes no difference, but I hadn't considered the locality of money circulation!
Amazon discusses that every dollar of salary produces $2.5 of local economic activity, eg, because their workers buy coffees that then pay the salaries of baristas who then…
That money comes from many communities and is distributed to a handful; and I think it would be interesting to quantify the loss of economic activity from Amazon moving money out of a community.
Honestly it's interesting to me that this is a novel take to you. I believe it is a generally understood, if not acted on, principle.
Money sent off to Detroit or Japan for your car is as good as lost to your community, but as I said even a small amount of money spent locally will help your local community a small amount, which is more than none. Even eating at a locally owned McDonald's franchise is slightly better than eating at a corporate owned store. That difference is probably too small to be worth looking up who owns a McDonalds, but if the choice is between McDonalds or some local diner then it doesn't require any time spent looking it up.
> it is a generally understood, if not acted on, principle
I think you'd be surprised to realize how much that's not actually the case.
If you google the "Preston model", you'll find a lot of material waxing lyrical about the government of a lone city in England that actually dared to follow that principle in their procurement strategies. They are doing well, but the fact that it feels revolutionary for mainstream sensibilities shows that those principles are still very unknown to most.
(I should add: the principle of locality is not always a good thing, because there are scoundrels everywhere. Again in England, the regeneration of massive swaths of land previously used for steelmaking is being done through well-connected local businessmen and corrupted politicians, and it is a shameful rip-off for the taxpayer. If a national government had done that, the relevant minister would have faced the sack; but it's ”old boys” from the area, the national press is not interested, and so it's just business as usual.)
Perhaps it’s out of fear of what Amazon’s market and price-setting power would be post-local stores
Amazon doesn't have any extra power post-local stores. If Amazon ups their prices then the local stores reappear. In some weird future where Amazon completely obliterates small businesses it might take a few years, but it'd take more than a few years of good prices before that from Amazon to get to that state. The manufacturers always have strong incentives to defect from an AWS dominated equilibrium. They want middleman prices to be low, it means they move more goods and make more money.
Although I should stress I like the idea of buying local. If the money goes off to some exotic foreign place it is less likely that I will get my hands on it later on. Better to live in a wealthy community than a poor one, etc. Local capital is local prosperity.
Local stores don't just reappear. It takes initial capital to purchase stock, rent building and hire employees.
It takes knowing what market segment you are selling to to know what to stock.
It takes business connections to but the stock.
On the localist/resilient extreme in a developing world village you have the problems of:
* Inefficiency
* Lack of options
* Stupid business practices uncritically continued
See https://asteriskmag.com/issues/07/want-growth-kill-small-bus...
On the globalist/efficient extreme in the USA, for example, you have the problems of:
* Economic dependence on large, national players that can leave at any time
* Business proprietors feel no social responsibility to your community because they do not live there and interact with locals
* Little power in deciding what products businesses offer
* Profits enriching another place rather than your own place
I don't want either of these.
It's called "community" and our generation has no idea what that word means or why there is value to it.
> is doing a societal good by parking money in inventory they brought near you?
Yes. That generates sales taxes. That generates property taxes. That pays for insurance. That pays for upkeep which is hopefully provided by a local contractor. Where this cycle repeats.
> and getting "too" rich? ie dislike of big corporations?
Yes. The money actually doesn't bother me, it's the access to unrestrained political influence it buys you, and big corporations monopolize labor pools and result in worse outcomes for working conditions and wages. Where this story starts.
I used to work at Amazon.
What you want to support are:
- local retailers offer better jobs, and often better benefits. The work you do stocking at Menards is much better than sorting boxes at Amazon
- support local repair vs repurchasing. This cuts down on the upstream demand and does wonders for local small-business economies. And again, provides better jobs than sorting boxes.
- Efficiency is great! But what is Amazon efficient at? They have maximized the speed and convenience of delivery. Once stated that way it's obvious there must be tradeoffs. One of those tradeoffs is the shit work. In one dist center, a guys entire job was to wheel odd shaped boxes from one side of a warehouse to another. Whenever you order a big or weirdly shaped box, that guy moved it. Even he hates that job. It's meaningless, non social, provides no transferrable skills.
- ultimately what your parents were talking about is how one chooses to shape their local economy and jobs market. I want to buy from companies that I would want my friends and family to work for.
But yeah, I buy from Amazon all the time too.
To disagree, local "mom and pops" often don't offer better jobs or benefits, or meaning.
Historically, in the US, these shops and restaurants often depended on underpaid (often children of the owner) labor, offered no benefits, and had no safety net in case of owner or business failure.
On average, today, starting wages at McDonalds, Walmart, or your "local" Amazon warehouse are 25-50% higher than local restaurants and retailers for rural America (which more typically pay minimum wage). And benefits, a local mom and pop is less likely to account for paid sick/vacation days, retirement savings, healthcare coverage, and workplace insurance (in some cases, a disability or workplace injury would make the business unprofitable + less oversight).
Comparing Amazon to an average rural main street coffee shop or craft store isn't fair.
But you're right I suppose, if your choice is employee number 3 at a tiny thrift store for half the pay, I'd choose Amazon too. But I'd probably want my kids to work at Target stocking shelves rather than Amazon hauling boxes.
Of course a tipped minimum wage is less than a McDonald's non-tipped wage. It's disingenuous to make the comparison. Just as a bus boy at a local restaurant, I took home more money than my friends who worked at major chains.
>- local retailers offer better jobs, and often better benefits.
Is this backed by empirical evidence? I've also heard that small local companies have worse labor conditions, because they're small and fly under the radar compared to multinationals. One incident of an Amazon delivery driver peeing in bottles (even if they're technically working for a local subcontractor) is enough to show up on the New York Times. The same isn't going to be true for some local firm. Moreover, it's possible that "local retailers" targets a more upmarket segment compared to national chains. When I think "local retailers", I think small boutique shops in gentrifying neighborhoods. Obviously those stores will have better working conditions than Amazon, but it's not as if we got rid of Amazon, it'll get replaced by boutique shops, or that most people would be better served by them.
I was wrong to imply "local" since that conjures images of things like a main street one window shop with 3 employees. Obv their benefits are lower.
I had in my head things like Target, Best Buy, or more social, occasional-customer-interaction-based work. It's just those mega corps are local. Also the large retailers like Home Depot, Menards, etc. At least those aren't as soulless and monotonous. By "local" I meant "brick and mortar" etc.
But I'm out of the edit window so, best to ignore it.
There are many replies already, but one point that hasn't been mentioned:
The local store pays their taxes — local and national taxes. Amazon is big enough to evade these, or where possible, pay small amounts only in Luxembourg, Delaware etc.
Amazon pays sales taxes, which makes up a big chunk of the local business' tax burden anyways. Moreover, the retail division Amazon barely makes any money, so any taxes on profit going to delaware or whatever is probably minimal (as % of your spend).
> Moreover, the retail division Amazon barely makes any money
That is exactly the kind of creative accounting unavailable to a small business.
If the retail division of Amazon barely makes any money, why hasn't it been cut or spun off so that the company can concentrate on the things that it is really good at and are more profitable?
This is an insightful breakdown, though I think it leaves out the option I would have chosen. A small business run by a human who is physically present is going to make different decisions that are better for the community.
I have to say though I have evolved a bit in this perspective as I've come to realize that these small business owners can be every bit as greedy or even more. Especially there are a lot who are just fundamentally incompetent at business and try to make up the difference by extracting it from their employees, willfully ignoring labor laws in ways a large company would not dare. A large company is a big target surrounded by people who want a piece of the action and often must tread carefully as a result.
I've personally never worked in such a position, but I have heard absolutely crazy stories from people who have, things like demanding that commission only sales people come in hours early to do unpaid work like cleaning unrelated to their job title, "fining" people $75 for checking their phone while "on the clock" (again in a commission only job), constantly helping themselves to their employees paycheck finding things to "charge" them for, and just generally being a menace and treating employees like they personally owned them. Their ego and sense of entitlement go completely wild. The owners I have known personally will brag about cheating on their taxes while railing against the government, running an atrociously inefficient business that they talk about as if it's some sort of charity. In many cities there's a whole good old boy network type system in place that's no less corrupt and ugly than whatever you want to say about companies like Amazon.
A hyper-efficient system is inherently fragile: if something happens to any part of it, it has a big ripple effect all over the place, because there's no slack anywhere. More resilient systems always have some redundancy that helps them cope in a case of failure. If you think about societally optimal setup, it likely should include a mix of systems, from very efficient to very resilient. Something about eggs and baskets.
I do it to try to keep the money flowing around in my local community.
>Is it because you just don't like someone doing it more efficiently and getting "too" rich? ie dislike of big corporations?
That’s such an odd way to paint it.
When people live in a system with millions of quettallionaires and the bilion left are mere millionaires where 1 unit of currency is enough to buy the best meal in town with all towns in the world equally provided in services, the system won’t see much strikes happening soon.
When people live in a system where a small cake is growing at a slow rate and a few hundreds people are cornering always more of it at an accelerating rate, all the more when the extraction rate of the cake is known to exceed the cake regeneration rate, the system is well on its road for repeated strikes or even bloody social movements.
Ok, these allegories are two possible points in a spectrum. Which scenario is most likely to be closest to the world as its perceived by most people out there?
People don’t love or hate big corporations and riches out of the blue. If there are given room out of the vivid feeling that their life is a day to day struggle to survive, most people can perfectly demonstrate nuances in their judgment.
It's basic ethics. Amazon are an evil corp, vote with your wallet and don't support them.
For me it’s that last one and also wanting more of my money to flow through my community. I don’t want to live in a world where 10 trillionaires control everything. I already tried to avoid Amazon but Bezos blocking the Post from endorsing a political candidate as we descend into extreme oligarchy was the last straw.
Given that Bezos has announced plans to donate $1M to Trump’s inaugural fund, supporting local businesses helps keep money out of the hands of fascists.
It's because the absolute centralization of business in one entity is almost indistinguishable from Communism. For now it may appear that Amazon is cheaper/more convenient, but in the long run this type of monopoly leads to worse products and services.
