13 ms·

When Sears Flourished, So Did Workers. At Amazon, It’s More Complicated

192 points by danso 8y ago

airstrike 8y ago
Right, cause stuff is cheaper at Amazon.
donatj 8y ago
And look how that worked out for them?
- jimktrains2 8y ago
  Sears is ~112 years old; that's quite the run. Moreover, they have brands that continue to be produced and sold in other stores. Let's talk in 2106.
- jaysonelliot 8y ago
  During their best years, when Sears was a genre-defining behemoth, workers owned 25% of the company, and a warehouse worker could get the same kind of retirement package a salesman could if they had the seniority. They build an empire that lasted over a century, and flourished. Sears' downturn didn't come until two decades after they phased out worker-friendly policies like profit sharing, and their decline was based on poor strategic decisions, not the profit-sharing that had existed decades earlier. In other words, being excellent to their employees worked out great for Sears.
jorblumesea 8y ago
If you're making 30k / year, having any kind of equity in lieu of traditional compensation (bonuses, wage increases) is an extremely risky affair. Amazon's stock has increased x6, but that is not normal, nor is it indicative of future performance. For those living paycheck to paycheck, there are far better methods of compensation that will ensure a higher quality of life without huge amounts of risk. An increase of just $1-2 per hour would easily make up the difference. White collar workers can absorb the risk in the case of a market downturn, but I'm not sure that blue collar workers can.
- mjevans 8y ago
  It would be really nice if EVERYONE not in the 1% got a raise of some sort. An extra 1-2 an hour or whatever... However then the prices of everything would go up for everyone, just like they are everywhere. When the 'living wage' 15 USD/whatever minimums are passed don't the prices of everyday living just rise to meet that extra cash in the market? Meanwhile everyone who was previously making a little above minimum wage, mostly the (lower/mid) middle class, get shafted, because they do not get raises.
  - chii 8y ago
    Which is why I'm in favour of a profit sharing scheme. You get rewarded the productivity of your work.
    - mschuster91 8y ago
      > Which is why I'm in favour of a profit sharing scheme. But... but that's socialism! /s Such corporation types exist - in Germany they're called "Genossenschaften". They're very limited in actual usage, though.
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    It would be really nice if EVERYONE not in the 1% got a raise of some sort. It’s happened before. But that was when Bush was president, and on the internet we’re supposed to pretend that he didn’t do anything good. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Stimulus_Act_of_2008 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Stimulus_Act_of_200...
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    This argument comes up every time raising the minimum wage and its just bad math and bad economics. Around 3% make the federal minimum wage raising the minimum wage to say 10 would barely move the needle as far as the available money supply. If most people have the same amount of money then rational actors aren't going to raise the prices much. On the other hand a person going from 7 dollars an hour to 10 will have 43% more money in their pocket. It ought to be intuitively obvious that the benefit to the poor is not related in a linear fashion to prices. If you were to graph an expected increase in price based on minimum wage they would expected to become close to proportal when an increase in minimum wage was also the average wage.
purple-again 8y ago
The sears salesmen directly drove revenue. He was being incentivized to increase revenue. The warehouse worker is not directly driving revenue at Amazon. The developers do...and they are being incentived to keep doing so. The world changed, business stayed the same.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- darawk 8y ago
  Exactly this. It's staggering how intellectually dishonest this piece is. I don't understand what is happening at the NYT, but this and other pieces like it lately are representative of just awful journalistic standards.
- kibwen 8y ago
  According to the article, it would appear this was not limited to salespeople: “Most of these people retired with a good pension,” said Jon White, who worked at Sears for 38 years, most recently as a manager in a store in Lithonia, Ga., before retiring in 2008. “Most of them are comfortable for the most part — cashiers, clerks, replenishers, all kinds of workers.” I would assume that "replenishers" are directly analogous to current Amazon warehouse employees.
jpatokal 8y ago
An interesting exercise in what Bezos could do about this if he wanted to: https://direkris.itch.io/you-are-jeff-bezos https://direkris.itch.io/you-are-jeff-bezos HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18276937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18276937
- partycoder 8y ago
  Stock money is not as liquid as you think it is. It's not that he is Scrooge McDuck and all his money is in cash.
massaman 8y ago
I'm hoping Amazon goes public soon.
- asaph 8y ago
  It's already public. Ticker symbol AMZN.
- afterburner 8y ago
  AMaZiNg
cheeze 8y ago
