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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". E

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.

1123581321 6y ago
Suffice to say I disagree. Higher wages only inflate consumer prices when they are across the board without a corresponding productivity (wealth) increase. Higher wages from one company force the others to compete, and attracts workers from other fields or unemployment, so has two contrasting effects, as what was formerly a general labor pool splits into a more highly trained group, that retains or increases its pay, and a lower paid group due to the influx of applicants. Amazon retail, considered as a whole, is not a loss leader. The nature of its business adds a peculiar wrinkle to this because its growth pushes consumer prices down further than other wage-raising businesses would, even if they were in fact paying excess wages for no reason indefinitely.

1123581321 6y ago

Suffice to say I disagree. Higher wages only inflate consumer prices when they are across the board without a corresponding productivity (wealth) increase. Higher wages from one company force the others to compete, and attracts workers from other fields or unemployment, so has two contrasting effects, as what was formerly a general labor pool splits into a more highly trained group, that retains or increases its pay, and a lower paid group due to the influx of applicants. Amazon retail, considered as a whole, is not a loss leader. The nature of its business adds a peculiar wrinkle to this because its growth pushes consumer prices down further than other wage-raising businesses would, even if they were in fact paying excess wages for no reason indefinitely.