It’s all the downsides of communism, but non of the benefits.
"All the downsides"?! I find living in the US to be quite different from what I've seen of life depicted in current/past communist countries.
It sure seems to me as if there were a few additional downsides in those communist countries that I don't see to anywhere near the same degree in the US.
Under communism, workers own the means of production and all of the profit their labor creates. Centralizing business into a single private monopoly whose profit is entirely controlled by shareholders is the exact opposite of communism.
You're correct that monopoly leads to a degradation of products and services, but that's a flaw in capitalism (specifically the myth of the self-regulating free market ideal that eschews proper regulation in favor of the "invisible hand.")
I needed some 3D printing filament a few days ago. Shopped around locally and the absolute cheapest was ~$50. Amazon was $17 with next day shipping.
The overheads of physical retail stores makes it all but impossible for them to compete with online shopping. I’d love to “support local” but I don’t have the expendable income to spend double/more on everything.
What we ideally need is more “local online businesses”, but that seems to be very rare outside of niche hobby/craft type stuff.
I'm spoiled by having a local Microcenter here in Houston. Not always the cheapest filament, but it's often competitive enough. Inland is as good as any other brand I've tried, and in some cases, I prefer their colors.
Xyltech is also in Houston, and they don't have a typical retail operation, but you can place an order and pick it up.
Polymaker has a Houston warehouse, and while you can't pick it up, a number of SKUs actually ship from there.
Often I buy bulk purchases of Sunlu from Aliexpress. Usually takes about 8 days to get to me, but at around $11/KG for PLA+, it's a great price.
It turns local businesses into showrooms for Amazon, and that is a failing business model.
I do not patronize Amazon. But f I did, I would pick a margin - let's say 20% - and resolve to buy locally when the price is at least that close to the online price.
> But f I did, I would pick a margin - let's say 20% - and resolve to buy locally when the price is at least that close to the online price.
Focusing on the price is a complete misunderstanding. Just looking at my recent amazon purchases. I have bought 3mm and 2mm thick brass sheets, 0.8mm endmills, a set of dwarven miner minis, and a highlander cow shaped slipper. I have no clue which shop would even hope to have these things. I could get on my bike and go to all the hardware shops around me in the hopes that maybe they have endmills, or all the department stores and walk up and down to see if they have the slippers I'm thinking about. And I would be still without brass sheets and dwarven miners.
Or I can from the comfort of wherever I am browse a wild selection of things and get them for reasonable price. I bought the miner minis while physically situated in a coffee shop waiting for my friend to return from the washroom. Just because I happened to have a minute to think about what I need for our next DnD session. That is insanely convenient.
You do have a pretty niche use case tho. Aany issues with inferior product quality ?
That's equivalent to you making 20% less money.
Not many people will choose that.
Behold! Neighborhood businesses wither and die.
When all the business does is order from the catalog shipped from China and stock a shelf it’s not that worrisome when they die.
Businesses that should be able to sustain themselves are things that have additional experiences and services. Food, coffee, sports shops with fittings or lessons, bike shops with repair rooms, art galleries that are fun to browse, clothing stores that you can touch and try on, stuff crafted locally that is tangibly better than something mass produced, etc.
Multibrand retail should be about curation, and a shop that does little more than open boxes is not worth supporting, I'll grant you that.
Your list is good, but how many are vulnerable to competition from online ?
> The overheads of physical retail stores makes it all but impossible for them to compete with online shopping.
As a purely-theoretical thought experiment, this may be true.
As a blanket statement about prices in the real world, this is not correct.
There are many stores around me here in San Francisco who absolutely do have prices that are close to (and sometimes lower than) "e-tailer" prices. If stores in SF can meet or beat "e-tailer" prices, I find it hard to believe that stores in Bum-fuck Nowhere, USA can't ever do the same.
I think it's a mistake to look at the % price difference instead of the dollar price difference. It's a $33 dollar difference. Which is not much if you are a busy person, but a lot if you have time to shop around. If you're buying a motorcycle and it's $6200 at your local dealer and $6100 a couple of towns away, then you'd consider that difference negligible.
Every local business should be a "local online business" as you suggest. But most business owners don't give a fuck and are happy to see Amazon crush them. Why?
I used to try to support local business, but frankly it's such a waste of time to go looking for products that they never have in stock, ward off annoying salesmen who never have a clue if you actually need help, and dealing with bad return policies. The price difference is but icing on the cake.
You should check out Protopasta! Their prices aren't rock bottom ($30 for a 1kg spool of PLA) but the product is really good and if you happen to live near the warehouse you can pick up your order on the same day
For filament I typically order directly from the manufacturer (dasfilament for example) but idk if that's viable in the US
You basically can't buy couple-dollar things on Amazon, which is rather annoying. F.ex. I wanted a fiberglass pole, 5/16" diameter. I could buy 10 for $20. Home Depot had one for $3.50.
Should I spend 15 minutes each way driving (carbon emissions) to the store and waste 1 hr of my time in this case, when it can be delivered to me tomorrow? I definitely want to support local, but the cost/benefits are not as clear in this case.
How much carbon emissions went into making that available to be delivered tomorrow?
You have a a large fleet of 18 wheelers, delivery vans and forklifts. Then the warehouses that go into making the supply chain work.
Which are definitely more efficient than having every individual that needs something hop in a car and drive for 20+ minutes. One delivery person with goods for 100 people in their truck is literally one truck replacing one hundred drivers. It is absolutely much more efficient carbon wise. All of the warehouses and 18 wheelers exist either way, since the local shops still need all the same supplies, although presumably more widely distributed.
The only way it works out is if people buy much less, which given prices would be much higher, they likely would.
They didn't exist prior to Amazon deciding to offer 2day delivery, that's my point. Why else would they invest all that money, when they could use the already existing services that deliver to people's houses fairly quickly: FedEx, UPS and DHL or the slightly slower but goes everywhere every day USPS?
Your one person is a truck delivering to 100 homes ignores the fact that at least 80% of the people in those homes have a car that they use everyday, often passing a grocery store and most other local shops.
I have a longer reply talking about the Carbon usage below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42463832
There are studies about this. I don’t know how good they are or what specific scenarios they apply to (urban vs rural vs rural are all different calculations). But what I’ve seen is it’s about 14 items you’d have to buy before going to the store yourself is more efficient than shopping online.
You really need to consider the reality outside of your own bubble of concern. Especially as your bubble doesn't even extend beyond the door of your house, since you don't understand that the Amazon delivery driver is also driving and also spending his time.
That driving and time is amortized across 1000s of deliveries.
The product is delivered the same distance, whether it is from "Producer -> Amazon warehouses -> Customer" or if it is "Producer -> Retail warehouses -> Customer". An Amazon delivery car with a bunch of products to deliver is the equivalent of OP filling up his car with purchases when shopping in town.
The key is “filling up his car”. Most trips for most people aren’t like that. There is a tipping point for which it’s more efficient to order online. One study I saw said it takes 14 items before driving yourself is more efficient (of course the calculus is different for every car and route).
>An Amazon delivery car with a bunch of products to deliver is the equivalent of OP filling up his car with purchases when shopping in town.
Right, but if you want something in 2-3 days (which amazon provides), you need to make a dedicated trip. Even if timing wasn't a factor, at best doing a consolidated errand run allows you to visit a handful of stores, whereas an amazon delivery van delivers to dozens of houses in your neighborhood in one trip.
Amazon built up a dedicated logistic network in order to get the 2-3 day delivery time. How does the Carbon Emissions of that factor in?
Is there to believe that logistics network has worse emissions compared to logistics networks for brick and mortar stores? At least for me, most of the amazon packages' tracking shows up as departing from a local warehouse, so I'd imagine most of the fast delivery time comes from pre-positioning goods in warehouses near buyers, rather than shipping packages across the country using planes or whatever.
Most existing retailers did not own or run a private logistics network, they would use XPO, R+L, Old Dominion, etc.
In order to get that amazing fast delivery time, Amazon had to create their own system. The creation of that system, created a large amount of Carbon emissions at it's onset just with the requisite vehicles require to make it happen. It also set off an arms race between logistics enterprises to try and deliver the same performance, leading to further emissions.
>The primary function of Amazon Air is to transport Amazon packages from distant fulfillment centers that are outside of Amazon's local ground linehaul network for a specific area.
They have their own air cargo service for shipping packages between Distribution centers. They wouldn't invest in that unless they had enough volume to make it profitable.
I get that it is easy and convenient but please don't try to claim that it is ecological.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Air
https://www.businesstechweekly.com/online-sales-and-growth/s...
https://www.warehousingandfulfillment.com/warehousing-and-fu...
The driver is getting paid for his time. You driving to a local store are not paid.
Amazon used to be the cheapest in almost every category, but more and more, I find that places like Harbor Freight beat them. I even bought a pricey resin printer and a wash and cure station the other day; Microcenter had them beat by $100+.
I don't think people buy on Amazon because it is the cheapest, they buy on Amazon for convenience. EVERY SINGLE TIME I buy something from someone else (talking online here) I painfully regret that decision (didn't arrive on time, didn't arrive at all, shipped in multiple shipments, one arrived, two didn't and yet order is showing as delivered -> this is just small sample of what I have seen just in the last say 6 weeks). My wife and I have been trying all year to purchase as much as we can on other e-commerce websites but in often (always) ends up like these examples above...
Harbor freight also has much more consistent quality and no fake name brand items. It’s funny because they used to be synonymous with low quality- but now they seem to have the highest quality tools you can easily buy as a consumer.
Amazon does not seem to have good prices anymore. And it is hard to judge the quality compared to seeing stuff in person.
I feel like they are riding on old momentum by now. The experience shopping there is terrible.
> Not only regarding delivery.
You do realize that an electric Amazon van delivering hundreds of packages to your neighborhood pollutes a lot less than you taking your G-wagon to the local store, right?
> but also the message it sends to local stores
"You're obsolete", which is true? Local stores are usually more expensive, carry less inventory, require you to go there or charge delivery fees, have inexistent or predatory return policies, etc. It's simply a worse experience in every way.
