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Amazon hires 427,000 people in 10 months

286 points by brian_herman 6y ago

j4kp07 6y ago
Congratulations everyone. Small business is dead. Luckily, we still have Dr. Phil, professional sports and soap operas. Keep up the good work. And don't follow your leaders; stay inside and do as you're told instead.
NDizzle 6y ago
I’d rather have thousands of small businesses continue to exist instead of Amazon hiring 400k people. Apparently that’s an uncommon position these days.
- TulliusCicero 6y ago
  It's common enough when people are speaking with their words, and less common when speaking with their wallets.
  - tylermac1 6y ago
    Individual effort isn't going to break up a company Amazon's size.
    - TulliusCicero 6y ago
      Of course not. To consumers, Amazon provides an excellent service. (This is the point where everyone always kramers in with their personal beefs with Amazon) Like many others, I use Amazon because it's extremely useful, overall it's simply a better experience than shopping at other places. I have nothing against small businesses, but when I shop, I don't treat businesses like charities. If small businesses want my money, they have to actually present a better service. If they can't do that, it doesn't overly bother me that they go away.
      - hshshs2 6y ago
        How would a small business even begin to compete with amazon right now? it’s outright impossible on all fronts... service, price, etc
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - throwaway2245 6y ago
        > To consumers, Amazon provides an excellent service. I'd rather say, like Starbucks, Amazon provides a consistent and adequate service. Small businesses might provide a better service or worse service, but consumers can't easily know which in advance - so large conglomerates present less risk and less cognitive load. Amazon is the obvious choice, more than it is the best choice. Presenting a better service is not enough, for a small business to survive against a monopolist. It's one of the monopoly advantages that Amazon has.
        kmlx 6y ago
        amazon doesn’t seem to be a monopoly. walmart is bigger than amazon. amazon’s share of retail in the US is around just 5%. maybe i missed something...
        throwaway2245 6y ago
        you missed something, apart from giving intentionally misleading and old figures, and yet within that you're still able to identify Amazon's market share as a percentage of all retail as an industry? ok.
        kmlx 6y ago
        nothing misleading about my comment. it’s not all retail. it’s retail minus auto sales, travel etc etc basically anything that amazon doesn’t sell. they have 5% of that pie. offer a rebuttal if you can instead of attacking the commentator personally next time you leave a reply on this website. i was actually curios as to why you considered it a monopoly when in fact the numbers are against you.
    - dddbbb 6y ago
      I would nominally agree with this logic, but surely the exact same applies when voting? Should people not bother voting because they are just one in a sea of many?
      - tylermac1 6y ago
        In the United States I would say it depends where you live. I'm a Democrat in a forever-red state. My vote for President will never matter as long as the Electoral College is there. I still vote for state-wide and local matters and that is where my vote really does count.
      - Schiendelman 6y ago
        Millions of people don’t vote for exactly that reason.
    - rch 6y ago
      I'd argue that modern megacorporations have become sufficiently adept at morphing around state interventions, that coordinated grassroots movements might be the only means of mitigating their influence.
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    Customers (like competitors) are the victims of monopolies, not the perpetrator. The only perpetrator is the monopolistic company itself, and the only solution is government action.
    - colejohnson66 6y ago
      Amazon didn’t get how they are today without the help of consumers. It’s not like they started out as a monopoly
      - throwaway284534 6y ago
        That's absolutely true. It's just also a very narrow lense to look at the situation. I've worked retail and it honestly sucks for everyone involved. The customers can't make informed choices or even get an unbiased direction from sales people. It's a market designed to work with as little information or agency as possible. People have a limited appetite for friction when they shop too. An ideal store with a better return policy and selection seems to look a lot like Amazon. I'm not saying that it's good for us to invest all of our shopping into one business. It's just what unregulated capitalism breeds over time.
      - anonuser123456 6y ago
        Name a single product or service that Amazon has a monopoly on.
        sp332 6y ago
        https://www.geekwire.com/2020/hearing-documents-reveal-amazons-aggressive-strategy-beat-diapers-com/ https://www.geekwire.com/2020/hearing-documents-reveal-amazo...
        anonuser123456 6y ago
        Walmart.com, Target.com So not a monopoly. Edit: Walgreens.com, Costco.com, Honest.com All 5 of those popped up on Google/DuckDuck before anything from Amazon.
  - Technically 6y ago
    The problem is political. Expecting people to spend and then blaming bad things on the same people is not going to have any good effects.
  - jeffrallen 6y ago
    My wallet buys beef, goat cheese, and vegetables from my neighbors. I am blessed to live where this is possible.
- cm2012 6y ago
  50% of Amazon sales come from 3rd party merchants, most of whom are small and medium businesses. I worked for two family businesses with 10+ employees where Amazon selling was a lifesaver. That's not to say Amazon is a saint by any means.
  - petra 6y ago
    I wouldn't count on that over the long-term. Currently Amazon has better ways to use their money to grow. When that's over, a lot of the 3rd party sellers will be at risk.
    - dunefox 6y ago
      They're at risk now without Amazon.
    - hobofan 6y ago
      I wouldn't count on that over the mid-term. I've worked with a lot of Amazon merchants where they would put up a item with a decent margin and good sales only to be reliably be cut out from that exact item by Amazon offering it themselves after 1-2 months. The core of their business on Amazon was to continuously hustle and identify new products that would fill that niche, as that made up for the biggest chunk of their profit. So there are many 3rd party merchants at risk _now_ on Amazon. Apart from that there are also numerous brands from Amazon themselves already. Most obviously "Amazon Basics" and "Amazon Essentials", but also many with a non-obvious name[0]. [0]: https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=17602470011 https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=17602470011
      - petra 6y ago
        >> The core of their business on Amazon was to continuously hustle and identify new products that would fill that niche, as that made up for the biggest chunk of their profit. That sounds like a very risky business. How do they manage/lower that risk ?
        6y ago
- CPLX 6y ago
  Exactly. In ecological systems we don't get confused when a single species or type of cell replicates out of control and crowds out everything else. It's instantly, and intuitively, understandable as a pathology. A lesson that seems to suddenly get forgotten when we see it happening in an economic ecosystem.
  - comboy 6y ago
    Right? We would have never had humans in the first place without a government intervention when these replications were getting out of control!
  - Kaveren 6y ago
    something being popular and eliminating other options is not inherently bad. there is nothing wrong with one company acquiring a monopoly through superior service. you can attack amazon's behavior as anticompetitive, but that's not what you're doing here.
  - crazygringo 6y ago
    Sorry, but that's bad ecology. You're overlaying moral human values on an environment. Scientifically, it's simply evolutionary survival of the fittest. It's adaptation. By your argument, every sudden game-changing evolutionary leap was a pathology, which is obviously false. Plus, there is absolutely nothing "out of control" about Amazon either. Amazon's a private enterprise competing in the marketplace like any other. It's just doing a better job at it.
    - CPLX 6y ago
      > You're overlaying moral human values on an environment. Indeed. > By your argument, every sudden game-changing evolutionary leap was a pathology, which is obviously false. The definition of pathology is always context-driven. Worth noting that a massive bacterial infection is a fantastic success from the perspective of the bacteria.