I think tech workers at Amazon are closer to the Sears workers than fulfillment center folks are. My friends working at Amazon as tech workers are making money hand over fist right now. 100+ stocks each grant. On the flipside, Amazon has a "projected total comp" which they keep you at, and if you're over projected, they don't give you more which is fucked. Google gives you 80k in stock and doesn't tie your future say to it.
- jorblumesea 8y ago
  It's not just Amazon, techies at most tech companies get generous stock grants as there is a considerable talent war going on. Even non major players like Priceline group now give equity.
- philipodonnell 8y ago
  If you ask I bet the cost of living and workload expectations makes that compensation feel a lot less than it is.
whoisjuan 8y ago
Sears' huge pension liabilities was cited as one of the main reasons that prevented any possible re-structuring that could have saved the company when it was declining and heading to bankruptcy... I mean, let's be realistic here. For how long was Sears in this pitiful state?... Getting all that real estate + semi-established brand was a private equity's wet dream, yet nobody ever contemplated that option. And now that Sears is bankrupt, their pension fund is going into default and passed to the government who will need to fulfill those obligations (thankfully the pension benefit guaranty is not funded with tax revenues). Of course, I'm not blaming Sears retirees. They deserve their pensions as much as any other person. But the reality is that corporate America learned this lesson a while ago and Sears is just one of many examples. Is not about pleasing shareholders and fucking up employees as this article claims. It's a problem of business viability and long-term expectations. Wanna increase salaries and stock grants? Sure, do it. Two quarters later Wall Street will fuck you up because your new shiny compensation model just shaved the company revenue. And guess what, they will punish you at much larger magnitude than your declining revenue. So that 5% of lost revenue is going to cost you 20% or 30% of market value, and now all those stock grants are 30% less valuable. So your great initiative just put you in a negative spiral. And now your employees will be pissed, and the press will come and write an article claiming that your once frugal company is now a money firepit and that morale is low, completely forgetting their initial narrative on how you used to fuck over your employees.
- tinktank 8y ago
  Yup, if you're interested in a recent example look at Mellanox vs Starboard capital. We need to break out of the vice-grip Wall Street has on public companies. The Long Term Stock Exchange is one such initiative but I think co-operatives are another way that should be popularized further. Problem is, it becomes really hard to capitalize without Wall Street money.
  - kopo 8y ago
    Wall Street money is just the money of 1%. The 1% need to get on board.
paulpauper 8y ago
Yeah I remember Bernie Sanders praised Amazon's decision in a tweet, but only later did people and the media realize that increasing the minimum wage came at a cost to other things, such as stock compensation. no free lunch guys.
- steve19 8y ago
  Amazon realized that they kept getting a black eye because of their wages so of course they pivoted. Now some workers are probably worse off. I blame the media for only caring about sensationalist headlines.
  - skookumchuck 8y ago
    Our local communist Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant loves to excoriate Amazon with her bullhorn. She gets a lot of press for it.
  - pm90 8y ago
    What nonsense. Many thousands of workers will be compensated much better. Other retailers will have to increase their wages. This is a good outcome.
    - chimpburger 8y ago
      Did you even read the article? Many thousands of workers will be compensated less. The higher wages came at the cost of no more free stocks.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - bryanlarsen 8y ago
        Nobody is going to be compensated less. The "extra" compensation they received before was simply a consequence of the fact that Amazon stock quadrupled in the last three years. So if previously they got $14 + 0.50 in shares their total comp ended up being $16. But they still got paid less than somebody who was paid $15 in cash straight up (who could have then purchased AMZN on the market).
arentiright 8y ago
Why does NYT have it out for Amazon? Is it because Mr Bezos owns a rival paper?
- ryanhuff 8y ago
  I don’t know that the NYT has it out for Bezos, but he’s a very easy target. He has a long reputation of treating employees badly while amassing enormous wealth.
  - biocomputation 8y ago
    Yes, it's just this simple. I don't know why more people can't understand how basic this is.
    - mtgx 8y ago
      The better question is - why are so many in such a hurry to defend billionaires?
      - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
        I don't know, I think it's right to question journalists' motives in an attempt to keep them honest. This works both ways.
      - harrumph 8y ago
        >The better question is - why are so many in such a hurry to defend billionaires? I think it's because the tech industry is positively lousy with deluded persons who see themselves as embryonic billionaires. When you believe your asshole sprays gold coins every time you update a git repo, you tend to overlook that production is arranged under capitalism to have the ownership class expropriate the majority of the value that workers create.
