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Speaking as an American, I’m proud that Amazon is one of the greatest success stories of the last 25 years, and it’s one of the many tech companies that have em

Speaking as an American, I’m proud that Amazon is one of the greatest success stories of the last 25 years, and it’s one of the many tech companies that have emerged only in America. Europe hasn’t produced a single large tech company despite similar population size and an even better educated work force. Maybe foreign countries should learn why America continues to create superstar firms in every industry.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
robert_foss 6y ago
I think innovation based on providing minimum wage jobs is not much of innovation, it is a story as old as humanity. The case is even worse for the low salaried work force of the gig economy where a job no longer even qualifies you for 'job' benefits. If you think other regions aren't producing value in the tech ecosystem, nationalism is getting in the way of your eye.
- credit_guy 6y ago
  > minimum wage jobs Amazon wages are $15/h or more, more than double the Federal minimum wage of $7.25/h.
  - robert_foss 6y ago
    Would you be able to make a living on 15eur/m? If you live in America I would sincerely like to know the answer.
    - curryst 6y ago
      Perspectives vary. That's what I made on my first job out of college in one of the bigger cities in the Midwest (not Chicago). It was fine for that. I didn't have extravagant tastes, but I didn't penny pinch. I had enough room in my budget that I could have saved probably a few hundred dollars a month. It's worth calling out that my car was paid off (and a Prius so gas/insurance was cheap), and my rent was really low ($300 a month because of arrangement with the landlord). Work also covered almost all of my insurance, which I think is unusual for jobs in those range. If those things weren't true, I probably would have saved little or nothing unless I started cutting back and focusing on buying cheap food to eat instead of just being happy with cooking instead of eating out. Home ownership is possible if you save for years, or if you can get a grant to help with the downpayment (had a friend who did that). It's not pleassant, but it's doable imo. I don't think you could have a family on a single $15/hr income. Even at 2 $15/hr incomes I would think it was hard, but I don't have children so maybe they're cheaper than I think. Although no one has ever said their children were cheaper than they thought.
    - credit_guy 6y ago
      $15/h is a bit more than $30k per year. Taxes are quite low for this income bracket, so you get to keep most of it. As a graduate student I got to live on about half that much for 5 years. The rent on campus was low and the health insurance was cheap, but neither was free. Living in campus meant I didn't need a car, but in my last year I did buy one, a 13 year old SUV for $1350. Accounting for inflation, that would still be less than $2000 in today's money. Out of curiosity, I just checked on edmunds.com, and you can still get a 13 year old SUV of similar condition for a bit less than $2000 today. So, I think it's possible to make a living on $15/h. Is it ideal? No.
nicoffeine 6y ago
Spot on. Who needs five weeks of vacation and years of maternity/paternity leave, or an affordable university and health care system? The important thing is to create technology companies with incredible ideas like "shipping items really fast" or "youtube but we call it Prime Video." And most importantly, to make it profitable by squeezing employees to the fullest extent of the law. You would think all these highly educated Europeans would understand that it's better to dissolve their unions so they can work two jobs to support the kids they never get to spend time with. They don't seem to understand that the true meaning of life is to be be exploited by large corporations. So sad.
salawat 6y ago
Innovation in wage theft or shirking of regulations/tax evasion is not innovation. Amazon built itself on ignoring expenses and processes everyone else has had to deal with for ages. Props to em for having a logistics network, but if the abuse of their workforce is what keeps them competituve, I'd frankly prefer their collapse, as I'm not sure the distribution model we've settled on now is any better than what it replaced given the way it's adversely effected local brick and mortars. I'd rather everybody have a shot at being a distributor than only a single monolithic company outcompeting by ignoring half the pre-reqs of business.
- seibelj 6y ago
  Their minimum wage is over $15 an hour and people work for them voluntarily. Where is the abuse?
  - salawat 6y ago
    In obstructing the exercise of the right for labor to organize, and hiring union busters, even if plausibly deniable, or circumspectly justified through fiduciary duty to shareholders, course. It's not a legitimate strategy. Labor has the right to organize. End of story. If they've gotten to the point of Union building, obviously, a non-trivial number feel they are being taken advantage of, and believe energy investment in collective bargaining is the way to go. That is their choice, and as much a free market exercise as anything else. Businesses don't have a right to deal only with workforces who do not organize. They might be able to orchestrate things to prevent that momentum from building; but if you know it's happening, beyond stating your case, as an employer, it is your duty to remain hands off and let them sort it out amongst themselves. The American Laborer has been shortchanged long enough. The growth-at-all-costs economy is a crime against the nation as a whole. I figured that would be plain as day?
    - seibelj 6y ago
      I don't agree that any employee has a right to extort the owner - work stoppage, barring the company from hiring other labor, being impossible to fire. I philosophically disagree.
AlexandrB 6y ago
Keep your superstar firms, I'd prefer to keep my quality of life: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-us-drops-to-no-28-on-this-global-well-being-index-2020-09-10 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-us-drops-to-no-28-on-t...
ramphastidae 6y ago
Take off your rose tinted glasses and join reality. This happened in America and not Europe because America allows these “superstar firms” to exploit the working class in order to achieve their success. If America had proper workers rights and labor laws, suddenly these “superstars” would disappear.
- dfxm12 6y ago
  If America had proper workers rights and labor laws, suddenly these “superstars” would disappear. I wonder if this is actually true, looking at how much a company like Amazon rakes in. They have cash to spend. They could probably spend it towards living wages & safety measures for their workers & still have a hefty sum left over.
  - dagw 6y ago
    If the US introduced "proper workers rights and labor laws" today Amazon would probably be fine. In fact they might even be better off long term since it would greatly increase barriers to entry for any future competition. The interesting (and unanswerable) question is what Amazon would look like today is those hypothetical "proper workers rights and labor laws" had been in place 20 years ago.