- deleted 6y ago
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- raister 6y ago
  I needed to buy a set of bolts, I checked my local hardware store and 12 was sold by £2.99. I thought: 'this is expensive, let me check online'. Went to amazon, found the same for £1.99 with free shipping (prime). Now, which one should I buy? The one where I have to go somewhere and then pay more, or the other where I click a few buttons and the next day the product is with me? Should I 'invest' in my local hardware?
  - rightbyte 6y ago
    Bolts for a car? I would not dare buy bolts on Amazon due to the risk of counterfeits with lower grade than advertized.
  - otachack 6y ago
    A margin of a dollar? I believe you should support your local store as long as you can afford it. It's more work, money, and time off your day but it's likely you waste the extra time Amazon convenience gives you with browsing HN, or the like, anyways. Local business also most likely have picked up curbside for convenience. It's in Amazon's best interest to shutter all locals aside from what they own (Whole Foods, Amazon Grocery, etc). Their ultimate goal is automating everything they can to remove the human element and maximize revenue. You can see other businesses like Starbucks taking over as well in different fields. In my opinion it's a matter of time until Amazon starts their own attempt at local cafes. We had presidential candidates in the US like Andrew Yang that recognize this effort and want to get ahead of it with UBI but I'm sure you know how that turned out. If the government isn't going to support local businesses in dire times, who will? And who wants to live in a boring world where there are no local shops?
    - newen 6y ago
      Fighting systemic changes by making individual decisions is quixotic, to put it nicely.
    - hmate9 6y ago
      Sure. If it was only a single dollar. But do it for every purchase and it adds up. In a way if you are relying on the "community" to help your business stay alive, then your business is clearly not creating enough value and shouldn't exist.
- bzb6 6y ago
  Brick and mortar stores and especially small stores fucking suck. Amazon is not perfect but it sucks less.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  The problem is are you willing to deal with 5000 different return policies, 5000 different merchant policies, 5000 different shipping times, etc? Amazon eliminates all that friction. I can one click buy something and know when it will arrive, what the shipping will be, and the rules on returning it.
  - shiftpgdn 6y ago
    Yes?
- eltados 6y ago
  I think that's the main reason I try to limit my shopping on Amazon. Shopping on Amazon means limited circular economy because all the large profit centers are concentrated on few large metropolis ( probably must of then in the US ) and by large shareholders. Lower amount of tax is collected from that purchase that in a local shop because of fiscal optimization. Overall at the scale of the city it seems to me ( I don't have any numbers for that ) that consuming on Amazon is not a great deal long term.
- disown 6y ago
  Exactly. It's great that so many people are getting jobs, but it just means that many small businesses closed. And as amazon gets bigger, it'll put even more pressure on smaller businesses. With amazon getting into the pharmacy business, I wonder what impact it will have on pharmacy chains which themselves put small independent pharmacy stores out of business.
- Reedx 6y ago
  This gets tricky. Consider another version of this: Should we have saved the 9,024 Blockbuster stores?
- actuator 6y ago
  > Apparently that’s an uncommon position these days. Is this recent though? US made Walmart the behemoth it is. Also, chains like Target, Best Buy etc are also not your friendly small neighborhood stores.
flowerlad 6y ago
This is a pandemic-fueled hiring binge. What happens when the pandemic is over and demand for online shopping declines?
- TulliusCicero 6y ago
  They get laid off or contracts not renewed. Hopefully with the pandemic over, hiring in other sectors will increase.
- burlesona 6y ago
  Layoffs, if the demand drops enough. Since these are largely low-skill jobs, mass layoffs wouldn’t be particularly surprising. Amazon already has “seasonal” labor that rotates in and out anyway.
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  The same thing that happens after every holiday season
- infofarmer 6y ago
  Digitization is largely irreversible. US ecommerce penetration has lots of catching up to do with China, UK, South Korea.
- scarface74 6y ago
  I don’t see a case where people really think - “You know it’s a lot more convenient to get in my car, drive all over town to pick up items than it is to get delivery.” I hate everything about the physical retail experience.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- ystad 6y ago
  I’m not sure how much of the hiring is seasonal, but I think software engineers hired are probably going to be for long term investments
11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
Before the pandemic, my household purchased items online for delivery perhaps 1x per week. Now, it's 2-3x per day. Clothing, LPs, pearl milk tea, ... This is a behavioral change that is playing out worldwide. I'd certainly expect people to head back into retail stores once the virus is spent, but they will also likely continue purchasing a higher portion of overall shopping online, simply because they've been forced to learn that for many, the experience is satisfactory. This is something they may not have previously realized. What I wonder is, where is the labor shift happening? Warehouses need management, delivery needs drivers, live customer service is still valuable for handling corner case complaints & returns. Can cashiers and floor salespersons and store managers take those jobs? Even a town of, say, 25,000 needs drivers to deliver. How much of the brick-n-mortar workforce can be absorbed in this phase of Internet Automates Everything?
- walkingolof 6y ago
  2-3 times per day? Until transports are carbon neutral, free shipping should be made illegal....
  - rat9988 6y ago
    Using cars too I'd guess then?
    - walkingolof 6y ago
      Cars are not free, one of the biggest household budget posts.
      - stjohnswarts 6y ago
        what's a budget post? I don't think I've ever heard that term before.
    - Agreed99 6y ago
      Sure, why not It is nothing more than an entitled demand of a minority of the species that can afford them Why should that be justification enough to destroy the planet for the entire species?
nabla9 6y ago
The U.S. Private Sector Job Quality Index (JQI) https://www.jobqualityindex.com/ https://www.jobqualityindex.com/ The long term trend is down. Data suggests that mid-level jobs are disappearing. They will be replaced with small number of very well paying jobs, but mostly by lower paying jobs.
- kilroy123 6y ago
  This is what Cal Newport says in his book "Deep Work". I think this is correct. His book scared me to my core. I do not want to be left behind and fall even more behind overtime. Which is how it has been for my parents. This fear is what drove me to really change how I work. I do deep work on tasks for stretches of time and I've been doing a lot of personal automation.
  - JacobSuperslav 6y ago
    can you expand on that last sentence?
- cwperkins 6y ago
  Do other countries track this metric as well? I'd be curious to study worldwide trends in the quality of work and study the efficacy of policy in trying to reverse this trend. I'm of the opinion that the future of work is focused on knowledge and creativity, but my worry is that that will leave out a big swath of people. Is Truck Driving an occupation that people want to do, or would freeing up people to do other things be a greater goal? Truck driving is a hazardous occupation, but it also provides opportunity for people that otherwise may have limited opportunity. There will surely be a transition period, but how can we create a large number of opportunities to ensure people are prepared for an economy with more robotics and automation? Maybe space ship building will employ a vast number of people, maybe indoor farming will provide new opportunities in an urban setting and maybe there will be new opportunities with implementing new forms of energy and transportation. I certainly think if you take a long term view the world it has trended towards solving many problems over the course of centuries, but we do need to factor the human element in or there will be another Luddite movement.
thweor234324 6y ago
Long term (~10 y), Amazon will likely replace all these workers with pick-place robots once the tech gets there.