  - skookumchuck 8y ago
    Seattle is full of multi-millionaire ex-Amazon workers.
stella_r 8y ago
I joined Amazon as an SDE 1 in early 2015. I was promoted to an SDE 2 in q4 2016. I just was promoted this year to SDE 3. Hard work, navigating to the right projects, and managing both upwards and down... senior and junior people on my part... I feel a bit ripped off. I'm not sure I would have wanted to get promoted knowing where my comp now falls. The thing I'm unhappy about is that my target comp isn't actually that much more than where it already was as an SDE 2. Without going into specific numbers, what Amazon does is if the stock value goes up, you only reap the benefits insofar as your existing grants are worth more. That means if you're above the target comp they assigned you, then you get no additional stock. My job role as an SDE 3 has changed. I have more responsibilities and the influence I built as an SDE 2 has solidified. It's not easy by any means. I'm going to just a bit longer as there is some initial vest that's wrapping up early next year... and then I go somewhere else. My total comp this year is upwards of $250k because of the stock appreciation, but basically I got shafted with the promo raise. My salary and total comp didn't increase. I'm just reaping a higher stock price of vested shares. Edit In response to the article >A warehouse worker hired now at Amazon who stays until retirement would leave with a fraction of that. A buddy of mine works at the NYT in a tech role. NYT isn't doing anything different than Amazon. It takes a lot of nerve to write these kinds of articles... Hypocrisy at its finest.
- jrmg 8y ago
  My total comp this year is upwards of $250k, but basically I got shafted Only in our industry...
  - chii 8y ago
    If the person did 1 mil dollars worth of work, but only got compensated a quarter of a mil, isn't that getting shafted? Just because the numbers are bigger, doesn't mean it is less deserving of being fair.
    - mirceal 8y ago
      Nope. You need to make more than you’re paid (on average of course). If this does not happen it does not make sense keeping you around.
TylerE 8y ago
Is it really complicated? Workers are drones to be squeezed for all they have and then discarded.
refurb 8y ago
Why does the article keep comparing warehouse workers at Amazon with salespeople at Sears? Those don't seem like comparable positions (sales comp is often very performance based) and thus, compensation wouldn't be the same. Maybe compare the salespeople at Sears with account managers or some similar position at Amazon?
- s_trumpet 8y ago
  > “Most of these people retired with a good pension,” said Jon White, who worked at Sears for 38 years, most recently as a manager in a store in Lithonia, Ga., before retiring in 2008. “Most of them are comfortable for the most part — cashiers, clerks, replenishers, all kinds of workers.”
  - refurb 8y ago
    It would have been exceedingly easy for the NY Times to do research to get us some numbers. Instead we get this handwavy quote. And this statement doesn’t invoke a lot of confidence for me. The article talks about profit-sharing for salespeople, then this quote says “most” retired with a “good” pension. So there were some that didn’t retire with a good pension? Who were they? And then the quote ends with “most” are “comfortable”. Comfortable is quite different than the prior part about profit-sharing and retiring with the equivalent of a million dollars today. That quote is just so exceedingly vague it doesn’t answer the question that The NY Times itself poses.
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  Most positions at retailers are compensated at a fixed hourly rate.
huffmsa 8y ago
Everyone seems to only focus on the blue collar staff at Amazon. They're enot Amazon's main employees, developers are. The warehouse staff will be mostly replaced by machines in the next 5-10 years.
- ljf 8y ago
  Main employees - care to explain what you mean? * Largest number of people? * Largest share of total salary? * Most 'important'? -- I think for a long time they are going to have a larger number of blue collar workers than white collar. In in an automated future - who will look after and maintain the robots? Don't forget that they now also own Whole Foods that currently are 'people' heavy. Quote: While Amazon employees at its Seattle headquarters make an average salary of more than $110,000, according to Glassdoor data cited by the Seattle Times, the paper reported Thursday that the company’s median employee earned just $28,446 last year. That’s because the vast majority of Amazon’s 566,000 employees are not white-collar workers in Seattle but blue-collar workers toiling in the company’s 140 “fulfillment centers” across the country https://splinternews.com/a-staggering-number-of-amazons-employees-still-need-foo-1825389776 https://splinternews.com/a-staggering-number-of-amazons-empl...
- InitialLastName 8y ago
  > They're enot Amazon's main employees, developers are. According to [0] (page 30), Amazon's median compensation was $28,446. Where's your justification that either "main employees" are way less than half of Amazon's total employees or $30K/year is a normal developer salary. [0] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312518121077/d514607ddef14a.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312518...

