Most likely it's a result of an overly broad classification system. At a small company, people are going to wear many hats. "Warehouse workers" could include pe

Most likely it's a result of an overly broad classification system. At a small company, people are going to wear many hats. "Warehouse workers" could include people who do many related tasks like logistics, inventory tracking, team management, etc which all require some degree of skill and warrant higher pay. Amazon is large enough to mostly spin out these roles as separate jobs, and they make up a smaller fraction of their labor force. Amazon can thus hire lots of unskilled people to do a legitimately unskilled job, whereas smaller warehouse operations can not (or at least can't as frequently). Combine that with name recognition and a massive amount of recruitment infrastructure and it's hardly surprising Amazon can bring a lot of people out of the woodwork who would not have been traditionally hired at smaller warehouses. Really it is disingenuous to say that Amazon lowers warehouse salaries, which would be like saying McDonalds lowers restaurant salaries - it's changing the population to which the term applies, not changing the condition of the original population.