There was a time where this was compensated by the vendors having wide knowledge about the subject that they were selling items for, but it's not the case anymore, so really, what's left to local stores?
I don't know why people have this tendency to romanticize outdated and objectively worse in every way things just for the sake of "tradition".
Ignoring the tone of your comment, I agree with you in a way, but I also wonder if that has something to do with where I live.
The US suburbs don't really have what I would call "local stores," just big, well known corporate stores. So, when making the choice of where to buy Product X, my options are giving my money to Best Buy, Walmart, Ikea, Kroger, etc...or Jeff Bezos, whose online empire offers slightly more convenience than the others because I don't have to drive if I can wait a day or two.
There's no family-owned businesses to hurt here because they were all chased out by the Big Box stores years ago. Heck, I remember when they filled in the pond I learned to fish in as a kid just to put up that Walmart. Sure, Amazon can be held up as contributing toward the death of the small business, but those wheels were spinning long before Bezos was selling books out of a garage or whatever mythology we want to accept.
I don't like Amazon. I don't like the idea of one entity having that much influence and control over my consumer habits. I don't like that the business model is just drop-shipping in a trenchcoat of digital services. I don't like that their workers are basically treated as third-world labor.
But I do have to admit that they have won the game and as a result, I have to use them. I wish it were otherwise, but we're past the point of no return, on that. We all gave them permission for this to happen by patronizing it for years, even down to the mistreated workers who keep applying for those jobs knowing full well Amazon's employment reputation. Amazon did not kill small business. Consumers did, ever suckered by savings and convenience.
Thing that I hate most about amazon is how it turned into the western version of aliexpress. Completely flooded with terrible products, you know the ones (badly translated, titles that are a list of keywords, ai generated everything, clearly and badly edited product images, ...)
Like I'm at a point where I order like 5-10 products a year from amazon, mostly cause I can't get them elsewhere for reasonable prices. Everything else I buy in other online stores or physically.
> Amazon can be held up as contributing toward the death of the small business
Amazon does more than most of those to let you buy from small producers, which also feature in their catalog. The volume SMBs ship on Amazon was in the double digit billions per year when I worked there — and is probably higher now.
Now, back to my regular Amazon criticism!
Consumers killed family owned stores not because they didn't like them(though true in some cases), they killed them because things were getting expensive and they didn't want to lose their standard of living.
At one point in time, Wal-mart's big thing was they sold Made in America. Then they pivoted to cheap junk, their pivot occurred as jobs moved from the US to Mexico and China.
That was the point when it became unfashionable to shop at Wal-mart; as recorded by the finest news network : https://theonion.com/hostages-trapped-inside-walmart-insisti...
Consumers weren't completely suckered by savings and convenience; although that was some of it, they were trying to make their ever smaller budgets stretch further.
> I also wonder if that has something to do with where I live
I live in the center of London and out of the 200 non-household goods orders I have on Amazon this year I don't think I would have been able to find even 20% of them in local stores.
Actually even when I do go in a store and find an item I need, I scan the barcode on the Amazon app and saw that it's usually a LOT cheaper on Amazon (like, 30% cheaper for the exact same tool).
Add to that what I mention in my previous comment about return policies, travel time, etc. and there's absolutely no reason not to order on Amazon, even if you're in the ideal place to go to local stores.
I live in the centre of Copenhagen, and haven't ordered anything from Amazon for a decade — on principle.
I have ordered from online retailers in Denmark, and I've made 2 orders from AliExpress, and a few more from eBay.
Can you give five items you can't buy in central London, but can buy from Amazon?
I have 400 orders on Amazon this year (I think that means I have more than 400 unique items since one order can be more than one items, but it's probably around 450 items total so not far off).
Of those, I probably have a good portion which is household goods as I mentioned, like soap in bulk, soda cans in bulk, etc. which is cheaper than any other option (especially because I don't have a car in London).
Then I have around 170 orders which are items I got for free through the Vine program (https://www.amazon.co.uk/vine/about). And probably around 30 orders that are free books (https://www.amazon.co.uk/firstreads).
If I ignore all of those, and take only recent orders that I paid for, here are 5 items that I can't buy, or at least wouldn't know where to even begin looking for, in central London:
- A luggage and suitcase scale
- A monitor arm
- A good shower filter for hard water (not the crap that doesn't actually filter anything which you can easily find anywhere)
- A label printer
- A moth repellent for wardrobes
I can't imagine the level of consumption that leads to more than one online purchase every day. You must have a constant mountain of cardboard at your home.
But anyway, shops selling luggage are common. They probably sell scales too. Argos, Tesco and Ryman have them.
Electronics shops like Currys have monitor arms, as well as office supply shops.
I won't guess what a good shower filter is.
Office supply and electronics shops also have label printers.
Moth repellent is available from large supermarkets, DIY stores and hardware shops.
All of these are also available online from British companies that pay their fair share of taxes.
I think what shocks me most here is that in a single year, you have placed 200 orders.
What is it that you buy online or offline? I just can't imagine making a purchase every other day, especially if you aren't including groceries...
400 actually, and there are 12 more days to the year.
I just don't buy anything in brick and mortar shops, except food and drinks. Just out of convenience and price, not for ideological reasons or anything.
The number of orders is also inflated by things I listed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42463417 and by the fact that one project can be many orders. I built a NAS, and it was split over 10 orders, basically one per component when the price was right.
> But I do have to admit that they have won the game and as a result, I have to use them.
Try ordering direct from the manufacturer's website. A surprising-to-me number of companies have set this up, and it's what I often do if I know what I want and Newegg isn't selling it for a reasonable price (or at all).
Unfortunately, Amazon policies prohibit them from selling their product any cheaper on their own website than they do on Amazon. This essentially guarantees that Amazon will always be cheaper, so there's not much point in going to the manufacturer's website where you don't get prime, you don't get the same guarantees, and you pay at best the same and at worst a whole lot more.
It's quite an evil genius policy on the side of Amazon.
This should be illegal.
what kind of a law would you put in place here to make this illegal? and who would it cover? amazon has a business, yes? and if you want to do business with amazon you have to abide but those rules. you can also just NOT do business with amazon - sell your shit at another place, done deal. too many times here on HN we see people say what you say - let's just add mooooooar laws (these would have to be FEDERAL to make any sense) and have government involved in as many things as possible... it is just wrong although in theory you can say this is unfair - but certainly should be be illegal... like saying apple charging 30% wig should be illegal :)
Are you saying that antitrust law is nonsense?
The laws of our economy are not there to serve a few large companies. They are there to serve us, people, most of all. Do you think that markets will collapse if we had more fair rules for big companies?
> Are you saying that antitrust law is nonsense?
Not nonsense of course but if what Amazon is doing is breaking any of the antitrust laws we have in place there is a machinery for that already - the government can take this up if they feel like Amazon is breaking antitrust laws. The problem is - whatever "issue" someone has with something amazon is doing it inevitably ends up here on HN as "oh that should be illegal..." you start putting every little thing you don't like into some federal laws and pretty soon you are China... it is a fine line to walk on...
> The laws of our economy are not there to serve a few large companies. They are there to serve us, people, most of all.
In some theory maybe - not in any reality... this sounds more like the way China is organized, not United States :) I personally wish this was true...
> Do you think that markets will collapse if we had more fair rules for big companies?
This depends - who is making the rules?! This is always easier said than done - you think that whatever "rules" you put in place is what "everyone/majority/..." wants but of course you'd be wrong. And again - who is making the rules? The politicians who spent over 70% of their fundraising for their next election... and during those fundraisers the donors are ... well not me and you but Amazon, NRA... and they will get their way... The system is stacked against you and you can talk fantasy like "oh the economy should work for the little guy..." or reality...
You are skeptical but we __do__ have antitrust laws, even though people in power probably opposed them in several ways at different points in time.
no doubt... the question remains whether what is being discussed in this thread falls under an antitrust law breach though? and if it does not (it does not) would it make any sense to add it (I will argue it does not)
The conditions under which you can do business are governed by law. For example, you can't require that employees enter into a contract for eternal servitude, even though that too could be explained away as "if you want to do business with the company you need to follow their rules". So why exactly would a pricing scheme like this be uniquely difficult/undesirable to outlaw? It seems pretty straightforward to me.
you are comparing something as crazy as “eternal servitude” with company saying “if you want to use our platform you cannot price gouge on it”??! how is paying more on amazon than elsewhere “better for consumers and needs to be regulated”??! so weird we are discussing this at all…
> amazon has a business, yes? and if you want to do business with amazon you have to abide but those rules.
And if you want to do business (at all) you have to abide by the local laws. In an ideal democratic world, those laws would be set by the people and for the people.
Can you make an argument outlining how Amazon's anti-competitive rules help the society, and why their behavior should be tolerated in an ideal democratic society?
> And if you want to do business (at all) you have to abide by the local laws. In an ideal democratic world, those laws would be set by the people and for the people.
which law is amazon breaking and if there isn't one (there isn't, otherwise there would be lawsuits we are all aware of) what's the law going to look like?
> Can you make an argument outlining how Amazon's anti-competitive rules help the society, and why their behavior should be tolerated in an ideal democratic society?
not sure what "democracy" has to do with anything? we don't really have a system in place where we go to a referendum and make decisions like this. whether or not amazon's anti-competitive rules help the society or not is on the society to decide. you have a choice whether to use amazon services and if you are so anti-amazon no one is forcing you to use their services. if amazon is doing something is illegal based on today's laws there is a machinery to bring lawsuits against (by the government itself or otherwise).
You should reread the comments you have replied to, as you clearly haven't understood what was written.
A law would be fairly simple — it would forbid a marketplace or retailer from influencing the price of goods sold outside their marketplace/shop.
There are already laws regulating pricing in some places, e.g. selling below the manufacturer's recommended retail price, or preventing selling products below cost to attract customers.
There's this from California: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32866055 (I haven't read it, I'm not that interested.)