192 points by danso 8y ago

airstrike 8y ago

Right, cause stuff is cheaper at Amazon.

donatj 8y ago

And look how that worked out for them?

jimktrains2 8y ago
Sears is ~112 years old; that's quite the run. Moreover, they have brands that continue to be produced and sold in other stores. Let's talk in 2106.
jaysonelliot 8y ago
During their best years, when Sears was a genre-defining behemoth, workers owned 25% of the company, and a warehouse worker could get the same kind of retirement package a salesman could if they had the seniority. They build an empire that lasted over a century, and flourished. Sears' downturn didn't come until two decades after they phased out worker-friendly policies like profit sharing, and their decline was based on poor strategic decisions, not the profit-sharing that had existed decades earlier. In other words, being excellent to their employees worked out great for Sears.

jorblumesea 8y ago

If you're making 30k / year, having any kind of equity in lieu of traditional compensation (bonuses, wage increases) is an extremely risky affair. Amazon's stock has increased x6, but that is not normal, nor is it indicative of future performance. For those living paycheck to paycheck, there are far better methods of compensation that will ensure a higher quality of life without huge amounts of risk. An increase of just $1-2 per hour would easily make up the difference. White collar workers can absorb the risk in the case of a market downturn, but I'm not sure that blue collar workers can.

mjevans 8y ago
It would be really nice if EVERYONE not in the 1% got a raise of some sort. An extra 1-2 an hour or whatever... However then the prices of everything would go up for everyone, just like they are everywhere. When the 'living wage' 15 USD/whatever minimums are passed don't the prices of everyday living just rise to meet that extra cash in the market? Meanwhile everyone who was previously making a little above minimum wage, mostly the (lower/mid) middle class, get shafted, because they do not get raises.
- chii 8y ago
  Which is why I'm in favour of a profit sharing scheme. You get rewarded the productivity of your work.
  - mschuster91 8y ago
    > Which is why I'm in favour of a profit sharing scheme. But... but that's socialism! /s Such corporation types exist - in Germany they're called "Genossenschaften". They're very limited in actual usage, though.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  It would be really nice if EVERYONE not in the 1% got a raise of some sort. It’s happened before. But that was when Bush was president, and on the internet we’re supposed to pretend that he didn’t do anything good. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Stimulus_Act_of_2008 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Stimulus_Act_of_200...
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  This argument comes up every time raising the minimum wage and its just bad math and bad economics. Around 3% make the federal minimum wage raising the minimum wage to say 10 would barely move the needle as far as the available money supply. If most people have the same amount of money then rational actors aren't going to raise the prices much. On the other hand a person going from 7 dollars an hour to 10 will have 43% more money in their pocket. It ought to be intuitively obvious that the benefit to the poor is not related in a linear fashion to prices. If you were to graph an expected increase in price based on minimum wage they would expected to become close to proportal when an increase in minimum wage was also the average wage.

purple-again 8y ago

The sears salesmen directly drove revenue. He was being incentivized to increase revenue. The warehouse worker is not directly driving revenue at Amazon. The developers do...and they are being incentived to keep doing so. The world changed, business stayed the same.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
darawk 8y ago
Exactly this. It's staggering how intellectually dishonest this piece is. I don't understand what is happening at the NYT, but this and other pieces like it lately are representative of just awful journalistic standards.
kibwen 8y ago
According to the article, it would appear this was not limited to salespeople: “Most of these people retired with a good pension,” said Jon White, who worked at Sears for 38 years, most recently as a manager in a store in Lithonia, Ga., before retiring in 2008. “Most of them are comfortable for the most part — cashiers, clerks, replenishers, all kinds of workers.” I would assume that "replenishers" are directly analogous to current Amazon warehouse employees.

jpatokal 8y ago

An interesting exercise in what Bezos could do about this if he wanted to: https://direkris.itch.io/you-are-jeff-bezos https://direkris.itch.io/you-are-jeff-bezos HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18276937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18276937

partycoder 8y ago
Stock money is not as liquid as you think it is. It's not that he is Scrooge McDuck and all his money is in cash.

massaman 8y ago

I'm hoping Amazon goes public soon.