nomad543 6y ago
No company should be allowed to get to the size and marketshare that Amazon has now. This just proves that capitalism without intervention eventually becomes toxic and destructive. It's even amusing that capitalism was pushed so far in the US that it became worse than China. Americans can only buy from Amazon, Walmart and eat at McDonalds. Comparing to China, where people can eat at hundreds of different local small restaurants, several local groceries and local shops. Essentially, Amazon and Walmart are now some sort of authoritarian government, they are deciding what Americans can buy and who can sell.
- pietrovismara 6y ago
  Not only, they are an authoritarian government with power over milions of employees. These people are going to spend the best 1/3 (or more) of their lives in an autocratic environment where they have no power over decisions that will influence drastically their lives. That's not living in a democracy at all.
- ganstyles 6y ago
  I was fully supportive of your first paragraph, but then comparing them to an autocratic government is too much, as is saying there are only three companies (Walmart, Amazon, mcdonald's) is just nonsensical. I get you're frustrated, but these comparisons don't help advance your argument.
  - Supermancho 6y ago
    > Americans can only buy from Amazon, Walmart and eat at McDonalds. I think there is a good point in there which is ignored because this is some sort of Chinese propaganda, instead of someone with life-experience in the USA. If you have a cellphone, how many sites do you check prices on past Walmart, Target, Amazon with niche exceptions (like BestBuy)? Effectively there are only a few companies that are controlling prices for US consumer goods. In many cases, the ONLY pricecheck is Amazon. This is a problem that will only get worse.
- twblalock 6y ago
  > Americans can only buy from Amazon, Walmart and eat at McDonalds. Comparing to China, where people can eat at hundreds of different local small restaurants, several local groceries and local shops. What on earth are you talking about? Americans have many choices for shopping and restaurants.
werber 6y ago
I’m not sure if this widespread but Amazon is the only place I can order from and get the package at my door in a high rise building. And right now every time I think there’s a slight chance of me getting other people sick I order my basics through them (including Whole Foods). This morning it was toilet paper, sparkling water and a replacement for my headphones I can’t hear out of anymore.
- swiley 6y ago
  That's odd. At the beginning of the pandemic Amazon was definitely the least cooperative with our building's requests to deliver to the door instead of just dumping everything in the lobby.
- benhurmarcel 6y ago
  On the contrary, Amazon are the only ones that are completely unable to deliver to me if I'm not at home whenever they come.
- spoopyskelly 6y ago
  > every time I think there’s a slight chance of me getting other people sick I order my basics through them What if you get the delivery guys sick?
ystad 6y ago
I’d be curious to know how has competition scaled. > It far outstrips the 230,000 employees that Walmart, the largest private employer with more than 2.2 million workers, added in a single year two decades ago.
temptemptemp111 6y ago
All truth is censored on HN as usual. Communists crushing small businesses, and sheep obeying and begging for more.
aluminussoma 6y ago
After reading articles and anecdotes about the way Amazon treats its employees - warehouse and office - I tried to stop giving my business to Amazon. It is hard. Amazon offers a much better customer experience. Trying to place an order at Best Buy or Staples or others, I often encounter random website issues or distribution issues (bad packaging, out of stock despite showing available) that I never had with Amazon. So it costs me more time. Amazon is also cheaper where I live but I'm willing to spend a little bit extra on the alternatives. What scares me is that Amazon is getting so big that there will be a future where some products will only be online and only on Amazon. It will be too expensive for local retailers to carry them. Amazon will control distribution and supply. That is not a future I want so I put up with the inconveniences of not support Amazon, even if I am tilting at windmills like Don Quixote.
- kpierce 6y ago
  Add in that no one can build an ecommerce website without strong web services its almost impossible for another ecommerce company to come in compete with them. Amazon is a monopoly.
- ArtDev 6y ago
  Before the pandemic, I never thought twice about ordering from Amazon. However, shipping now takes 2-3x as long. It's faster to order from most any other website. After learning about how they treat their workers (including tech workers) I try to avoid ordering from Amazon as well.
- gist 6y ago
  > It will be too expensive for local retailers to carry them. How is this any different than any other company being put out of business because someone does it better cheaper or faster? Would you have said the same about automobiles putting out of work people who work in and around horses and replacing them en masse? Candle makers when oil came out? Oil lamp makers when electricity csme out? > about the way Amazon treats its employees - warehouse and office You have no data on how others treat their workers vs. Amazon. Amazon is almost certainly way better than a local smaller type company paying less less benefits and so on. They have modern warehouses not the crap that is typically out there. I have worked in my earlier years in one of those. Nobody is forced to work at Amazon it's not the military where you are drafted. And you will always have a small amount of people saying they are driven to hard and outlier situations (bosses and supervisors). Nothing is perfect. Small about of people dissatisfied creates a large amount of noise. > Amazon will control distribution and supply. Ok so this happens and then if they get 'to big for their britches' it opens up for others to nip away at what they do (craigslist as an example maybe?). > That is not a future I want so I put up with the inconveniences of not support Amazon Your choice of course. I don't think of buying from Amazon as me 'supporting' them. I think of it as being able to get what I need for a reasonable price and very convenient. There are things I can order that I can have later in the afternoon and no hassle returns. Very generally I mean sometimes things are wrong but generally as we all know and judging by the business they are getting they did build a better mousetrap. Guess what? I know they will raise pricing and I don't even care. I often pay them more just for the security of the ordering and convenience and certainty. Not everything is price price price.
ryanSrich 6y ago
And all it cost was decimating local economies!
troughway 6y ago
Something that isn't discussed about is how Amazon is able to do this, and that is that they are using their position to pay more for jobs that involve manual labor work (lots of positions in that 427,000 figure) but also to pay rates that the local businesses that also utilize manual labor cannot compete with. So what ends up happening is that Amazon is placing a dent in the over all labor market of all the industries in the surrounding area, not just their direct competitors. That is a lot of manual labor being impacted. If you have worked in fields with manual labor (factories, construction, fabrication, assembly line of any sort), there is very little employee retention because those employees are just concerned about the next pay stub. Nothing else. This might come across as elitist, and it is, but that is the prevailing mentality of these sort of employees and there is very little to be done about it.
- oblio 6y ago
  Why should they care about more? These jobs don't pay well and are frequently not very fulfilling. Plus you frequently have crap co-workers and bosses.
- 1123581321 6y ago
  If I understand correctly, you're saying Amazon is driving up the cost of labor. That seems like a good thing, assuming that they are hiring for work that actually needs done.
  - troughway 6y ago