> You should reread the comments you have replied to, as you clearly haven't understood what was written.
I sure have
> A law would be fairly simple — it would forbid a marketplace or retailer from influencing the price of goods sold outside their marketplace/shop.
This type of law would make no sense, you are basically saying "I can price gouge the customers on your platform while providing the same product cheaper on mine." That is a F'ed up as it gets...
> e.g. selling below the manufacturer's recommended retail price
This is completely a different thing - if Amazon is actually telling retailers "hey, you want to sell this for $100 but you can't, you need to lower this price" that should 100% be illegal - Amazon should not be telling anyone what the price of their product should be. But that is 1000000% different from Amazon telling same companies "you cannot use our platform to price gouge people and sell your shit for more than you are selling elsewhere."
I've done that, only to get it "fulfilled by Amazon" anyway.
Weird. I've done it a bunch and not had any indication that Amazon was involved with either the money-handling or the delivery.
It makes a ton of sense that it WOULD happen sometimes, but I've yet to see it.
This is probably not the most environmentally friendly solution, though.
You're right. The most environmentally-friendly solution is to truck, train, or ship things into stores in big cities and let people walk or take public transit to get their things.
I'm not sure how you imagine that ordering direct from a manufacturer works, but I'm certain that most of them have their goods in big warehouses and use major delivery services to get those goods to you, much like they would get those goods to an ordinary store.
Goods are going to be shipped, flown, and trucked around. Until we invent macro-scale teleportation, there's no reasonable way to stop doing that entirely.
> You do realize [...], right?
You are correct, but I don't like this idiom. Your point would come across better if it wasn't delivered in a patronisation sandwich.
Apple Pay has raised my confidence level about buying directly from smaller internet sites. Since those sites don’t get my raw credit card info when I use Apple Pay, I don’t have to worry about whether they’ve implemented CC handling well (most have not).
I almost never have to resort to Amazon any more.
Is this an ad? Paypal's been doing this for 25 years.
I've used PayPay a lot over decades, starting with when they were mainly a way of paying on eBay, but I haven't thought of them as "making the rest of the web an alternative to Amazon". Perhaps that's because PayPal didn't achieve the same market penetration. Or because I didn't perceive them as providing the same level of service, or ease of use — for example, they haven't made shipping as easy (or if they have, I'm not aware of it).
And no, my post is not an "ad" *eyeroll*. There seem to be several competitors active in a maturing ecosystem. I don't have experience with them them to the level that I'd feel comfortable citing them, but I regret not mentioning them if it would have made the point more effectively. If PayPal, or Google Pay, or some other provider has served that role for you, I'm glad.
Did America go straight from giving full credit card info to Apple Pay? Chip and pin and card contactless both solve that problem
I was talking about buying from online merchants. I’m less familiar with the security implications of chip-and-pin or contactless card for in-person transactions. Do those technologies prevent the merchant from getting raw CC info?
Rightly or wrongly, I worry less about the security implementations of hardware point-of-sale terminals than the security implementations of small websites.
I mostly prefer Apple Pay for in-person transactions because of anonymity — my understanding is that it makes it harder for companies (other than Apple) to track my purchases.
Answering my own question...
> Do those technologies prevent the merchant from getting raw CC info?
They do:
https://www.worldpay.com/en/insights/articles/how-does-a-chi...
> An enabled EMV terminal reads and verifies the card information contained in the embedded chip when inserted into the slot of the payment terminal. Like using the magnetic stripe, card data is then processed for payment authorization; the key difference is that the chip card generates a one-time code for each transaction while a traditional magnetic stripe card does not.
So, the merchant doesn't get the raw CC number; they get a transaction token.
This doesn't prevent someone from reading the CC account number off of the physical card, but unlike swiping a stripe, the act of purchasing via an EMV token means that the CC account number doesn't enter the system.
Bank of America automates the process of creating virtual cards for your account when you set up contactless payments such as Google Pay. It is not an anonymous service as the bank still keeps the transaction records and iirc, will occasionally sell or relinquish the data on request to 3rd parties or enforcement agencies.
Apple Pay is set up as a front for my credit card, which is a Visa card I get through my credit union. Whether it's Apple Pay or Google Pay (or PayPal, or others), I think the card provider is always going to have full records — in addition to the payment channel provider. So I should have said "(besides Apple or my card provider)" rather than just "(besides Apple)".
Yes mostly. The cell phone wallets were the convenience difference that caused merchants to upgrade their POS systems to support contactless. Before that there just wasn't much reason for merchants to change their existing card infrastructure. Now customers feel inconvenienced if they have to use a credit card.
I find it interesting because in my lifetime the UK went from magstripe (falling back to a carbon copy of the card with signature) to chip and pin, to contactless, and now smartphone. A lot of upgrading while the US just skipped it.
I live in a big city and unfortunately the local price gouging has gotten out of control. It's now often 50% cheaper to buy basics like aluminum foil and cereal on Amazon compared to even the discount dollar store.
I worked in an Amazon warehouse for two different periods:
- for over a year part-time on weekends
- four-day full-time in-between jobs recently
https://www.reddit.com/r/EDC/comments/dmnuts/53mamazon_fulfi...
Once, when polled by HR, I noted that it should be more efficient for many different people in a given neighborhood to place orders, and for one delivery truck to run through it dropping off packages even if somewhat fuel-inefficient, than for that myriad of consumers to make separate trips even if using fuel-efficient vehicles.
Stores should not try to "out-Amazon" Amazon --- I buy my groceries from a store which is 1 mile away, and usually stop on the way home from work --- if I need something over the weekend or on a telework day which won't wait, I walk or ride my bike unless there is some other errand which needs to be made. Similarly, I prefer to shop the local hardware store (bike-distance) for hardware and tools (when suitable ones are available, if not, then it's Harry Epstein, or Jim Bode, or a trip to Woodcraft, or an on-line order).
Folks forget what life was like before Amazon --- there were occasions when I drove all around multiple towns looking for one connector because I didn't want a project to wait for a special order and 6--8 weeks delivery --- my kids were amazed when we came across my copy of the book: _U.S. Mail Order Shopper's Guide: A Subject Guide Listing 3,667 Unique Mail Order Catalogs_ by Susan Spitzer
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4313476-u-s-mail-order-s...
If I don't need to drive to the "local" store, then the local store is miles better than Amazon especially if it has the choices you need. The problem is: 1. many times they don't have exactly what you need but Amazon does and 2. if it requires a ride, then both are no longer 5 bucks.
Most of the time it's not the same price, and most of the items are not in local stores. I know because I comparison shop, and 90% of the time I end up ordering from Amazon, because it's still the quickest and cheapest way to get things.
I agree, in almost all cases there is a store nearby that sells it - and if not I probably won’t need it that bad.
But for me it is an ideological thing - I absolutely loathe Amazon and it’s practices; I just have to visualise how I insert my money into Bezos gaping asshole and my desire to shop at Amazon is rapidly diminishing.
But I think ordering stuff when you are able bodied is immoral as well - not super immoral but you should always feel a little bit bad if you order stuff that you could’ve picked up yourself.
Also the distances in my country are tiny, if you live in the outback with 200km to the next neighbour it’s a different story
For me it is also something ideological but even from an economic point of view I never buy on Amazon, this is my reasoning:
You buy it cheaper but you are generating a debt, it's like buying on credit: somewhere someone is being exploited or a natural resource is being overexploited, and you will pay for it in the future, with a poorer environment socially, economically and naturally.
Everything comes back. I once read that I don't know which tribe made decisions that were good for the next 7 generations, well, buying on amazon is a decision that is not good even for the current generation, you will probably see the consequences in your own or your children's life.
Imagine you are taxed to repair the roads, on which your untaxed competitors is driving too ruin you.. a nightmare.
We are taxed for road repairs. It's a common tax on gasoline here in the United States; and, yes, there is a known issue around this with electric cars and some efforts in place to try and rectify it.
Many states recapture those lost taxes via vehicle registration surcharges for EVs. (For example, Texas charges $200, which is consistent with what a truck or SUV would pay driving around 12k mi/yr)
Amazon in europe went "untaxed" quite a while via the irish route, thus beeing subsidized by mom & pop stores.
Amazon employing people creates a lot of taxes. Don't forget everything's taxed, not just corporation tax. Every employee generates income tax, employee tax, if they invest their money the interest is taxed, almost everything they buy from a shop has VAT, fuel they purchase is taxed, everything they buy has a higher price because that business has to pay tax and so do its employees, ad infinitum. There's tax everywhere, and the roads will still be there if none of those people had jobs and weren't paying any tax.
> employee tax
There is no such thing as "employee tax". Usually, what exists is a scheme for some of the employee's salary to be paid in the form of retirement schemes, health care, etc. It's not a tax to subsidize unrelated things. Likewise, the income tax is not there to pay for the company's use of collective amenities, it's there to pay for the citizen's use.
In the end, if your company doesn't pay all the stuff that other companies do, it's freeloading, and the society would most likely be better off with another company getting the business.
> There is no such thing as "employee tax". Usually, what exists is a scheme for some of the employee's salary to be paid in the form of retirement schemes, health care, etc. It's not a tax to subsidize unrelated things.
I didn't say it was to subsidize unrelated things; in fact it's more the other way round, where state pensions, and state employee pensions, public healthcare etc are just paid for, and the money comes from whence it comes.
The local stores also employ people. They also pay business taxes that Amazon avoids.
I don't understand the dichotomy. Local stores can exist and their taxes can pay for things, but the Amazon HQ also exists and can pay for things. And its employees likely pay the higher taxation bands as well, although I could be wrong.
The local stores still support those higher-paying roles, though again probably more locally — the local accountant, the local lawyer when they need one, the local IT company.
The Amazon HQ is great for Seattle and Luxembourg, but money spent there is gone from my local (or even national) community.