- jandrewrogers 6y ago
  Amazon pays its warehouse workers very well by European standards, so clearly that isn't the whole story. Where are the people demanding that European warehouse workers be paid the same wage as Amazon warehouse workers? Do you think a European warehouse worker would feel "exploited" by the much higher wages Amazon pays?
- seibelj 6y ago
  > If America had proper workers rights and labor laws, suddenly these “superstars” would disappear. Whatever the rights and laws you consider are "proper", if that resulted in the death of all large corporations, I would argue such rights and laws are "improper". I like corporations. When the pandemic occurred, basically the only thing that still worked like normal was my internet, Netflix, and Amazon. The Postal service was a piece of shit. So there's one data point!
akudha 6y ago
Why are people "proud" of something that they had no involvement in, has no connection to etc etc? Like, were you involved with Amazon at all, other than perhaps being a shopper and maybe owning some stock? Also, you are proud of a company that squeezes the living daylight of its workers? That treats its suppliers like crap? That is doing every trick in the book to discourage unions?
- seibelj 6y ago
  I'm proud that my country has a system that enables entrepreneurs to build new enterprises that rise to such heights without being torn down by outside forces. All of the reasons that enabled Amazon to be formed, protected, and grown to its current situation is a reason to be happy for the American economic and political system.
sandworm101 6y ago
>> I’m proud that Amazon is one of the greatest success stories of the last 25 years That is a very modern american trend. In the past, citizens were proud of inventions. Germans were proud of BMW cars. Americans were proud of American rockets. The Japanese were proud of their electronics. Now Americans are proud of having the best mall, the most profitable distribution platforms. Ok. Cultural values changes. Maybe I'm old but I would rather be proud of technological innovation than marketplace innovation.
- beaconstudios 6y ago
  but Amazon is a technological innovation. You don't think they have advanced logistics working behind the scenes? Their warehouses are full of robots! They made serverless computing a reality. Their topic of technological innovation just happens to be a shopping website.
  - sandworm101 6y ago
    It is a website where you buy things that are then delivered to your house. They may use all sorts of fancy tech in the back room to enable that function, but it is just a website for buying stuff. Being the best at something is very different than creating something actually new.
    - beaconstudios 6y ago
      I wasn't aware that you previously had access to same-day delivery of basically any consumer product imaginable. I agree that it isn't "sexy", in the same way that SpaceX or Google are "sexy", but that doesn't make it "not a technology company". There's plenty of sexy tech companies out there doing fuck-all for anybody but collecting nice VC paychecks. If you're making the same argument as Peter Thiel, that there's a lot more 1-N (incremental) innovation now than there is 0-1 (brand-new) innovation, I agree and I think that sucks. I think that's why many people (including myself) cheerlead for Elon - he's actually leading companies doing cool sci-fi-style innovation.
kar5pt 6y ago
And why do we need "superstar firms" if they require inhumane working conditions?
- akudha 6y ago
  I don't know why your comment is downvoted, seems like a sensible question to me!
wwww4all 6y ago
Speaking as a senior software engineer, where I develop software to bring food to my table, Amazon is a monopoly and should be broken up under anti trust rules. Amazon as a business is about rent seeking and taxing internet commerce and engages in predatory monopoly behavior. They are actively suppressing tech competition and free market activity in e-commerce space. The Amazon workers union should expand to cover he entire country. Anyone that thinks this is about free market and Amazon is just a private company doesn’t have a clue. Amazon is quasi government actor now, where they are the only game in some small company towns. Jeff Bezos owns Washington Post and exerts undue influence on many politicians. Amazon has contracts with CIA and military. As a software engineer, do you want a future where Amazon is the only employer and can undercut the salary to their liking?
Barrin92 6y ago
>Maybe foreign countries should learn why America continues to create superstar firms in every industry. I must have missed those American high speed rail or 5G companies, and if I take a look at global construction firms I see a lot of Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Chinese and South Korean names, but barely an American one. The US has really been great at putting apps on our phones, but the country kind of forgot how to built things in the actual world. Which by the way at this point manifests in a very physical way in the infrastructure of large American cities. The US might be the first country where affluent upper middle-class people get their groceries delivered by drone within the same day, but it seems to be forgetting how to built roads and subways for everyone else.
- seibelj 6y ago
  To take one of your points, America doesn't need high speed rail. There are barely any high speed rail on earth that are break-even let alone profitable[0]. They are a huge suck of government funds, avenue for corruption, and ultimately are boondoggles that are not as efficient or needed as planes and busses. Especially in a country like the USA that is so spread out, very few places make sense for rail lines. [0] https://reason.org/wp-content/uploads/files/high_speed_rail_lessons.pdf https://reason.org/wp-content/uploads/files/high_speed_rail_...
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    >There are barely any high speed rail on earth that are break-even let alone profitable Neither are nuclear power plants, is that an argument against them? I guess in the US nowadays it is which is why its nuclear infrastructure is decaying as well. Many of the arguments in the paper seem terrible and seem to be in reverse fashion. It says that gas is cheap so rail is unattractive. Absolutely right, but that's terrible, so make gas more expansive with a carbon tax while you're at it. It says American cities are designed around the car. That's terrible as well, redesign them. Any serious argument about high speed rail looks decades into the future anyway, so you might as well fix cities while you're at it. Planes aren't a substitute for the kind of benefits that rail gives you. With rail you can get from one metropolitan area, centre-to-centre to another one over medium distances in two hours. That's terrible with a plane or a car. Also, the US overall is spread out but many of its population centers are not. The North-East seems like a great corridor for rail, covering 50 million people give or take?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