    I assure you, in almost every situation, driving up the cost of anything has huge ramifications. You might think "oh that's a good thing, they get paid more". Except they don't. Read on.... When the minimum wage was raised, that very same morning, all the prices of all the goods went up by that exact same amount to compensate for it. In essence, all that was was inflation. Your _actual_ "purchasing power" remained exactly the same as the day before. What Amazon is doing here, which I find to be a pretty blatant case of a "bad thing" rather than a "good thing", is they are artificially increasing manual labor salaries by shoveling in money from all their other divisions, such as AWS. The only thing you will see from this, as I had just mentioned, is a price hike to account for inflation, however in the meantime there will be a number of industries struggling to find workers at affordable salaries because companies like Amazon can just keep playing a different sort of game. To give you an analogy, it's like VCs shoveling money in to startups to prop them up and keep them on top of their advertising channels and pay for employees, even though the company itself could not possibly survive without that kind of capital. The wages here do not make sense for the labor market, but Amazon has so much money stocked up from all their other channels, and of course, the various shady government kickbacks that you are unaware of, that they just don't give a fuck.
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
When I joined Amazon (Web Services) in 2008, there were approximately 20,000 employees in the whole company. AWS was maybe a couple of hundred people at most. Year 2020: Amazon adds double that number, EACH month. Mind blowing.
deleted 6y ago
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colordrops 6y ago
More evidence of a transfer of wealth from small businesses to large and lower to upper classes.
intricatedetail 6y ago
Why big companies are allowed to do tax tricks getting even bigger competitive advantage over small business? Why police or other forces don't screen politicians lobbied by these companies to keep investigations at bay?
jariel 6y ago
In case you were wondering, you really don't need amazon. I got off it years ago and don't miss it at all. Honestly when I see people ordering even once a week I wonder if that is egregious. Put it on your grocery/pickup list, and/or, maybe you 'don't need it'.
- jeffrallen 6y ago
  One can of spray chalkboard + one box of chalk + one square meter of your kitchen wall = weekly shopping list, with happy kid scribbles around it to boot!
peter303 6y ago
Sounds like they are responsible for about a tenth of the recovery since the March recession.
abraae 6y ago
I hope that every one of them is the kind of employee that Gives A Shit https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25229291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25229291
- nicetryguy 6y ago
  Yeah i really give a shit about Bezos' 15th yacht
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Is giving a shit webscale?
- yellow_lead 6y ago
  And hopefully they do so on company time.
wnevets 6y ago
Can someone explain why they need subsidies?
sacks2k 6y ago
Amazon is like a plantation owner for small and medium sized businesses. When you sell anything on Amazon, you have no way to build a brand as Amazon not only takes ownership of your customer, but they also forbid you from directly advertising to them. It can all be taken away in an instant and by withholding your money for 90 days+ (which is what happens when they take your account away), it can bankrupt a small business because they don't have the funds to pay staff or run their company. I had an Amazon seller account and they banned me 12 years ago over one disgruntled customer that I believe was just a competitor (I had 100% feedback from hundreds of customers before this) trying to shut me down. I've been banned for life. I not only can't sign up with a new seller account, but if my name is associated with any other seller account, it gets banned for life as well. I've tried to contact support over the years and it just goes into a black hole and I get automated responses with no help or no response at all. This needs to be part of a broader conversation: Do we really want to give big companies like Amazon this much control over what we can do online?
- andreilys 6y ago
  Sounds awful, my recommendation is to find a connection who can put you in touch with someone at Amazon. My experience with these huge companies is you can either get stuck in Algo Hell where you either get automated responses or are redirected to people who can't help you. Or try to get your story to the top of HN, that seems to work with Google
  - AndrewUnmuted 6y ago
    > find a connection who can put you in touch with someone at Amazon. I was at Audible for many years, and at least within that section of Amazon this would have been very sound advice. If any complex legal procedures, economic regulations, or necessary international standards must be followed to sell your product, there is a strong chance that Amazon's policies are being handled by a single GM/PM type who can directly handle the internal tooling necessary to remedy the ongoing issue.
- didibus 6y ago
  Can't you open a normal online store that doesn't rely on Amazon? You could try shopify, or etsy, or sell on eBay? Or make your own? Otherwise I feel it's a chicken and egg. It's like saying we need Amazon or a similar big known marketplace so that customers can find you and buy from you, but at the same time, we don't like the concentration of power it brings. So if nobody tries to open an online store on their own anymore, what then?
optimalsolver 6y ago
We have a variation of this article literally every year now. I'm not sure what my reaction is supposed to be. Surprise? Disapproval? This is exactly what I'd except a colossal global retailer to be doing in the run up to Christmas. And I say this as someone who once spent a couple of unpleasant months toiling in an Amazon warehouse.
LatteLazy 6y ago
I've been an Amazon fan for a while. When the first lockdown started here in the UK, it was anarchy in the retail world. I needed a few bits after the first month: household MCBs (fuses) after some power issues and a new mechanism for our toilet. All 4 of the national DIY retailers were unable to handle online orders. Some simply removed the Pay button. No note explaining they were closed, you could browser and make a basket, register, put in card details. You just couldn't find the Buy button. They continued to sell "essentials" like wallpaper and flowering plants once they opened. But they wouldn't sell other items like the ones I needed. If it wasn't for amazon, I'd have literally been sitting in the dark, filling the cistern with a bucket. That's amazon's killer app: basic competence and taking some vague interest in customers needs rather than profit margin and half arsing everything and being allergic to basic tech and customer experience.
- dylkil 6y ago
  the other suppliers will catch up eventually
  - suren130 6y ago
    maybe. but his not talking about eventually. Amazon delivered when the world needed them the most.
  - LatteLazy 6y ago
    It's been 20 years since I started using the Internet. How much longer before major national brands start using it?
throwitaway1235 6y ago
I have a question on ethics. If Amazon has profited greatly from Covid-19 related lockdowns and restrictions, would it be inappropriate for WaPo, which he owns, to create content that persuades the public to support continued lockdown measures?
stillbourne 6y ago
I got interviewed in the latest round, I'm generally one of those people that tends to no pay attention to l33tc0d3 shit for interviews because I think my skills speak for themselves. Additionally no matter how well I do when coding at home or at work I have never passed a code interview. I knew it was going to be a problem with my interview for amazon, the truth is I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder, I was fully expecting to fail. I did so spectacularly. I don't understand why its necessary to do these stupid test, I have some serious accomplishments under my belt and I know I'm a real solid developer but these coding tests are fucking stupid, menial, and don't accurately depict my abilities. For example the position I was looking for was with the Identity product. I thought I would be a shew in. I have written OIDC and SAML providers from scratch by only observing how existing ones work via http calls. I thought that's got to be a unique skillset, I bet they'll give a test that fits in my wheel house. But the fucking question was about 3d geometry. What the fuck do I know about 3d geometry? I imploded, I couldn't think, I panicked, I failed. Fuck em.
known 6y ago
Amazon hired https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slaves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slaves without giving them equity https://archive.is/DAn9i https://archive.is/DAn9i
mancerayder 6y ago
Great that hiring is taking place. Not so great that Amazon's success comes because many small businesses were forced to shut by government action, and with minimal or no lifeline for many of them.