This is mostly the case from imports, though, isn't it? Anything you import rather than buy locally is money leaving the country. That seems to be by far the bigger effect if that's what you're concerned about. Ireland's situation, if I understand it correctly, is still to pull corporation tax from Amazon sales in Europe, just at a lower rate. So Ireland is going to be a massive net beneficiary, even if you only take into account the corporation tax paid by Amazon and not the larger effects (other taxes; infrastructure investment; etc).
we'd be better off rectifying why everyone thinks they need to drive some monster truck
Order from local store, order from Amazon, use first one to receive, return new one to whichever was more expensive.
I’ve found that the rise of Apply Pay as a payment mechanism on random sites has been helpful in getting me off of Amazon. Often it’s just as easy to order something direct if they have Apple Pay (or ShopPay, but I have other issues with them) and the same price as Amazon. Plus discoverability is awful on Amazon anyways.
Still don’t get the Whole Foods return ability when not shopping from Amazon, but not punching in my credit card number to random sites has been enough to get me to move 50% of my shopping to retailers direct.
For me, Amazon cuts delivery times, improves reliability and makes returns 10x easier.
I live in a big city and the last few years especially it's very easy to see the cost of that approach to delivery. Residential streets are clogged with double parked amazon vehicles, I can't go three blocks in the bike lane without having to get into traffic to go around one. If they can't figure out the apartment buzzer in a few seconds they just ring them all, I'm buzzed multiple times a day even if I don't use amazon.
It has made life worse in small but tangible, concrete ways. I don't need it that fast, probably neither do you. You can blame enforcement or the individual drivers or whatever but I think that's a cop out. Amazon demands efficiency of its drivers, this is what efficiency looks like.
I've gotten a lot of free stuff from Amazon. Shipped duplicate products to me? Just keep the other. Food bottle slightly cracked and leaked in transit? Keep it and we'll send another.
I was even able to get another 30% off an already sale price for a Kindle because my old one (>5 years) died, and they couldn't fix it.
Not justifying any particular actions on their part, but their customer service has been above and beyond and other major retailer I've interacted with.
I recall it used to be like that....but I haven't had that level of customer service out of amazon since like, 2017-2018 at the latest.
Amazon earned my business back in the day, but they don't seem very interested in it anymore.
Strange, the cracked bottle example was from only a few months ago.
> Food bottle slightly cracked and leaked in transit? Keep it and we'll send another.
Hah, I have the opposite experience. My shampoo bottle leaked and filled a bubble wrap. Amazon said, "We'll send a replacement, but you need to return this." After discussing it, I went to the UPS Store for the return. UPS, reasonably, refused to accept it.
Had to debate this for far too long with another customer service person before they would agree that "We don't really want a ziploc bag of shampoo back".
Ease of returns is probably the main feature that makes my household have some degree of Amazon preference.
But that's increasingly offset by an inability to find quality products.
I'm always surprised how often I contact Amazon to do a return and they refund my money and tell me to keep the item.
I suspect it's just cheaper for many things.
You not only have to consider the money spent on shipping it back to them at their own cost but also then deciding whether the product is still in good enough condition to be resold or most likely it would just go wholesale directly to a business that sells returns at a cheaper price and they handle that checking / repackaging. That by itself still probably costs money to handle. At Amazon scale, all of that together is a lot of money.
If the amount of profit they made from selling to you is offset by all those costs, why not let the customer keep it and get free goodwill and repeat business?
> makes returns 10x easier.
Makes dumping what would otherwise be useful goods into landfills 10x easier*
You sure need that ease of return when Amazon repeatedly ships the wrong item again and again.
They're also 10x more efficient at providing counterfeits
I hear people complain about this but maybe I'm just better at serving fake goods.
I grew up in a place and time where scams were everywhere. I now invest in garage stage startups, and endlessly amused.
Making me drive 20 mins to Whole Foods to deliver some items, and wait in a line where there’s one kiosk, has completely turned me off of Amazon.
This is probably by design, but I don’t return a whole lot.
Mine is 5 minutes away. Two kiosks plus a person is always on site. The most I've ever had to wait for the person is 30 seconds -- all they do is scan the QR code and take the item. So I guess it's YMMV.
Until the person enters something wrong on the screen, and you get emails claiming you will be billed if you don't return the item, and you end up spending a few hours with Kafkaesque customer service, repeatedly, over the course of weeks, interrupting multiple days with time-sucking aggravation.
Unless Mr. Bezos has been putting on a disguise, and secret-shoppering his own company, I have a suspicion he has no idea how much his Leadership Principles have been eroded in the last few years. I don't think metrics will tell you that, when your staff has been conditioned to desperately make their metrics look good. The short-term quantitative metrics will be hit, at least on paper, and everything else will be neglected or outright cannibalized.
To me, the key feature of Amazon is the fast delivery with Prime. Do other merchants offer fast delivery often enough?
Regarding credit cards, I started using privacy dot com for virtual, merchant-locked cards. It protects against (rare) card details leaks, but, of course, does not give you any points or cashback.
The local Target and Home Depots all offer same day pickup and delivery. For our house, that's taken 90% of the business away from Amazon.
What's ironic is we still make purchases on Amazon that don't require their fast shipping. We're just conditioned to expect it. I'm thinking TVs, books, project supplies, art, etc.
>What's ironic is we still make purchases on Amazon that don't require their fast shipping. We're just conditioned to expect it. I'm thinking TVs, books, project supplies, art, etc.
Realizing this was what made me quit Prime years ago, and eventually drive down my Amazon purchases to just a handful of times a year. For the most part, there's really not much of a difference if I get a book tomorrow vs. four days from now, or if I get it from Amazon or from the nearby Target. But there's a lot of infrastructure built up to satisfy this admittedly frivolous expectation of fast delivery.
Are there cases when rapid delivery is necessary and valuable? Absolutely. Are those cases the norm? Not in my life, by an overwhelming margin.
Exactly. The $35 free shipping threshold actually helped me hold off a few impulse purchases. Thanks Amazon!
> Realizing this was what made me quit Prime years ago
I quit Prime after Amazon replaced "two-day shipping" with "it'll get there when it gets there".
I love that I can click "Get it tomorrow" filters, and see the search results visibly change... and not a single one is actually going to be here tomorrow.
The same is true with two-day Prime. Even if you get to the item, all of a sudden, it's gone.
I think their argument is that it's "Prime" shipping (not two-day), so if their eco-get-it-in-a-week-option is available, that's still a variant of Prime.
Do you actually care that much about fast delivery?
My Prime membership ended 3 years ago. These days I just put items in the cart, and place order whenever it reaches $35. If I need an item in a hurry -- which rarely happens -- I go to a store to buy it.
This barely affected me, and I ended up with much fewer impulse purchases.
What's funny though is that the "standard" delivery often takes 5 calendar days. But AliExpress shipments can take as few as 8 calendar days. I ended up spending even less -- well, if the items are manufactured in China, why not just order on AliExpress where you get the same/similar items and pay less.
> well, if the items are manufactured in China, why not just order on AliExpress where you get the same/similar items and pay less.
Yep, I've come to see it as a general rule that, if the item on Amazon is sold under one of those all-caps gibberish brand names, the same exact item is almost always on AliExpress for 30-50% less.
Fantastic experiences doing this, highly recommend discovering on amazon and shifting to bargain sites to actually purchase
Sometimes I'll even browse Amazon for a product I'm about to buy on AliExpress simply because their reviews are much better than Ali's. Someone wanna write a greasemonkey script to replace the AliExpress reviews with Amazon ones when browsing AliExpress? :)
I really wish there was a non-rush way to order with a guaranteed delivery moment.
Usually I'm not in a huge hurry, and I would happily wait a few days extra if it means workers don't have to pee in a bottle during their night shift. However, a "3-5 days" delivery means there's a pretty decent chance I won't be home and have to go to the other side of town to pick it up - and that's incredibly annoying. So I end up choosing next-day delivery and order it when I know I'll be home the next day.
Why can't I just place an order on Monday with a guaranteed delivery on Saturday? Ordering on Friday with a guaranteed delivery on Saturday is already possible, so what's stopping them?
Amazon offered me exactly that during checkout recently: 'no rush delivery', and deducted the price a little as an incentive.
Generally when I order something it's because I need it now and I live at the ass end of nowhere, so it's too inconvenient to find a decent store that sells what I need at a decent price (if that exists at all nearby).
I think the biggest issue is just the uncertainty. I've been ordering at other places lately and it's just ... frustrating that I have no idea if it'll take them a day or three days to process before shipping.
What Prime did for me, which didn't start with but was emphasized by COVID, was that if I needed/wanted many items I could just order them from Amazon with fairly prompt delivery rather than putting them on a shopping list. I'd probably get them quicker than I'd have gotten around to going to the store and probably save at least 30+ minutes into the bargain.
> Do you actually care that much about fast delivery?
I care about knowing when it's going to arrive. I don't necessarily need next day delivery, but if something says 2-3 day delivery that doesn't mean it will arrive in 3 days, it means it will arrive 3 days after it's shipped. Which for some major UK retailers can be 3-5 days. All of a sudden your delivery window is 2-8 days.
Also, much of the stuff I buy off Amazon is the sort of "crap" you make a single trip to the dollar store for - lightbulbs, wood filler, bin liners. They're the sort of things that I kind of need when I need them, or shortly after. My parents are the sort of people who will spend 20 minutes doing a quick round trip to the nearest dollar store/supermarket to get one thing, twice a week. I order it on amazon, and know it'll be there by the weekend for me to do whatever I need to do with it.
This is true. DHL asked me to delay my shipping because of Black Friday chaos and it was a bunch of crap that I didn't really need immediately so I delayed it for a week.
> Do you actually care that much about fast delivery?
Yes. Simple as. But a lot of people don't, so it's nice that there's options.
Most of the time, when I order something on Amazon, it's because something broke and I need to fix it, or something is running out, or there's some other time-sensitive need.
I rarely buy big-ticket items, and these can definitely wait.
Why the incredulity?
Yes, people often care about delivery time.
Most of the time, if I'm buying something, it is because I need it for a project, trip, or event. If I could buy it at a store today I would.
It's really hard to beat Amazon just because of logistics. Amazon tells me if it'll arrive tomorrow or the day after if I order now and I can be 99% sure that it'll be processed today or tomorrow and it'll arrive as expected.