robert_foss 6y ago

I think innovation based on providing minimum wage jobs is not much of innovation, it is a story as old as humanity. The case is even worse for the low salaried work force of the gig economy where a job no longer even qualifies you for 'job' benefits. If you think other regions aren't producing value in the tech ecosystem, nationalism is getting in the way of your eye.

credit_guy 6y ago
> minimum wage jobs Amazon wages are $15/h or more, more than double the Federal minimum wage of $7.25/h.
- robert_foss 6y ago
  Would you be able to make a living on 15eur/m? If you live in America I would sincerely like to know the answer.
  - curryst 6y ago
    Perspectives vary. That's what I made on my first job out of college in one of the bigger cities in the Midwest (not Chicago). It was fine for that. I didn't have extravagant tastes, but I didn't penny pinch. I had enough room in my budget that I could have saved probably a few hundred dollars a month. It's worth calling out that my car was paid off (and a Prius so gas/insurance was cheap), and my rent was really low ($300 a month because of arrangement with the landlord). Work also covered almost all of my insurance, which I think is unusual for jobs in those range. If those things weren't true, I probably would have saved little or nothing unless I started cutting back and focusing on buying cheap food to eat instead of just being happy with cooking instead of eating out. Home ownership is possible if you save for years, or if you can get a grant to help with the downpayment (had a friend who did that). It's not pleassant, but it's doable imo. I don't think you could have a family on a single $15/hr income. Even at 2 $15/hr incomes I would think it was hard, but I don't have children so maybe they're cheaper than I think. Although no one has ever said their children were cheaper than they thought.
  - credit_guy 6y ago
    $15/h is a bit more than $30k per year. Taxes are quite low for this income bracket, so you get to keep most of it. As a graduate student I got to live on about half that much for 5 years. The rent on campus was low and the health insurance was cheap, but neither was free. Living in campus meant I didn't need a car, but in my last year I did buy one, a 13 year old SUV for $1350. Accounting for inflation, that would still be less than $2000 in today's money. Out of curiosity, I just checked on edmunds.com, and you can still get a 13 year old SUV of similar condition for a bit less than $2000 today. So, I think it's possible to make a living on $15/h. Is it ideal? No.

