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> So aside from “just stop buying from Amazon” what can we do ? The "just stop buying amazon" arguments never made sense to me in the first place, because most

> So aside from “just stop buying from Amazon” what can we do ? The "just stop buying amazon" arguments never made sense to me in the first place, because most people who use it are the ones budget-stretched in the first place. A lot of rural communities have no other viable options for some items as well. It will take massive government action and that's it. There's no other way we can fix this problem. Wages are suppressed because it's _legal enough_ to suppress them. Labor fines basically become a cost of doing business. After the union busting that went on during the Alabama Amazon unionization votes, after all of these labor complaints against Amazon coming under media attention and not a single thing being done about it, it's clear that there is truly nothing that will stop it except a general strike.

dstick 5y ago
And it’s a negative cycle. Those already budget stretched people are getting paid poorly by Amazon, so they too will shop at Amazon. We’re not there yet but the cycle is reminiscent of the factory owners with factory stores and pubs where the workers spend all their money during the industrial revolution. Unions and worker laws stem from that era. So who knows - maybe we’re on the cusp of another revolution that’s similar, but in our current digital revolution!
- shakezula 5y ago
  There was an article on the front page about how Amazon does this in some places already. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- marcusverus 5y ago
  > We’re not there yet but the cycle is reminiscent of the factory owners with factory stores and pubs where the workers spend all their money during the industrial revolution. Is it? Amazon employees (presumably) have the same options as everyone else. Many of those options are, generally speaking, cheaper than Amazon. Whatever your feelings about Amazon in general, fact that Amazon’s supposedly cash-strapped employees choose to pay a premium for convenience is not evidence of Amazon’s malevolence.
- XorNot 5y ago
  See also: Walmart and its standard practice onboarding employees by signing them up to food stamps.
  - gruez 5y ago
    Why is helping employees get government aid bad? Isn't that what government aid is supposed to be for?
    - snypher 5y ago
      It is to stop the employees from wondering why their wage does not cover their living expenses.
    - michaelmrose 5y ago
      Because if you tax Bob who makes 24 bucks an hour to feed Sam who is making 12 then Sam is in effect working for below market wages because in a functional market Sam would never work for less money than he required to eat. This arrangement is a transfer of wealth between the middle class and Walmart regardless of whether they opt to shop at Walmart.
      - sokoloff 5y ago
        In a world where Bob makes $24/hr and Sam doesn’t work (because he won’t take the $12/hr job), Bob’s probably not going to pay less taxes or be better off.
        XorNot 5y ago
        In a world where Walmart didn't post a gross profit of 24.3% for 2020[1], you might have a point. But in a world where Walmart posted that much profit on it's $559 billion 2020 revenues[2], somehow Walmart is being allowed to tax me, not a Walmart shopper, via my taxes, and transfer it to Walmart's owners and shareholders, by forcing me to pay for part of their employees wages. Which they clearly have the money to actually pay for. Unless Walmart is a break-even business, there is no excuse, period, for them to not be paying a living wage and getting sponsored by the government for it. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/269414/gross-profit-margin-of-walmart-worldwide-since-2006/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/269414/gross-profit-marg... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/shelleykohan/2021/02/18/walmart-revenue-hits-559-billion-for-fiscal-year-2020/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/shelleykohan/2021/02/18/walmart...
- kortilla 5y ago
  It’s not reminiscent of it at all. The factory stores had shitty prices and were the only option. Amazon employees can choose to spend their money anywhere. The company towns are gone.
  - dstick 5y ago
    Which is precisely my point. Amazon is forcing competitors out of business. And once they have a monopoly, history teaches us they will have no incentives left to keep their prices down, and introduce the very shitty prices you speak off. Hence: we’re not there _yet_
    - kortilla 5y ago
      > Which is precisely my point. No it’s not. Your point was completely the opposite (factory towns had shitty prices due to exclusivity). > Amazon is forcing competitors out of business. And once they have a monopoly They are forcing little shitty stores that have nothing to add over ordering online out of business. They aren’t anywhere near a monopoly in any segment of the world. They aren’t even on a path to it. It’s so trivial for people to sell things online that they will never be anything close to one unless they get online sales banned for the rest of the Internet.
- hinkley 5y ago
  My relatives come from a town of <10k people who got a Walmart around the time everyone was figuring out Walmart's tactics. They tore up the side of the road from the highway to grandma's house to install bigger storm drains, and as we know now the town usually never recoups those costs. My aunt went to be a manager at the Walmart while everything else in town slowly went out of business. They carried sewing supplies until Franklin's went under and then they got rid of that section. It's the same story with louder music.
pwillia7 5y ago
There's 152 other families to work as scabs for each striking worker. I worry all of this won't be resolved until the next State level paradigm shift, like when the world mostly did away with kings and queens for liberalism.
- shakezula 5y ago
  The vast majority of those other workers won’t be flexible enough to be able to just drop and work for Amazon. This is a problem inherent to neoliberalism, you’re right, I’m just not sure I’d agree that it requires a nation state level shift in politics to make Amazon pay their fare share in taxes and wages.