asaph 8y ago
It's already public. Ticker symbol AMZN.
afterburner 8y ago
AMaZiNg

cheeze 8y ago

I think tech workers at Amazon are closer to the Sears workers than fulfillment center folks are. My friends working at Amazon as tech workers are making money hand over fist right now. 100+ stocks each grant. On the flipside, Amazon has a "projected total comp" which they keep you at, and if you're over projected, they don't give you more which is fucked. Google gives you 80k in stock and doesn't tie your future say to it.

jorblumesea 8y ago
It's not just Amazon, techies at most tech companies get generous stock grants as there is a considerable talent war going on. Even non major players like Priceline group now give equity.
philipodonnell 8y ago
If you ask I bet the cost of living and workload expectations makes that compensation feel a lot less than it is.

whoisjuan 8y ago

Sears' huge pension liabilities was cited as one of the main reasons that prevented any possible re-structuring that could have saved the company when it was declining and heading to bankruptcy... I mean, let's be realistic here. For how long was Sears in this pitiful state?... Getting all that real estate + semi-established brand was a private equity's wet dream, yet nobody ever contemplated that option. And now that Sears is bankrupt, their pension fund is going into default and passed to the government who will need to fulfill those obligations (thankfully the pension benefit guaranty is not funded with tax revenues). Of course, I'm not blaming Sears retirees. They deserve their pensions as much as any other person. But the reality is that corporate America learned this lesson a while ago and Sears is just one of many examples. Is not about pleasing shareholders and fucking up employees as this article claims. It's a problem of business viability and long-term expectations. Wanna increase salaries and stock grants? Sure, do it. Two quarters later Wall Street will fuck you up because your new shiny compensation model just shaved the company revenue. And guess what, they will punish you at much larger magnitude than your declining revenue. So that 5% of lost revenue is going to cost you 20% or 30% of market value, and now all those stock grants are 30% less valuable. So your great initiative just put you in a negative spiral. And now your employees will be pissed, and the press will come and write an article claiming that your once frugal company is now a money firepit and that morale is low, completely forgetting their initial narrative on how you used to fuck over your employees.

tinktank 8y ago
Yup, if you're interested in a recent example look at Mellanox vs Starboard capital. We need to break out of the vice-grip Wall Street has on public companies. The Long Term Stock Exchange is one such initiative but I think co-operatives are another way that should be popularized further. Problem is, it becomes really hard to capitalize without Wall Street money.
- kopo 8y ago
  Wall Street money is just the money of 1%. The 1% need to get on board.

paulpauper 8y ago

Yeah I remember Bernie Sanders praised Amazon's decision in a tweet, but only later did people and the media realize that increasing the minimum wage came at a cost to other things, such as stock compensation. no free lunch guys.

steve19 8y ago
Amazon realized that they kept getting a black eye because of their wages so of course they pivoted. Now some workers are probably worse off. I blame the media for only caring about sensationalist headlines.
- skookumchuck 8y ago
  Our local communist Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant loves to excoriate Amazon with her bullhorn. She gets a lot of press for it.
- pm90 8y ago
  What nonsense. Many thousands of workers will be compensated much better. Other retailers will have to increase their wages. This is a good outcome.
  - chimpburger 8y ago
    Did you even read the article? Many thousands of workers will be compensated less. The higher wages came at the cost of no more free stocks.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - bryanlarsen 8y ago
      Nobody is going to be compensated less. The "extra" compensation they received before was simply a consequence of the fact that Amazon stock quadrupled in the last three years. So if previously they got $14 + 0.50 in shares their total comp ended up being $16. But they still got paid less than somebody who was paid $15 in cash straight up (who could have then purchased AMZN on the market).

arentiright 8y ago

Why does NYT have it out for Amazon? Is it because Mr Bezos owns a rival paper?

ryanhuff 8y ago
I don’t know that the NYT has it out for Bezos, but he’s a very easy target. He has a long reputation of treating employees badly while amassing enormous wealth.
- biocomputation 8y ago
  Yes, it's just this simple. I don't know why more people can't understand how basic this is.
  - mtgx 8y ago
    The better question is - why are so many in such a hurry to defend billionaires?
    - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
      I don't know, I think it's right to question journalists' motives in an attempt to keep them honest. This works both ways.
    - harrumph 8y ago
      >The better question is - why are so many in such a hurry to defend billionaires? I think it's because the tech industry is positively lousy with deluded persons who see themselves as embryonic billionaires. When you believe your asshole sprays gold coins every time you update a git repo, you tend to overlook that production is arranged under capitalism to have the ownership class expropriate the majority of the value that workers create.
- skookumchuck 8y ago
  Seattle is full of multi-millionaire ex-Amazon workers.