Anybody else? I have no idea how long it'll take them to process my order, how long it takes for it to be processed by DHL/DPD/GLS and how long the actual delivery will take.
+1 - when I order on Amazon, it mostly gets here. Others, I suffer stress & distraction.
Hm, I have an active order right now. I ordered three things simultaneously on December 15 with a stated delivery date of December 20, also called out by the website as "arrives before Christmas".
One of those things shipped the next day and is currently reported to be arriving tomorrow, which happens to match the stated delivery date.
The other two have yet to ship, but their delivery date has slipped to "December 21 - 24".
Realistically, they look unlikely to arrive before Christmas, and Amazon seems to feel no need to honor their contract.
What's your control group? Would other online retailers fare better or worse than this? Most of the time, other online retailers are worse in my experience.
Amazon is much worse on shipping than pretty much any other online retailer. The norm is that the retailer tells you when the thing will arrive, and it arrives on time. The norm for Amazon is that they advertise a deadline they don't plan to meet, and when they slip that deadline, they alter the shipping speed displayed on your order.
A long time ago I assumed that Amazon removed shipping speed options from their ordering process because, if you itemize shipping separately from the cost of the good, the customer can demand a refund on shipping when you don't provide what you sold.
My current theory is that it's a side effect of deciding they needed to provide shipping in-house instead of buying it from reliable sources. They replaced shipping they could control with shipping they couldn't control, and so they stopped letting you specify the shipping speed you needed. But for some reason they continued advertising shipping speeds they knew they couldn't provide.
It's the complete opposite for me here in Germany based on recent experience ordering from Amazon and other online retailers. It almost always arrives when Amazon says it will. I literally just received a package from an Amazon courier in an Amazon truck, something that I ordered late yesterday.
Big day in 4 days. Amazon is currently dealing with hundreds of millions packages. Those not using fulfilment have less but even worse on them.
Update: between my comment above and now, Amazon has marked the other two items shipped, and un-slipped the expected delivery date back to the 20th.
Interestingly, the "shipped" status is matched to a tracking update that says "package left the shipper facility" with no time or location information. All further updates have a location and a timestamp. (Everything is shipped by Amazon.)
It's interesting to me that some people really see fast-delivery as an important feature of e-commerce. In the 20+ years I've been buying stuff online I think maybe less than 5% of the time I have cared about how fast I get something delivered.
Then again I don't have a business that relies on things getting to me fast. I'm just a guy who buys crap online for myself and my family. If I'm getting a book or some electronic doodad it rarely matters to me if I get it tomorrow or in 10 days.
For most Amazon non-business shoppers is getting stuff delivered quickly really an important consideration? I've always assumed that fast shipping, and the importance that Amazon places on it, was at least partly because of their desire for rapid cash flow. That fast shipping was more instituted because of Amazon's accounting needs than because most customers actually needed it. Maybe I'm wrong. It would be nice to hear people's informed opinions on this.
Fast delivery not a daily need for most people, but the dopamine hit is huge, and it makes people buy more stuff. I think an underappreciated factor of amazon's success is how it makes normal people feel like they're the boss, who can slam their fist and get immediate action.
Personally, I feel similarly to you, that most of the time the difference between one day and 1-3 weeks shipping is negligible. However, I think that relies on certain assumptions; I buy most consumable items (food, sponges, soap, etc) in person and almost always have enough to last another month or without buying more. Not everyone does that, some are JITing their daily needs and/or don't have enough free time and energy to make sure everything is always set well in advance (think working single mom, kid needs dress shirt tomorrow for whatever).
Another factor is that, while I travel less than I used to, I do like the schedule deliveries around being at home. Although package theft is not really a factor where I live, I also don't want my mailbox getting overstuffed or a package potentially sitting out in the elements for a week. As a result, I don't lke to order things with an indeterminate delivery if I might have travel coming up. (Which used to be a LOT.)
I think it's less fast shipping, and more reliable shipping.
I ordered a pair of shoes from a major UK high street store earlier this year who advertised 3 day shipping. Fine, I'm going away next weekend. Except, it turns out their guarantee is from dispatch, which is 3-5 days. It was listed in the small print on the order page, but even the order page still had the "Free 3 day shipping" banner on it. Unsurprisingly, they took 5 days to dispatch, and 3 days to deliver. I actually ended up going into the store to buy them, and returning them when I got home.
Amazon, for all it's faults, if they say next day, it's almost certainly going to arrive next day.
> To me, the key feature of Amazon is the fast delivery with Prime
Most websites won't even give you a realistic shipping time (major brands might but the long-tail of online merchants don't). They might say "2-3 day shipping" but that's how long it takes after they ship it, sometimes it can take up a week before they actually ship it. It means than if I buy from anyone but a massive retailer I am rolling the dice on if I'll get something in 2 days or 2+ weeks. Some things can wait 2 weeks but when I'm moving between my house and my parent's house (I visit often) it's really hard to remember "2 weeks before I move locations I need to start directing packages at the other location". The two locations are 3hrs+ apart so I can't just pop over and pick up something sent to the other place.
I was just looking at buying “The Great American Mail Race”, which is sold directly by USPS. They charge $16.45 for the shipping and don’t even provide the shipping speed! It could be anything from next day to next month- it’s not mentioned. And that’s from USPS’s own website! How does the USPS not think to consider sharing the shipment priority with the customer during checkout? Insanity.
Prime delivery is rarely 2 day anymore, and Walmart/HD/Target often match or beat it.
And you still get free shipping over $35 which covers most anything else.
Prime is too heavily tied to video now, which is a $0 value for me.
Prime is almost always next day, occasionally same day delivery for me, FWIW. B&Q (home depot equivalent in the UK) can occasionally be the same as ordering off of aliexpress.
In the UK, the only place that I've found beats Amazon for delivery is Argos. For some utterly insane reason, they do their own delivery logistics from my nearest store and it can only be a fleet of vans sitting waiting for an online order to come in. I've _regularly_ had orders delivered in about 15 minutes from them (which is about how long it takes to drive to the nearest store).
Depends on where you're at. The vast majority of stuff I buy on Amazon is same or next day.
I don't dislike typing in my credit card numbers because I'm worried about the number leaking (This is the US, I hand my card to strangers a half dozen times per week), I dislike it because I have to go find my wallet and fill out a long form. Apple Pay is nice because I can slap one button on the top right of my keyboard.
A password manager can fill out CC details automatically as well.
Except basically none of them store the CVV and so even if I use them, I still have to go get my wallet. And many cannot fill out the varying expiration date fields correctly.
1Password fills out CVV. I sometimes have problems with zip code and state drop downs, or with weird validation that prevents filling. I just copy and paste CVV from 1Password. Better than typing out the number.
There is on browser thought. It doesn’t work on mobile so I usually wait until at computer which is better anyway.
The speed is nice, but for me it's more about the reliability. For example, a few years ago when my router broke I decided to try something else (Newegg I think) and after several weeks it just never arrived and I got a refund. Found the exact same model on Amazon and it arrived two or three days later, without Prime and without issues.
I just don't ever have the problems with Amazon that people complain about online.
For the most part these days, Amazon seems like a fast way to ship goods from Alibaba in the one to two day time frame.
For a lot of other stuff, it feels like they've lost their edge on price and shipping.
Often my main reason for using Amazon is that it reduces the friction associated with buying for more retailers. For example worrying about data breaches, being put on spam email lists, etc.
For me, the fast shipping is at a point where more reliability would be better than the current speed of delivery. If it's on time, I'd prefer to get a package in two days than have it delivered at 10pm in one. If it's behind the deadline, I'd prefer a more realistic deadline than emails about slipping on the schedule.
Why do you care about providing your credit card number to order something? You're not liable for fraud and most banks will replace the card quickly. In 25 years of having credit cards and using them extensively online I've had them compromised only a few times. It's really not something to worry about.
"not punching in my credit card number to random sites"
Not sure about OP, but for me it's about convenience. My pet peeve is credit card forms. Do you know what % of websites I've used that have at least minorly broken credit card forms? It's literally 99%.
Random common issues that are annoying but can be fixed:
- autocomplete doesn't work at all
- autocomplete only fills in half the fields
- autocomplete only fills in 1 field at a time
- autocomplete doesn't interact correctly with the rich widgets they provided for date picking or zip code
- autocomplete doesn't play well with js validation, which is only on callbacks for typing. Now I have to go backspace and re-insert the last character of every field so it doesn't think it's blank
- my town name has a ' in it. complete fucking crapshoot on whether sites DEMAND or HATE the '.
Common issues that are complete fucking messes that can't be fixed:
- javascript between fields fights over edits between them and I can't get the form simultaneously filled out correctly
- rendering issues on mobile leaving fields not visible
- autocomplete doesn't work and I've for some reason forgotten my CVV again and don't want to go get my wallet
I could go on and on. It's amazing how hard it is to get this right and how obviously nobody tests the flow where PEOPLE GIVE THEM MONEY which as I understand it is the primary purpose of these places.
This is what you get when "frontend devs aren't real devs" and every job wants a "full-stack dev" (surprise, they can't do frontend!).
Sounds like the real problem is autocomplete. Do what I do, disable it. I never have autocomplete issues on websites.
I don’t use autocomplete, but a large number of sites feel the need to reinvent how a credit card form should be displayed. I do not care for your innovation. Put it in the same layout as the physical card. Plus the large number of sites that have broken tabbing (does not work or seemingly jumps to fields at random).
Then you'll have to memorize a lot of long numbers.
I used to have my CC numbers memorized, until over time they were all replaced due to fraudulent charges.
You know they print them right on the card right? How hard is it to punch in 20 characters and a name and billing address? Talk about first world problems.
"disable it"
No
> [5 complaints about autocomplete]
Maybe it's just me, but why would you want too have autocomplete for CC forms enabled? Personally, on these very rare consciously chosen occasions where I decide to give my CC number to another entity, I prefer to copy it from my banking site and never save it anywhere, neither locally nor in a cloud.
