>And I have to imagine that an Amazon warehouse and a bunch of delivery drivers is more jobs than a big-box. It's probably fairly close - operating a checkout

>And I have to imagine that an Amazon warehouse and a bunch of delivery drivers is more jobs than a big-box. It's probably fairly close - operating a checkout lane is easier than delivering packages, but stocking an open-to-the-public store is harder than loading things onto delivery trucks. Figuring that out is fun, but honestly a waste of time unless you really want to get into operations research. The outside view is way better approach. Amazon will compete with Target on some combination of price and quality. In other words, Amazon will do some combination of being more efficient (= cause fewer dollars to be spent on labor) and providing new services that customers are willing to pay for (= cause more dollars to be spent on labor). So the two things we need to actually look at is how much a customer will spend monthly shopping at Target vs Amazon delivery, and average hourly rate of the employees required to provide marginal service. The first determines whether the economy is doing more work in terms of dollar value, the second determines how the growth is distributed between increased employment vs increased wages.