286 points by brian_herman 6y ago

Congratulations everyone. Small business is dead. Luckily, we still have Dr. Phil, professional sports and soap operas. Keep up the good work. And don't follow your leaders; stay inside and do as you're told instead.

NDizzle 6y ago

I’d rather have thousands of small businesses continue to exist instead of Amazon hiring 400k people. Apparently that’s an uncommon position these days.

TulliusCicero 6y ago
It's common enough when people are speaking with their words, and less common when speaking with their wallets.
- tylermac1 6y ago
  Individual effort isn't going to break up a company Amazon's size.
  - TulliusCicero 6y ago
    Of course not. To consumers, Amazon provides an excellent service. (This is the point where everyone always kramers in with their personal beefs with Amazon) Like many others, I use Amazon because it's extremely useful, overall it's simply a better experience than shopping at other places. I have nothing against small businesses, but when I shop, I don't treat businesses like charities. If small businesses want my money, they have to actually present a better service. If they can't do that, it doesn't overly bother me that they go away.
    - hshshs2 6y ago
      How would a small business even begin to compete with amazon right now? it’s outright impossible on all fronts... service, price, etc
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - throwaway2245 6y ago
      > To consumers, Amazon provides an excellent service. I'd rather say, like Starbucks, Amazon provides a consistent and adequate service. Small businesses might provide a better service or worse service, but consumers can't easily know which in advance - so large conglomerates present less risk and less cognitive load. Amazon is the obvious choice, more than it is the best choice. Presenting a better service is not enough, for a small business to survive against a monopolist. It's one of the monopoly advantages that Amazon has.
      - kmlx 6y ago
        amazon doesn’t seem to be a monopoly. walmart is bigger than amazon. amazon’s share of retail in the US is around just 5%. maybe i missed something...
        throwaway2245 6y ago
        you missed something, apart from giving intentionally misleading and old figures, and yet within that you're still able to identify Amazon's market share as a percentage of all retail as an industry? ok.
        kmlx 6y ago
        nothing misleading about my comment. it’s not all retail. it’s retail minus auto sales, travel etc etc basically anything that amazon doesn’t sell. they have 5% of that pie. offer a rebuttal if you can instead of attacking the commentator personally next time you leave a reply on this website. i was actually curios as to why you considered it a monopoly when in fact the numbers are against you.
  - dddbbb 6y ago
    I would nominally agree with this logic, but surely the exact same applies when voting? Should people not bother voting because they are just one in a sea of many?
    - tylermac1 6y ago
      In the United States I would say it depends where you live. I'm a Democrat in a forever-red state. My vote for President will never matter as long as the Electoral College is there. I still vote for state-wide and local matters and that is where my vote really does count.
    - Schiendelman 6y ago
      Millions of people don’t vote for exactly that reason.
  - rch 6y ago
    I'd argue that modern megacorporations have become sufficiently adept at morphing around state interventions, that coordinated grassroots movements might be the only means of mitigating their influence.
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  Customers (like competitors) are the victims of monopolies, not the perpetrator. The only perpetrator is the monopolistic company itself, and the only solution is government action.
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    Amazon didn’t get how they are today without the help of consumers. It’s not like they started out as a monopoly
    - throwaway284534 6y ago
      That's absolutely true. It's just also a very narrow lense to look at the situation. I've worked retail and it honestly sucks for everyone involved. The customers can't make informed choices or even get an unbiased direction from sales people. It's a market designed to work with as little information or agency as possible. People have a limited appetite for friction when they shop too. An ideal store with a better return policy and selection seems to look a lot like Amazon. I'm not saying that it's good for us to invest all of our shopping into one business. It's just what unregulated capitalism breeds over time.
    - anonuser123456 6y ago
      Name a single product or service that Amazon has a monopoly on.
      - sp332 6y ago
        https://www.geekwire.com/2020/hearing-documents-reveal-amazons-aggressive-strategy-beat-diapers-com/ https://www.geekwire.com/2020/hearing-documents-reveal-amazo...
        anonuser123456 6y ago
        Walmart.com, Target.com So not a monopoly. Edit: Walgreens.com, Costco.com, Honest.com All 5 of those popped up on Google/DuckDuck before anything from Amazon.
- Technically 6y ago
  The problem is political. Expecting people to spend and then blaming bad things on the same people is not going to have any good effects.
- jeffrallen 6y ago
  My wallet buys beef, goat cheese, and vegetables from my neighbors. I am blessed to live where this is possible.
cm2012 6y ago
50% of Amazon sales come from 3rd party merchants, most of whom are small and medium businesses. I worked for two family businesses with 10+ employees where Amazon selling was a lifesaver. That's not to say Amazon is a saint by any means.
- petra 6y ago
  I wouldn't count on that over the long-term. Currently Amazon has better ways to use their money to grow. When that's over, a lot of the 3rd party sellers will be at risk.
  - dunefox 6y ago
    They're at risk now without Amazon.
  - hobofan 6y ago
    I wouldn't count on that over the mid-term. I've worked with a lot of Amazon merchants where they would put up a item with a decent margin and good sales only to be reliably be cut out from that exact item by Amazon offering it themselves after 1-2 months. The core of their business on Amazon was to continuously hustle and identify new products that would fill that niche, as that made up for the biggest chunk of their profit. So there are many 3rd party merchants at risk _now_ on Amazon. Apart from that there are also numerous brands from Amazon themselves already. Most obviously "Amazon Basics" and "Amazon Essentials", but also many with a non-obvious name[0]. [0]: https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=17602470011 https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=17602470011
    - petra 6y ago
      >> The core of their business on Amazon was to continuously hustle and identify new products that would fill that niche, as that made up for the biggest chunk of their profit. That sounds like a very risky business. How do they manage/lower that risk ?
      - 6y ago
CPLX 6y ago
Exactly. In ecological systems we don't get confused when a single species or type of cell replicates out of control and crowds out everything else. It's instantly, and intuitively, understandable as a pathology. A lesson that seems to suddenly get forgotten when we see it happening in an economic ecosystem.
- comboy 6y ago
  Right? We would have never had humans in the first place without a government intervention when these replications were getting out of control!
- Kaveren 6y ago
  something being popular and eliminating other options is not inherently bad. there is nothing wrong with one company acquiring a monopoly through superior service. you can attack amazon's behavior as anticompetitive, but that's not what you're doing here.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  Sorry, but that's bad ecology. You're overlaying moral human values on an environment. Scientifically, it's simply evolutionary survival of the fittest. It's adaptation. By your argument, every sudden game-changing evolutionary leap was a pathology, which is obviously false. Plus, there is absolutely nothing "out of control" about Amazon either. Amazon's a private enterprise competing in the marketplace like any other. It's just doing a better job at it.
  - CPLX 6y ago
    > You're overlaying moral human values on an environment. Indeed. > By your argument, every sudden game-changing evolutionary leap was a pathology, which is obviously false. The definition of pathology is always context-driven. Worth noting that a massive bacterial infection is a fantastic success from the perspective of the bacteria.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
raister 6y ago
I needed to buy a set of bolts, I checked my local hardware store and 12 was sold by £2.99. I thought: 'this is expensive, let me check online'. Went to amazon, found the same for £1.99 with free shipping (prime). Now, which one should I buy? The one where I have to go somewhere and then pay more, or the other where I click a few buttons and the next day the product is with me? Should I 'invest' in my local hardware?
- rightbyte 6y ago
  Bolts for a car? I would not dare buy bolts on Amazon due to the risk of counterfeits with lower grade than advertized.
- otachack 6y ago
  A margin of a dollar? I believe you should support your local store as long as you can afford it. It's more work, money, and time off your day but it's likely you waste the extra time Amazon convenience gives you with browsing HN, or the like, anyways. Local business also most likely have picked up curbside for convenience. It's in Amazon's best interest to shutter all locals aside from what they own (Whole Foods, Amazon Grocery, etc). Their ultimate goal is automating everything they can to remove the human element and maximize revenue. You can see other businesses like Starbucks taking over as well in different fields. In my opinion it's a matter of time until Amazon starts their own attempt at local cafes. We had presidential candidates in the US like Andrew Yang that recognize this effort and want to get ahead of it with UBI but I'm sure you know how that turned out. If the government isn't going to support local businesses in dire times, who will? And who wants to live in a boring world where there are no local shops?
  - newen 6y ago
    Fighting systemic changes by making individual decisions is quixotic, to put it nicely.
  - hmate9 6y ago
    Sure. If it was only a single dollar. But do it for every purchase and it adds up. In a way if you are relying on the "community" to help your business stay alive, then your business is clearly not creating enough value and shouldn't exist.
bzb6 6y ago
Brick and mortar stores and especially small stores fucking suck. Amazon is not perfect but it sucks less.
MattGaiser 6y ago
The problem is are you willing to deal with 5000 different return policies, 5000 different merchant policies, 5000 different shipping times, etc? Amazon eliminates all that friction. I can one click buy something and know when it will arrive, what the shipping will be, and the rules on returning it.
- shiftpgdn 6y ago
  Yes?
eltados 6y ago
I think that's the main reason I try to limit my shopping on Amazon. Shopping on Amazon means limited circular economy because all the large profit centers are concentrated on few large metropolis ( probably must of then in the US ) and by large shareholders. Lower amount of tax is collected from that purchase that in a local shop because of fiscal optimization. Overall at the scale of the city it seems to me ( I don't have any numbers for that ) that consuming on Amazon is not a great deal long term.
disown 6y ago
Exactly. It's great that so many people are getting jobs, but it just means that many small businesses closed. And as amazon gets bigger, it'll put even more pressure on smaller businesses. With amazon getting into the pharmacy business, I wonder what impact it will have on pharmacy chains which themselves put small independent pharmacy stores out of business.
Reedx 6y ago
This gets tricky. Consider another version of this: Should we have saved the 9,024 Blockbuster stores?
actuator 6y ago
> Apparently that’s an uncommon position these days. Is this recent though? US made Walmart the behemoth it is. Also, chains like Target, Best Buy etc are also not your friendly small neighborhood stores.