stella_r 8y ago

I joined Amazon as an SDE 1 in early 2015. I was promoted to an SDE 2 in q4 2016. I just was promoted this year to SDE 3. Hard work, navigating to the right projects, and managing both upwards and down... senior and junior people on my part... I feel a bit ripped off. I'm not sure I would have wanted to get promoted knowing where my comp now falls. The thing I'm unhappy about is that my target comp isn't actually that much more than where it already was as an SDE 2. Without going into specific numbers, what Amazon does is if the stock value goes up, you only reap the benefits insofar as your existing grants are worth more. That means if you're above the target comp they assigned you, then you get no additional stock. My job role as an SDE 3 has changed. I have more responsibilities and the influence I built as an SDE 2 has solidified. It's not easy by any means. I'm going to just a bit longer as there is some initial vest that's wrapping up early next year... and then I go somewhere else. My total comp this year is upwards of $250k because of the stock appreciation, but basically I got shafted with the promo raise. My salary and total comp didn't increase. I'm just reaping a higher stock price of vested shares. Edit In response to the article >A warehouse worker hired now at Amazon who stays until retirement would leave with a fraction of that. A buddy of mine works at the NYT in a tech role. NYT isn't doing anything different than Amazon. It takes a lot of nerve to write these kinds of articles... Hypocrisy at its finest.

jrmg 8y ago
My total comp this year is upwards of $250k, but basically I got shafted Only in our industry...
- chii 8y ago
  If the person did 1 mil dollars worth of work, but only got compensated a quarter of a mil, isn't that getting shafted? Just because the numbers are bigger, doesn't mean it is less deserving of being fair.
  - mirceal 8y ago
    Nope. You need to make more than you’re paid (on average of course). If this does not happen it does not make sense keeping you around.

TylerE 8y ago

Is it really complicated? Workers are drones to be squeezed for all they have and then discarded.

refurb 8y ago

Why does the article keep comparing warehouse workers at Amazon with salespeople at Sears? Those don't seem like comparable positions (sales comp is often very performance based) and thus, compensation wouldn't be the same. Maybe compare the salespeople at Sears with account managers or some similar position at Amazon?

s_trumpet 8y ago
> “Most of these people retired with a good pension,” said Jon White, who worked at Sears for 38 years, most recently as a manager in a store in Lithonia, Ga., before retiring in 2008. “Most of them are comfortable for the most part — cashiers, clerks, replenishers, all kinds of workers.”
- refurb 8y ago
  It would have been exceedingly easy for the NY Times to do research to get us some numbers. Instead we get this handwavy quote. And this statement doesn’t invoke a lot of confidence for me. The article talks about profit-sharing for salespeople, then this quote says “most” retired with a “good” pension. So there were some that didn’t retire with a good pension? Who were they? And then the quote ends with “most” are “comfortable”. Comfortable is quite different than the prior part about profit-sharing and retiring with the equivalent of a million dollars today. That quote is just so exceedingly vague it doesn’t answer the question that The NY Times itself poses.
michaelmrose 8y ago
Most positions at retailers are compensated at a fixed hourly rate.

huffmsa 8y ago

Everyone seems to only focus on the blue collar staff at Amazon. They're enot Amazon's main employees, developers are. The warehouse staff will be mostly replaced by machines in the next 5-10 years.

ljf 8y ago
Main employees - care to explain what you mean? * Largest number of people? * Largest share of total salary? * Most 'important'? -- I think for a long time they are going to have a larger number of blue collar workers than white collar. In in an automated future - who will look after and maintain the robots? Don't forget that they now also own Whole Foods that currently are 'people' heavy. Quote: While Amazon employees at its Seattle headquarters make an average salary of more than $110,000, according to Glassdoor data cited by the Seattle Times, the paper reported Thursday that the company’s median employee earned just $28,446 last year. That’s because the vast majority of Amazon’s 566,000 employees are not white-collar workers in Seattle but blue-collar workers toiling in the company’s 140 “fulfillment centers” across the country https://splinternews.com/a-staggering-number-of-amazons-employees-still-need-foo-1825389776 https://splinternews.com/a-staggering-number-of-amazons-empl...
InitialLastName 8y ago
> They're enot Amazon's main employees, developers are. According to [0] (page 30), Amazon's median compensation was $28,446. Where's your justification that either "main employees" are way less than half of Amazon's total employees or $30K/year is a normal developer salary. [0] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312518121077/d514607ddef14a.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312518...