nicoffeine 6y ago

Spot on. Who needs five weeks of vacation and years of maternity/paternity leave, or an affordable university and health care system? The important thing is to create technology companies with incredible ideas like "shipping items really fast" or "youtube but we call it Prime Video." And most importantly, to make it profitable by squeezing employees to the fullest extent of the law. You would think all these highly educated Europeans would understand that it's better to dissolve their unions so they can work two jobs to support the kids they never get to spend time with. They don't seem to understand that the true meaning of life is to be be exploited by large corporations. So sad.

salawat 6y ago

Innovation in wage theft or shirking of regulations/tax evasion is not innovation. Amazon built itself on ignoring expenses and processes everyone else has had to deal with for ages. Props to em for having a logistics network, but if the abuse of their workforce is what keeps them competituve, I'd frankly prefer their collapse, as I'm not sure the distribution model we've settled on now is any better than what it replaced given the way it's adversely effected local brick and mortars. I'd rather everybody have a shot at being a distributor than only a single monolithic company outcompeting by ignoring half the pre-reqs of business.

seibelj 6y ago
Their minimum wage is over $15 an hour and people work for them voluntarily. Where is the abuse?
- salawat 6y ago
  In obstructing the exercise of the right for labor to organize, and hiring union busters, even if plausibly deniable, or circumspectly justified through fiduciary duty to shareholders, course. It's not a legitimate strategy. Labor has the right to organize. End of story. If they've gotten to the point of Union building, obviously, a non-trivial number feel they are being taken advantage of, and believe energy investment in collective bargaining is the way to go. That is their choice, and as much a free market exercise as anything else. Businesses don't have a right to deal only with workforces who do not organize. They might be able to orchestrate things to prevent that momentum from building; but if you know it's happening, beyond stating your case, as an employer, it is your duty to remain hands off and let them sort it out amongst themselves. The American Laborer has been shortchanged long enough. The growth-at-all-costs economy is a crime against the nation as a whole. I figured that would be plain as day?
  - seibelj 6y ago
    I don't agree that any employee has a right to extort the owner - work stoppage, barring the company from hiring other labor, being impossible to fire. I philosophically disagree.

AlexandrB 6y ago

Keep your superstar firms, I'd prefer to keep my quality of life: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-us-drops-to-no-28-on-this-global-well-being-index-2020-09-10 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-us-drops-to-no-28-on-t...

ramphastidae 6y ago

Take off your rose tinted glasses and join reality. This happened in America and not Europe because America allows these “superstar firms” to exploit the working class in order to achieve their success. If America had proper workers rights and labor laws, suddenly these “superstars” would disappear.

dfxm12 6y ago
If America had proper workers rights and labor laws, suddenly these “superstars” would disappear. I wonder if this is actually true, looking at how much a company like Amazon rakes in. They have cash to spend. They could probably spend it towards living wages & safety measures for their workers & still have a hefty sum left over.
- dagw 6y ago
  If the US introduced "proper workers rights and labor laws" today Amazon would probably be fine. In fact they might even be better off long term since it would greatly increase barriers to entry for any future competition. The interesting (and unanswerable) question is what Amazon would look like today is those hypothetical "proper workers rights and labor laws" had been in place 20 years ago.
jandrewrogers 6y ago
Amazon pays its warehouse workers very well by European standards, so clearly that isn't the whole story. Where are the people demanding that European warehouse workers be paid the same wage as Amazon warehouse workers? Do you think a European warehouse worker would feel "exploited" by the much higher wages Amazon pays?
seibelj 6y ago
> If America had proper workers rights and labor laws, suddenly these “superstars” would disappear. Whatever the rights and laws you consider are "proper", if that resulted in the death of all large corporations, I would argue such rights and laws are "improper". I like corporations. When the pandemic occurred, basically the only thing that still worked like normal was my internet, Netflix, and Amazon. The Postal service was a piece of shit. So there's one data point!

akudha 6y ago

Why are people "proud" of something that they had no involvement in, has no connection to etc etc? Like, were you involved with Amazon at all, other than perhaps being a shopper and maybe owning some stock? Also, you are proud of a company that squeezes the living daylight of its workers? That treats its suppliers like crap? That is doing every trick in the book to discourage unions?