flowerlad 6y ago

This is a pandemic-fueled hiring binge. What happens when the pandemic is over and demand for online shopping declines?

TulliusCicero 6y ago
They get laid off or contracts not renewed. Hopefully with the pandemic over, hiring in other sectors will increase.
burlesona 6y ago
Layoffs, if the demand drops enough. Since these are largely low-skill jobs, mass layoffs wouldn’t be particularly surprising. Amazon already has “seasonal” labor that rotates in and out anyway.
oh_sigh 6y ago
The same thing that happens after every holiday season
infofarmer 6y ago
Digitization is largely irreversible. US ecommerce penetration has lots of catching up to do with China, UK, South Korea.
scarface74 6y ago
I don’t see a case where people really think - “You know it’s a lot more convenient to get in my car, drive all over town to pick up items than it is to get delivery.” I hate everything about the physical retail experience.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
ystad 6y ago
I’m not sure how much of the hiring is seasonal, but I think software engineers hired are probably going to be for long term investments

11thEarlOfMar 6y ago

Before the pandemic, my household purchased items online for delivery perhaps 1x per week. Now, it's 2-3x per day. Clothing, LPs, pearl milk tea, ... This is a behavioral change that is playing out worldwide. I'd certainly expect people to head back into retail stores once the virus is spent, but they will also likely continue purchasing a higher portion of overall shopping online, simply because they've been forced to learn that for many, the experience is satisfactory. This is something they may not have previously realized. What I wonder is, where is the labor shift happening? Warehouses need management, delivery needs drivers, live customer service is still valuable for handling corner case complaints & returns. Can cashiers and floor salespersons and store managers take those jobs? Even a town of, say, 25,000 needs drivers to deliver. How much of the brick-n-mortar workforce can be absorbed in this phase of Internet Automates Everything?

walkingolof 6y ago
2-3 times per day? Until transports are carbon neutral, free shipping should be made illegal....
- rat9988 6y ago
  Using cars too I'd guess then?
  - walkingolof 6y ago
    Cars are not free, one of the biggest household budget posts.
    - stjohnswarts 6y ago
      what's a budget post? I don't think I've ever heard that term before.
  - Agreed99 6y ago
    Sure, why not It is nothing more than an entitled demand of a minority of the species that can afford them Why should that be justification enough to destroy the planet for the entire species?

nabla9 6y ago

The U.S. Private Sector Job Quality Index (JQI) https://www.jobqualityindex.com/ https://www.jobqualityindex.com/ The long term trend is down. Data suggests that mid-level jobs are disappearing. They will be replaced with small number of very well paying jobs, but mostly by lower paying jobs.

kilroy123 6y ago
This is what Cal Newport says in his book "Deep Work". I think this is correct. His book scared me to my core. I do not want to be left behind and fall even more behind overtime. Which is how it has been for my parents. This fear is what drove me to really change how I work. I do deep work on tasks for stretches of time and I've been doing a lot of personal automation.
- JacobSuperslav 6y ago
  can you expand on that last sentence?
cwperkins 6y ago
Do other countries track this metric as well? I'd be curious to study worldwide trends in the quality of work and study the efficacy of policy in trying to reverse this trend. I'm of the opinion that the future of work is focused on knowledge and creativity, but my worry is that that will leave out a big swath of people. Is Truck Driving an occupation that people want to do, or would freeing up people to do other things be a greater goal? Truck driving is a hazardous occupation, but it also provides opportunity for people that otherwise may have limited opportunity. There will surely be a transition period, but how can we create a large number of opportunities to ensure people are prepared for an economy with more robotics and automation? Maybe space ship building will employ a vast number of people, maybe indoor farming will provide new opportunities in an urban setting and maybe there will be new opportunities with implementing new forms of energy and transportation. I certainly think if you take a long term view the world it has trended towards solving many problems over the course of centuries, but we do need to factor the human element in or there will be another Luddite movement.