To flip the question - any modern card provider will 2fa through an app if the payment is suspicious, so why waste your time manually entering them?
It's the same reason I use a password manager, it's convenient and 2fa exists.
Can you name some specific sites where this is an issue for you? I've had nothing but good experiences buying online, in the US at least.
Every single site I've bought from has the same boring and functional checkout experience, whether it's Stripe Checkout, Google Wallet, or Shopify. They're practically all the same, and they all work fine.
>You're not liable for fraud and most banks will replace the card quickly.
It's enough of a pain in the ass that most people would rather not deal with it at all. An extra layer of security to help it not happen is a very nice benefit.
> You're not liable for fraud
No, but you're still paying for it.
Let's say you're a small EU-based merchant accepting payment for international orders via Stripe. An incoming iDEAL payment costs €0.30 / transaction. An incoming credit card payment? €0.25 / transaction, plus 2.5% of the transaction value. On top of that, you as merchant are charged €20 for every chargeback! And those additional costs are of course passed on to the customers because they will raise all prices by 2.5% to make up for it.
There is no free lunch. You are implicitly buying fraud insurance on every order and paying 2.5% for it.
Convenience. If it works like Google pay (fair bet?), it hands over your payment, billing, and shipping details in one go. It's wildly effective.
For me it is 2-3 times a year, which is a major pain. I have to switch every billing service over manually. Sometimes bills lapse. I have even had replacements stolen from mail and used.
Cancelling and replacing credit cards is a massive pain and waste of time.
Legally liable is one thing, arguing with a bank another.
I used to do that until I got screwed a couple times.
I bought something for $2k, it was bad, shipped it back, and "we never received it".
UPS had collected signature, went to correct place.
Tried to resolve it amicably, they dragged their feet, and finally I asked amex for a chargeback. and... some deadline was elapsed and they wouldn't refund.
long story short, with amazon, every single problem was resolved, with very little friction.
That said, amazon is horrible for name brands. They have basically pushed value of brands to zero. Everything comes from UPPERCASENONSENSE brand, searches seem to be 99% sponsored results, many 5.0-star reviews seem to be fake. ugh.
Shopify has helped a lot too. Having all my info on their platform with a checkout that’s familiar really helps. Plus their app to track everything is nice - although could do without all the spam.
> Still don’t get the Whole Foods return ability when not shopping from Amazon
Free returns aren't free. We need to de-normalize this practice of people buying so much junk just to immediately return it.
Well the first step is retailers and manufacturers needing to de-normalize this practice of playing continual games with pricing. These days if I see a "good sale" (aka non-sucker price) on something I'm in the market for, I will hit buy and then make the actual purchase decision over the next few weeks. Or if I'm unsure how many of something I will need, I will buy extra and then figure out how many I need later. Because I'm sure as shit not going to buy one or two for an honest price and then feel like a sucker later when I end up needing more but they've got me over the barrel. My main consideration is whether I've already got pending returns using the same method, or if I'm making a new task for myself.
It feels like this is part of a larger dynamic where companies are basically arbitraging consumers' feeling bad about waste and environmental destruction to increase their own bottom line. Like Target is abjectly terrible at packing items in boxes, such that things often get crushed in shipping. So then you're left with the dynamic of either complaining and accepting that return/resend creates a bunch more waste, or just shrugging off the damage they've caused (willfully, at this point). Now that I've seen the pattern, I just call that bluff too.
> Free returns aren't free. We need to de-normalize this practice of people buying so much junk just to immediately return it.
One of the things you lose from online shopping is sizing. Shoes run in different sizes, lengths, widths. How do you suggest you order shoes to find the right size if shopping online?
> How do you suggest you order shoes to find the right size if shopping online?
Don't shop for shoes online? Unless you're happy with most of those shoes you tried on but returned going to the landfill.
If your solution to the problem is “don’t do the thing you want to do” it’s never going to work. It’s not just shoes, it’s all clothing, lots of tech (ever bought a device only to find out it doesn’t actually do what it’s supposed to do?), lots of homeware goods. You’re basically saying don’t shop online.
If you think retailers are dumping every pair of shoes they get returned, you’re wrong by the way.
> lots of tech (ever bought a device only to find out it doesn’t actually do what it’s supposed to do?)
No, because I don't buy the cheap no-name junk off Amazon. It's pretty rare for me to encounter returns for stuff like that, because I already try and avoid supporting the e-waste game from the get-go. But I would say if you honestly tried to get a good and it wasn't what was advertised that's a good reason for a return.
But acting like the majority of returns are things which weren't as advertised is ignoring reality. Look no further than sibling comments here where that user openly acknowledges buying more than needed regularly and returns the rest. They're not alone with this; tons of people behave in this way. Buy something, decide later they didn't really want it/need it, return it. Decent chance it went to the trash. It's not worth it for the retailer to actually inspect and restock it.
> If you think retailers are dumping every pair of shoes they get returned, you’re wrong by the way.
Not all of them, just most of them.
Buying a dozen shirts and returning 10 of them because in the end you just didn't like the fit, you probably sent 5-7 otherwise fine articles of clothing straight to the landfill. Maybe a few of those will make it to some "donation" scheme, which will probably send half of those "donation" bound goods to the landfill. Then the last few will get put on a boat in a giant pile of goods, dropped off to some poor part of the world, and have a 50/50 chance of being worn by someone there or just become another piece of trash floating around.
Buying five pairs of shoes and returning four of them probably sent 2-3 pairs to the landfill. The rest are probably following that same flow above.
Do you honestly think retailers are throwing away 50% of their returned stock? They’re absolutely, 100% repacking and reselling what they can.
> Do you honestly think retailers are throwing away 50% of their returned stock?
For lots of categories of goods like apparel, yes. Its far cheaper for them to trash the item than spend all that money on the reverse logistics of actually analyzing the item. Other categories are probably more like 20-30%.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1yqcagavfY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG8idKaX9KI
If you're thinking the vast majority of your returns are getting restocked you're woefully uninformed.
Both your links are related to amazon for cheap items, not e.g. high street retailers that are managing their own stock and inventory. Do you think Office [0] are chucking 4 pairs of New Balance trainers in the trash? No.
[0] https://www.office.co.uk/
These links are not just about Amazon, but Amazon is overrepresented here due to the high percentage of their overall online sales.
And if Amazon can't get it to work with their already centralized logistics, smaller retailers probably have an even harder time with the reverse logistics.
> Do you think Office [0] are chucking 4 pairs of New Balance trainers in the trash? No.
Sure. If it costs them more to handle the return than what their margin on the goods would be, why would they reprocess it? Of that original sale say a $100, they probably only got $5-10 or so of original profit. And that was with the optimized supply chain getting it in to the original warehouse. So now they have to figure out the return shipping to the processing center, pay for inspections on the item, probably pay to re-ship to a warehouse, pay to re-stock it, and then for a lot of items list it as open box (if its anything that could have been plugged in to the wall it cannot be sold as new in the US), and then have all the regular costs of selling the item again.
Or they just eat the loss and increase prices a few percent and send it to "energy recovery". Or they "donate" it and claim they gave $100 worth of goods to charity. Or they sell the lots of returned goods for a few bucks a pound at the place where the returns were originally mailed to.
I returned some hardcover books that were intended as gifts, but the corners got banged up in shipping (because why bother doing something right when you can make it up in scale?). Perfectly usable items, but I obviously wasn't going to pay the new condition price for items they damaged with incompetent handling. When I brought them to return, the clerk just stuck the Amazon return label right in the middle of the front dust jacket. I doubt that's getting resold.
That's not an option for a lot of people. For example, the vast majority of physical shoe stores simply don't carry my size. There is literally only a handful of stores in my country I could go to - and I don't even have an incredibly unusual size!
Physical stores increasingly cater to the average. They would rather stock 20 different items in 5 sizes than 10 different items in 10 sizes. All of the long-tail stuff is only available online, so you are forced to buy online.
I don’t understand why all these comments are about who buys or doesn’t buy at Amazon. The article is about unionization and strikes. I expect a conversation about the merits of unions and their negotiation tactics. In my opinion, events like these will just accelerate job elimination. The goal of a logistics company is to be reliable. Humans are unreliable and more so when they are purposely and collectively unreliable. I’ve lived in a country with very powerful unions and it sucks— miss every 5th flight because the union decides to strike.
> I don’t understand why all these comments are about who buys or doesn’t buy at Amazon.
The logical connection is as follows: Bezos decided to optimize everything to its limits, including human behavior, to the very limits of law. To literally track every movement of employees and abusing the power the company holds over them. This is an ongoing process that we are all painfully aware of. Because of that, there is a growing negative feeling towards them that causes people not to give them their money. That's why instead of unions we are talking about boycotting Amazon.
> I’ve lived in a country with very powerful unions and it sucks— miss every 5th flight because the union decides to strike.
I'm willing to accept inconvenience if it means strong workers' rights.
Keep saying that when a vacation get ruined because your connections got messed up and your out thousands of dollars.
Many of the folks in the unions can't even dream of spending thousands of dollars on a vacation.
Poor guy. I'll be sure to let them know their selfish need for fair wages is affecting rich peoples vacations.
Where are you based?
> Keep saying that when a vacation get ruined because your connections got messed up and your out thousands of dollars.
Travel Insurance?
No longer there, but Argentina. The current government is squashing that fortunately.
Because people want to feel connected, and recognize that Amazon is an unethical entity.
If you read about Amazon mistreating workers to the point that they strike, you can feel good by saying, "I won't support that company!"
The general term is "solidarity", and it's a mix of empathy and action and encouragement for others to do the same.
> In my opinion, events like these will just accelerate job elimination
Sure, probably. The jobs that can be automated will eventually be automated. But while they're still needed, I'd hope they have some basic protections and decent wages.
If my online shopping costs go up 0.5% but now a thousand workers don't have to have the mental stress of "I really need a pee break, can my metrics take the few minute hit this week or will I lose my job and go homeless?", I'll take that trade in a heartbeat.
