4 ms·

Delivery gig arbitrage. Now how long before the cash flow from such operations is securitized and sold off? </sarcasm>

• gumby 6y ago
  Amazon could do this under an innocuously-named subsidiary to reduce their effective hourly pay costs.
  • adolph 6y ago
    It might be a valid way around "sticky wages." If one looks at the whole economy, some prices might be very flexible and others rigid. This will lead to the aggregate price level (which we can think of as an average of the individual prices) becoming "sluggish" or "sticky" in the sense that it does not respond to macroeconomic shocks as much as it would if all prices were flexible. The same idea can apply to nominal wages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_rigidity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_rigidity If Amazon were to open a subsidiary for lower priced delivery services it might be able to maintain its workforce branding and add lower rungs to the wage ladder for the purpose of labor supply development. It might be politically inconvenient for a wealthy company like Amazon to have an acknowledged wage tiering system even if it makes sense on different levels. For example, Amazon probably cannot publicly hire people without workforce documentation--an unacknowledged arms-length subsidiary would be able to provide this service.
    • gumby 6y ago
      This is sort of like taxi medallions. Amazon could have people pay to become authorized drivers, and then the medallion holders could rent them out.
  • munk-a 6y ago
    That innocuously named subsidiary could also team up with Uber and Lyft to skirt AB5 in California! Think of the monetization possibilities!
• me_me_me 6y ago
  Sadly i would remove the sarcasm markup.
• 082349872349872 6y ago
  "Greenmail Goes Transnational" (alt history from 1990) https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-03-23-me-521-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-03-23-me-521-st...
• kjs3 6y ago
  A/R lines of credit have been a thing for a long time.