thweor234324 6y ago

Long term (~10 y), Amazon will likely replace all these workers with pick-place robots once the tech gets there.

nomad543 6y ago

No company should be allowed to get to the size and marketshare that Amazon has now. This just proves that capitalism without intervention eventually becomes toxic and destructive. It's even amusing that capitalism was pushed so far in the US that it became worse than China. Americans can only buy from Amazon, Walmart and eat at McDonalds. Comparing to China, where people can eat at hundreds of different local small restaurants, several local groceries and local shops. Essentially, Amazon and Walmart are now some sort of authoritarian government, they are deciding what Americans can buy and who can sell.

pietrovismara 6y ago
Not only, they are an authoritarian government with power over milions of employees. These people are going to spend the best 1/3 (or more) of their lives in an autocratic environment where they have no power over decisions that will influence drastically their lives. That's not living in a democracy at all.
ganstyles 6y ago
I was fully supportive of your first paragraph, but then comparing them to an autocratic government is too much, as is saying there are only three companies (Walmart, Amazon, mcdonald's) is just nonsensical. I get you're frustrated, but these comparisons don't help advance your argument.
- Supermancho 6y ago
  > Americans can only buy from Amazon, Walmart and eat at McDonalds. I think there is a good point in there which is ignored because this is some sort of Chinese propaganda, instead of someone with life-experience in the USA. If you have a cellphone, how many sites do you check prices on past Walmart, Target, Amazon with niche exceptions (like BestBuy)? Effectively there are only a few companies that are controlling prices for US consumer goods. In many cases, the ONLY pricecheck is Amazon. This is a problem that will only get worse.
twblalock 6y ago
> Americans can only buy from Amazon, Walmart and eat at McDonalds. Comparing to China, where people can eat at hundreds of different local small restaurants, several local groceries and local shops. What on earth are you talking about? Americans have many choices for shopping and restaurants.

werber 6y ago

I’m not sure if this widespread but Amazon is the only place I can order from and get the package at my door in a high rise building. And right now every time I think there’s a slight chance of me getting other people sick I order my basics through them (including Whole Foods). This morning it was toilet paper, sparkling water and a replacement for my headphones I can’t hear out of anymore.

swiley 6y ago
That's odd. At the beginning of the pandemic Amazon was definitely the least cooperative with our building's requests to deliver to the door instead of just dumping everything in the lobby.
benhurmarcel 6y ago
On the contrary, Amazon are the only ones that are completely unable to deliver to me if I'm not at home whenever they come.
spoopyskelly 6y ago
> every time I think there’s a slight chance of me getting other people sick I order my basics through them What if you get the delivery guys sick?

ystad 6y ago

I’d be curious to know how has competition scaled. > It far outstrips the 230,000 employees that Walmart, the largest private employer with more than 2.2 million workers, added in a single year two decades ago.

temptemptemp111 6y ago

All truth is censored on HN as usual. Communists crushing small businesses, and sheep obeying and begging for more.

aluminussoma 6y ago

After reading articles and anecdotes about the way Amazon treats its employees - warehouse and office - I tried to stop giving my business to Amazon. It is hard. Amazon offers a much better customer experience. Trying to place an order at Best Buy or Staples or others, I often encounter random website issues or distribution issues (bad packaging, out of stock despite showing available) that I never had with Amazon. So it costs me more time. Amazon is also cheaper where I live but I'm willing to spend a little bit extra on the alternatives. What scares me is that Amazon is getting so big that there will be a future where some products will only be online and only on Amazon. It will be too expensive for local retailers to carry them. Amazon will control distribution and supply. That is not a future I want so I put up with the inconveniences of not support Amazon, even if I am tilting at windmills like Don Quixote.

kpierce 6y ago
Add in that no one can build an ecommerce website without strong web services its almost impossible for another ecommerce company to come in compete with them. Amazon is a monopoly.
ArtDev 6y ago
Before the pandemic, I never thought twice about ordering from Amazon. However, shipping now takes 2-3x as long. It's faster to order from most any other website. After learning about how they treat their workers (including tech workers) I try to avoid ordering from Amazon as well.
gist 6y ago
> It will be too expensive for local retailers to carry them. How is this any different than any other company being put out of business because someone does it better cheaper or faster? Would you have said the same about automobiles putting out of work people who work in and around horses and replacing them en masse? Candle makers when oil came out? Oil lamp makers when electricity csme out? > about the way Amazon treats its employees - warehouse and office You have no data on how others treat their workers vs. Amazon. Amazon is almost certainly way better than a local smaller type company paying less less benefits and so on. They have modern warehouses not the crap that is typically out there. I have worked in my earlier years in one of those. Nobody is forced to work at Amazon it's not the military where you are drafted. And you will always have a small amount of people saying they are driven to hard and outlier situations (bosses and supervisors). Nothing is perfect. Small about of people dissatisfied creates a large amount of noise. > Amazon will control distribution and supply. Ok so this happens and then if they get 'to big for their britches' it opens up for others to nip away at what they do (craigslist as an example maybe?). > That is not a future I want so I put up with the inconveniences of not support Amazon Your choice of course. I don't think of buying from Amazon as me 'supporting' them. I think of it as being able to get what I need for a reasonable price and very convenient. There are things I can order that I can have later in the afternoon and no hassle returns. Very generally I mean sometimes things are wrong but generally as we all know and judging by the business they are getting they did build a better mousetrap. Guess what? I know they will raise pricing and I don't even care. I often pay them more just for the security of the ordering and convenience and certainty. Not everything is price price price.

ryanSrich 6y ago

And all it cost was decimating local economies!

troughway 6y ago

Something that isn't discussed about is how Amazon is able to do this, and that is that they are using their position to pay more for jobs that involve manual labor work (lots of positions in that 427,000 figure) but also to pay rates that the local businesses that also utilize manual labor cannot compete with. So what ends up happening is that Amazon is placing a dent in the over all labor market of all the industries in the surrounding area, not just their direct competitors. That is a lot of manual labor being impacted. If you have worked in fields with manual labor (factories, construction, fabrication, assembly line of any sort), there is very little employee retention because those employees are just concerned about the next pay stub. Nothing else. This might come across as elitist, and it is, but that is the prevailing mentality of these sort of employees and there is very little to be done about it.