Most companies’ largest expense is labor/wages (usually somewhere on the order of 25-50%), and profit margins are usually on the order of 0-5%. Increasing pay or benefits substantially would increase costs by a lot more than 0.5%.
Sure, 0.5% is hyperbole on my part. Sorry. It's not like a 20% bump in costs for these workers would result in a 20% bump in prices or anything like that.
Their margin on that retail item is probably 30-40% of the cost of that product though. Let's assume the workers' benefits and wages in question here are 35% of Amazon's costs. If there was a 20% increase of that labor cost, that's going from 35% to 42% of the total share of costs, or an increase of 7% of the total costs. But that's 7% of the 30-40% of their markup. For a product with a 40% markup and they were to just pass that entire cost along to the consumer, it's a 1.6% increase in price.
So like in this hypothetical, which is not anywhere near real numbers for Amazon, we could give these workers a 20% benefit bump for increasing prices 1.6%.
I don't understand how you got down from 7% down to 1.6%. I think you are not counting COGS as an expense, and that's where the error comes from. If your assumptions are otherwise correct, I think you'd get roughly a 7% increase in prices to sustain the 20% bump in wage expense.
I am including COGS in this; that's the retail price minus the markup. The markup is all the rest of Amazon's costs, of which I agree wages for workers are probably somewhere around 30%ish.
Are you suggesting the warehouse worker's benefits and pay is really 25-50%+ of the final purchase price of the good?? That'd be an extraordinarily high amount of cost.
Yes, though I am including delivery and support staff with warehouse workers (basically everyone who is working 'on the floor'). More than half of their employees are categorized as "laborers and helpers", and there are a number of other categories that seem similar. https://assets.aboutamazon.com/64/79/d3746ef14fd99cc6be94532... (I only found this after your latest comment).
The largest categories of employees tend to dominate most companies' cost structures. I would like to run some numbers to see what the likely distribution is here, but the annual filings are quite sparse (in terms of income statement details), and I don't have the time to do an extensive analysis.
> Online retail North America booked $65.55bn in sales
> Amazon estimates the price of labour, labour-related productivity costs and cost inflation was $2bn in Q3
https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/29/amazon_q3_2021/
It cost $2b-4b in labor to do ~$65.55b in sales. Their labor cost of revenue was 3-6%. Pretty far from 50%, wouldn't you say?
unions and strikes are not illegal.
The merits of unions, not always but their goals are, multiple. a/ compensation and working conditions leverage in negotiations b/ structure that can directly address all sort of issues the employer don't care about and isn't obliged to deal with.
That it makes your service experience particularly painful is exactly the goal, bad (or better, no) customers experience hurts the employer, guaranteed.
Disclosure: raised in France.
But it’s also not illegal to get fed up and go above and beyond to automate everyone.
Was responding to the sufferings of travelers who disliked the strikes.
Unions are at war using any effective and legal weapons they can find. The same stands for "the capital".
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I've unsubscribed from Amazon Prime and Audible.
I don't mind waiting an extra for my stuff to arrive.
It's important to support other smaller retailers.
Amazon already started with enshittyfying some of their services.
What audible alternative are you using?
I have found a lot of great content available in Libby and Hoopla. I use my local library card, but am also able to get a card from a nearby larger city library, and between the two I have access to a lot of content and very soon in a lot of cases.
Libro.fm is basically bookshop.org but for audiobooks. Supports local bookshops, has roughly the same 1 credit per month price.
There are some audible-only titles, which is frustrating.
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> The world's second-largest private employer employs 1.5 million people. While that's a lot, it's a decrease of over 100,000 employees from the 1.6 million workers it had in 2021. [...] While Amazon is bringing on hundreds of thousands of robots per year, the company is slowly decreasing its employee numbers.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-grows-over-750-000-153...
This is the discussion which we need to be having, and one which has been put off since Jimmy Carter failed to put a tax into place on computers so as to budget for worker re-training for folks whose jobs were eliminated by computers.
Instead, you had situations such as the type compositors unions bargaining for sinecures for their members, rather than participating in, and informing the usage of the new systems, contributing to a decade of ugly "Desktop DTP".
On-going automation should reduce the total number of hours which humans need to work to ensure that humanity is housed, clothed, fed, &c. --- why aren't we talking about reducing the workweek? See recent story in Tokyo:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42342203
Or, if the U.S. gathered together all the money used for Disability, SSI, WIC, Unemployment, Welfare, Social Security &c. _and_ their administration and overhead, there would be a significant amount of money --- would that be sufficient to fund a Universal Basic Income?
using estimates online, the sum of the cost of those programs is somewhere around $4 trillion. who is ubi for? if it's all us adults, then that's somewhere around 250m people.
so about $16k of UBI per person per year.
Amazon is going to do that anyway. May as well stand up for your share of the profits.
The thing is, it used to be standard for full-time employees to get a full stock share, but that was bargained away --- anyone know the rationale?
Bargained away? Which union did that and for what company?
When I started at Amazon full-time employees got a stock unit (once vested), when I came back, that was no longer an option.
That’s because of the lack of a union. Companies can’t just remove benefits that are in a union-bargained contract. (Assuming that would have been one.)
I do not know the rationale, but this is the flip side of collective bargaining: if someone makes a bad deal on my behalf I can no longer deal directly with my employer.
Hard for me to imagine any cases where the union does a worse deal on your behalf than you did yourself. Maybe you're talking about only compensation? Unions bargain for more than just compensation: better healthcare, parental leave, more sick days, caps on hours worked, etc.
In aggregate unions exist to get a bigger share of a company's profits for its workers. (Instead of executives and investors)
But if you have examples, I'd love to read about them.
Probably not going to happen anyway.
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In silk bedsheets.
I also don't see how developers have any link with contract negotiations with warehouse workers?
How do you sleep at night knowing that you attack people based on which job they do to provide for their family?
> I also don't see how developers have any link with contract negotiations with warehouse workers?
Developers obviously have no direct impact on labor conditions of the warehouse workers. However, all the time-tracking, logistical optimizations, employee monitoring systems, etc. that enable Amazon to squeeze every bit of efficacy and profit out of these warehouse workers had to come from somewhere/someone.
I believe by contributing to companies that are as highly unethical as Amazon, developers are supporting entities that enforce and perpetuate such awful labor practices conditions. I am not assigning personal blame to any developer directly, but I do believe that as developers we need to be more considerate of the downstream ethical impacts that our work may have on others.
> I am not assigning personal blame to any developer directly
Actually you did exactly that in your post that got deleted by moderation.
In hindsight, I agree with you. I did not intend for my comment to be provocative, but I now see how it comes off as such.
“ How do you sleep at night knowing that you attack people based on which job they do to provide for their family”
If a line of reasoning can equally justify all the people who pushed opioids onto Americans, then it’s not a good one.
Just a reminder that if you search for "Thank my driver" on Amazon you'll get $5 donated to your most recent delivery driver at no cost to you. You can do this once per delivery, for every delivery, for the few weeks leading up to the holidays.
Not any more, apparently. Now all they get is a pat on the back.
"As of December 10, 2024, we have received more than 2 million "thank yous,” concluding the promotion offering $5 per "thank you" to eligible drivers. You can continue to thank your drivers and we will share your appreciation with them."
https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=18271648011&pd_rd_w=v1...
Looks like they no longer get the tip. This is what I see:
As of December 10, 2024, we have received more than 2 million "thank yous,” concluding the promotion offering $5 per "thank you" to eligible drivers. You can continue to thank your drivers and we will share your appreciation with them.
There seems to be a cap per local area. My area hasn't donated any money for the past week or so. It just says a thank you will be given to the driver. I presume it's because enough people used it to max out the allotment in our zip code(?).
Does this work if the driver is UPS or FedEx? Amazon drivers don't exist in my county and probably not in my state.
Surprised to see they're also offering it in Japan.
Bring in the Pinkertons
Try avoiding Amazon this holiday season, to not cross the picket line.
Are they specifically calling for a boycott, though? Or just striking? (Because if it's the latter, getting orders that go unfulfilled may actually help their cause.)
So what you're saying is we should order a bunch of stuff and then cancel at the first sign of a delay in fulfillment so amazon loses more by waiting it out?
No, what they are saying is, "ask the workers what they want, and do that. Don't make assumptions."
Bingo :)
I am just curious who still orders anything today with delivery expectation to get it before Xmas. From my experience the delivery drivers are today delivering tons of stuff ordered a week ago and they are so overloaded, that todays order might come only in January.
Back in my day, everything was 6 to 8 weeks for delivery from catalogs (Sears Christmas Wishbook, anyone?) and the carriers were far less accessible when it came to tracking packages and whatnot than they are today. Honestly, those times seem like a cold-sweat nightmare, now. Speaking as an old man who regularly shakes his fist at passing clouds, I'm pretty damned happy with the current delivery times, even if they are occasionally a few days late. Those folks are out there breaking their backs for us and we'd best not forget it
Speaking from personal experience: people with ADHD, who don't have their shit together but desperately want to avoid disappointing the people they care about. People who then get hoodwinked by the bald faced lies everybody from Amazon right through to the courier staff will tell you about projected delivery dates and "oh, gosh, sorry, you know we just attempted delivery but couldn't get in!" (while you're sitting in front of the building)
My solution for this is to keep gifts for the people I buy presents for in mind throughout the year, and buy things as I come across them, then, when it's time to wrap, my wife and I lay things out and decide what actually gets gifted, excess gets set aside for upcoming birthdays (which are both fortunately early in the year, Jan. and March) or possibly even the next Christmas, then come April I start in on the process again.
I'm glad that works for you! The challenge with executive function issues is that it can be literally impossible to reliably do things like that in advance! Especially months and months in advance. It's also a challenge to delay gratification; when I find something that really speaks to me about someone, I really just want to give it to them straight away.
As a result I think I place a pretty low value on events centred around gift giving -- and yet I live in a society, etc.
I ordered everything Christmas related before December 1st.
Now I'm just holding my usual orders until after Christmas to avoid having stuff lost in the big rush.
Better to go with a digital gift card if you haven't received everything for now.