seibelj 6y ago
I'm proud that my country has a system that enables entrepreneurs to build new enterprises that rise to such heights without being torn down by outside forces. All of the reasons that enabled Amazon to be formed, protected, and grown to its current situation is a reason to be happy for the American economic and political system.

sandworm101 6y ago

>> I’m proud that Amazon is one of the greatest success stories of the last 25 years That is a very modern american trend. In the past, citizens were proud of inventions. Germans were proud of BMW cars. Americans were proud of American rockets. The Japanese were proud of their electronics. Now Americans are proud of having the best mall, the most profitable distribution platforms. Ok. Cultural values changes. Maybe I'm old but I would rather be proud of technological innovation than marketplace innovation.

beaconstudios 6y ago
but Amazon is a technological innovation. You don't think they have advanced logistics working behind the scenes? Their warehouses are full of robots! They made serverless computing a reality. Their topic of technological innovation just happens to be a shopping website.
- sandworm101 6y ago
  It is a website where you buy things that are then delivered to your house. They may use all sorts of fancy tech in the back room to enable that function, but it is just a website for buying stuff. Being the best at something is very different than creating something actually new.
  - beaconstudios 6y ago
    I wasn't aware that you previously had access to same-day delivery of basically any consumer product imaginable. I agree that it isn't "sexy", in the same way that SpaceX or Google are "sexy", but that doesn't make it "not a technology company". There's plenty of sexy tech companies out there doing fuck-all for anybody but collecting nice VC paychecks. If you're making the same argument as Peter Thiel, that there's a lot more 1-N (incremental) innovation now than there is 0-1 (brand-new) innovation, I agree and I think that sucks. I think that's why many people (including myself) cheerlead for Elon - he's actually leading companies doing cool sci-fi-style innovation.

kar5pt 6y ago

And why do we need "superstar firms" if they require inhumane working conditions?

akudha 6y ago
I don't know why your comment is downvoted, seems like a sensible question to me!

wwww4all 6y ago

Speaking as a senior software engineer, where I develop software to bring food to my table, Amazon is a monopoly and should be broken up under anti trust rules. Amazon as a business is about rent seeking and taxing internet commerce and engages in predatory monopoly behavior. They are actively suppressing tech competition and free market activity in e-commerce space. The Amazon workers union should expand to cover he entire country. Anyone that thinks this is about free market and Amazon is just a private company doesn’t have a clue. Amazon is quasi government actor now, where they are the only game in some small company towns. Jeff Bezos owns Washington Post and exerts undue influence on many politicians. Amazon has contracts with CIA and military. As a software engineer, do you want a future where Amazon is the only employer and can undercut the salary to their liking?

Barrin92 6y ago

>Maybe foreign countries should learn why America continues to create superstar firms in every industry. I must have missed those American high speed rail or 5G companies, and if I take a look at global construction firms I see a lot of Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Chinese and South Korean names, but barely an American one. The US has really been great at putting apps on our phones, but the country kind of forgot how to built things in the actual world. Which by the way at this point manifests in a very physical way in the infrastructure of large American cities. The US might be the first country where affluent upper middle-class people get their groceries delivered by drone within the same day, but it seems to be forgetting how to built roads and subways for everyone else.

seibelj 6y ago
To take one of your points, America doesn't need high speed rail. There are barely any high speed rail on earth that are break-even let alone profitable[0]. They are a huge suck of government funds, avenue for corruption, and ultimately are boondoggles that are not as efficient or needed as planes and busses. Especially in a country like the USA that is so spread out, very few places make sense for rail lines. [0] https://reason.org/wp-content/uploads/files/high_speed_rail_lessons.pdf https://reason.org/wp-content/uploads/files/high_speed_rail_...
- Barrin92 6y ago
  >There are barely any high speed rail on earth that are break-even let alone profitable Neither are nuclear power plants, is that an argument against them? I guess in the US nowadays it is which is why its nuclear infrastructure is decaying as well. Many of the arguments in the paper seem terrible and seem to be in reverse fashion. It says that gas is cheap so rail is unattractive. Absolutely right, but that's terrible, so make gas more expansive with a carbon tax while you're at it. It says American cities are designed around the car. That's terrible as well, redesign them. Any serious argument about high speed rail looks decades into the future anyway, so you might as well fix cities while you're at it. Planes aren't a substitute for the kind of benefits that rail gives you. With rail you can get from one metropolitan area, centre-to-centre to another one over medium distances in two hours. That's terrible with a plane or a car. Also, the US overall is spread out but many of its population centers are not. The North-East seems like a great corridor for rail, covering 50 million people give or take?