oblio 6y ago
Why should they care about more? These jobs don't pay well and are frequently not very fulfilling. Plus you frequently have crap co-workers and bosses.
1123581321 6y ago
If I understand correctly, you're saying Amazon is driving up the cost of labor. That seems like a good thing, assuming that they are hiring for work that actually needs done.
- troughway 6y ago
  I assure you, in almost every situation, driving up the cost of anything has huge ramifications. You might think "oh that's a good thing, they get paid more". Except they don't. Read on.... When the minimum wage was raised, that very same morning, all the prices of all the goods went up by that exact same amount to compensate for it. In essence, all that was was inflation. Your _actual_ "purchasing power" remained exactly the same as the day before. What Amazon is doing here, which I find to be a pretty blatant case of a "bad thing" rather than a "good thing", is they are artificially increasing manual labor salaries by shoveling in money from all their other divisions, such as AWS. The only thing you will see from this, as I had just mentioned, is a price hike to account for inflation, however in the meantime there will be a number of industries struggling to find workers at affordable salaries because companies like Amazon can just keep playing a different sort of game. To give you an analogy, it's like VCs shoveling money in to startups to prop them up and keep them on top of their advertising channels and pay for employees, even though the company itself could not possibly survive without that kind of capital. The wages here do not make sense for the labor market, but Amazon has so much money stocked up from all their other channels, and of course, the various shady government kickbacks that you are unaware of, that they just don't give a fuck.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

When I joined Amazon (Web Services) in 2008, there were approximately 20,000 employees in the whole company. AWS was maybe a couple of hundred people at most. Year 2020: Amazon adds double that number, EACH month. Mind blowing.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

colordrops 6y ago

More evidence of a transfer of wealth from small businesses to large and lower to upper classes.

intricatedetail 6y ago

Why big companies are allowed to do tax tricks getting even bigger competitive advantage over small business? Why police or other forces don't screen politicians lobbied by these companies to keep investigations at bay?

jariel 6y ago

In case you were wondering, you really don't need amazon. I got off it years ago and don't miss it at all. Honestly when I see people ordering even once a week I wonder if that is egregious. Put it on your grocery/pickup list, and/or, maybe you 'don't need it'.

jeffrallen 6y ago
One can of spray chalkboard + one box of chalk + one square meter of your kitchen wall = weekly shopping list, with happy kid scribbles around it to boot!

peter303 6y ago

Sounds like they are responsible for about a tenth of the recovery since the March recession.

abraae 6y ago

I hope that every one of them is the kind of employee that Gives A Shit https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25229291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25229291

nicetryguy 6y ago
Yeah i really give a shit about Bezos' 15th yacht
mhh__ 6y ago
Is giving a shit webscale?
yellow_lead 6y ago
And hopefully they do so on company time.

wnevets 6y ago

Can someone explain why they need subsidies?

sacks2k 6y ago

Amazon is like a plantation owner for small and medium sized businesses. When you sell anything on Amazon, you have no way to build a brand as Amazon not only takes ownership of your customer, but they also forbid you from directly advertising to them. It can all be taken away in an instant and by withholding your money for 90 days+ (which is what happens when they take your account away), it can bankrupt a small business because they don't have the funds to pay staff or run their company. I had an Amazon seller account and they banned me 12 years ago over one disgruntled customer that I believe was just a competitor (I had 100% feedback from hundreds of customers before this) trying to shut me down. I've been banned for life. I not only can't sign up with a new seller account, but if my name is associated with any other seller account, it gets banned for life as well. I've tried to contact support over the years and it just goes into a black hole and I get automated responses with no help or no response at all. This needs to be part of a broader conversation: Do we really want to give big companies like Amazon this much control over what we can do online?

andreilys 6y ago
Sounds awful, my recommendation is to find a connection who can put you in touch with someone at Amazon. My experience with these huge companies is you can either get stuck in Algo Hell where you either get automated responses or are redirected to people who can't help you. Or try to get your story to the top of HN, that seems to work with Google
- AndrewUnmuted 6y ago
  > find a connection who can put you in touch with someone at Amazon. I was at Audible for many years, and at least within that section of Amazon this would have been very sound advice. If any complex legal procedures, economic regulations, or necessary international standards must be followed to sell your product, there is a strong chance that Amazon's policies are being handled by a single GM/PM type who can directly handle the internal tooling necessary to remedy the ongoing issue.
didibus 6y ago
Can't you open a normal online store that doesn't rely on Amazon? You could try shopify, or etsy, or sell on eBay? Or make your own? Otherwise I feel it's a chicken and egg. It's like saying we need Amazon or a similar big known marketplace so that customers can find you and buy from you, but at the same time, we don't like the concentration of power it brings. So if nobody tries to open an online store on their own anymore, what then?

optimalsolver 6y ago

We have a variation of this article literally every year now. I'm not sure what my reaction is supposed to be. Surprise? Disapproval? This is exactly what I'd except a colossal global retailer to be doing in the run up to Christmas. And I say this as someone who once spent a couple of unpleasant months toiling in an Amazon warehouse.

LatteLazy 6y ago

I've been an Amazon fan for a while. When the first lockdown started here in the UK, it was anarchy in the retail world. I needed a few bits after the first month: household MCBs (fuses) after some power issues and a new mechanism for our toilet. All 4 of the national DIY retailers were unable to handle online orders. Some simply removed the Pay button. No note explaining they were closed, you could browser and make a basket, register, put in card details. You just couldn't find the Buy button. They continued to sell "essentials" like wallpaper and flowering plants once they opened. But they wouldn't sell other items like the ones I needed. If it wasn't for amazon, I'd have literally been sitting in the dark, filling the cistern with a bucket. That's amazon's killer app: basic competence and taking some vague interest in customers needs rather than profit margin and half arsing everything and being allergic to basic tech and customer experience.

dylkil 6y ago
the other suppliers will catch up eventually
- suren130 6y ago
  maybe. but his not talking about eventually. Amazon delivered when the world needed them the most.
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  It's been 20 years since I started using the Internet. How much longer before major national brands start using it?

throwitaway1235 6y ago

I have a question on ethics. If Amazon has profited greatly from Covid-19 related lockdowns and restrictions, would it be inappropriate for WaPo, which he owns, to create content that persuades the public to support continued lockdown measures?

stillbourne 6y ago

I got interviewed in the latest round, I'm generally one of those people that tends to no pay attention to l33tc0d3 shit for interviews because I think my skills speak for themselves. Additionally no matter how well I do when coding at home or at work I have never passed a code interview. I knew it was going to be a problem with my interview for amazon, the truth is I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder, I was fully expecting to fail. I did so spectacularly. I don't understand why its necessary to do these stupid test, I have some serious accomplishments under my belt and I know I'm a real solid developer but these coding tests are fucking stupid, menial, and don't accurately depict my abilities. For example the position I was looking for was with the Identity product. I thought I would be a shew in. I have written OIDC and SAML providers from scratch by only observing how existing ones work via http calls. I thought that's got to be a unique skillset, I bet they'll give a test that fits in my wheel house. But the fucking question was about 3d geometry. What the fuck do I know about 3d geometry? I imploded, I couldn't think, I panicked, I failed. Fuck em.

known 6y ago

Amazon hired https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slaves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slaves without giving them equity https://archive.is/DAn9i https://archive.is/DAn9i

mancerayder 6y ago

Great that hiring is taking place. Not so great that Amazon's success comes because many small businesses were forced to shut by government action, and with minimal or no lifeline for many of them.