  - jdgoesmarching 5y ago
    No, but it will be a constant struggle when companies are incentivized to infinitely reduce costs and their political power far outweighs ours. Significant tax and minimum wage increases are almost a generational event at this point. Those are features, not bugs of our system.
  - 8note 5y ago
    Are there no federal corporate taxes? Or would the US be discluded since it's not a nation state?
    - bradknowles 5y ago
      With the correct arrangement of holding companies, etc… in various countries around the world, corporations usually get away with paying virtually no taxes themselves. They might have to collect local sales taxes or some such, but going through Ireland, the Netherlands, and various other tax havens, the company itself pays effectively no taxes. And that’s assuming they choose to make a profit. Amazon intentionally makes virtually no “profit”, because they take the revenue that would otherwise have become “profit” and spend it in a way that counts as “re-investing”. So, Amazon shows billions and billions of dollars of revenue, but relatively little profit. And it’s only profit that would get taxed at the federal level.
drorco 5y ago
There's also the other option similar to what happened after the New York Elevator Operator Strike in 1945 -- the total elimination of a profession. https://www.inc.com/thomas-koulopoulos/100-years-ago-we-feared-a-different-kind-of-driverless-vehicle.html https://www.inc.com/thomas-koulopoulos/100-years-ago-we-fear... "It wasn't until the middle of the twentieth century that the tipping point came along for the driverless elevator as the result of a strike by the elevator operators' union in New York City in 1945. The strike was devastating, costing the city an estimated one hundred million dollars. Suddenly, there was an economic incentive to go back to the automatic elevator. Over the next decade there was a massive effort to build trust in automatic elevators, which resulted in the elimination of tens of thousands of elevator operator jobs." If Amazon is close enough to automating these jobs, then it will likely just automate it and fire whoever it can. If not, then you're likely making the path towards that faster. I don't see any way for the employees to win this beyond buying a bit more time. Unless the employees, the government, and Amazon, find a way for them to get a profession in which they have more leverage thanks to the *high individual value* they provide, rather than being a temp for future robots. One solution can be for a union, government, Amazon etc, is to put aside money for a fund that will invest in training these employees so they could one day not depend on these kind of low-leverage jobs.
- zapataband1 5y ago
  retraining does not work https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/01/the-false-promises-of-worker-retraining/549398/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/01/the-fa...
- saurik 5y ago
  > If Amazon is close enough to automating these jobs, then it will likely just automate it and fire whoever it can. They will do this anyway. The reason it mattered for elevator operators is that you had to convince a bunch of end users that it was reasonable to self-operate the elevator after they had been trained for years to have an attendant, and you probably had to modify the deployed elevators all over the city--which weren't owned by and one party but had been installed by various buildings--to have additional safety features. Amazon can replace out how Amazon works internally and I would have no clue.
ProAm 5y ago
> The "just stop buying amazon" arguments never made sense to me in the first place, because most people who use it are the ones budget-stretched in the first place. A lot of rural communities have no other viable options for some items as well. They've become the new Walmart, they killed off all other options so now its the only place left for a lot of people.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > they killed off all other options Is it that difficult to imagine the amount of value it created for those communities, too?
  - ProAm 5y ago
    Walmart is known as a town killer, Amazon is an industry killer.
    - iamthepieman 5y ago
      The "big town" (8000 residents) near my town (2500 residents) rejected Walmart on these grounds 25 years ago. The town that accepted Walmart has grown tremendously whereas my big town has 14 empty storefronts on the two main streets which is about 25 percent of the walkable storefronts. It's probably a confounding factor more related to my town's resistance to change and growth than the fact that Walmart isn't there but that's my anecdata.
      - wccrawford 5y ago
        Another anecdote: Walmart moved into our rural town around, IIRC, 1980. The population chart takes a large upturn around that year. It was about 1000 then, and it's over 3000 today. It certainly didn't kill that town. Walmart even moved locations closer to the highway into a bigger store, too.
  - fakesheriff 5y ago
    > Is it that difficult to imagine the amount of value it created for those communities, too? "Value creation" generally reveals itself through a rightward shift in the distribution of household incomes, increased standards of living, and resilient supply chains. At least that's what Adam Smith had in mind when he wrote "The Wealth of Nations". If the only "value creation" KPI that ticks up is corporate earnings in offshore tax havens, the system starts to look like a non-governmental tax authority.
Gene_Parmesan 5y ago
> A lot of rural communities have no other viable options for some items as well. I sometimes fantasize about what it would be like to live in a mild-to-moderately isolated community - moving to Hawaii, northern Alaska, some random island. It's fascinating reading blogs by people who live there, and many of them have a "So You Want to Move to _____" type of post. In virtually all of them, there is some comment along the lines of "It's really hard to find all the things you're used to buying out here, but at least Amazon delivers to us." One of those that I was reading about Hawaii said the big island only has a few big box stores but Amazon can deliver in two to three days. Just thought that was an interesting tidbit.
- hokumguru 5y ago
  After having just taken my first trip to the big island I was actually very surprised how sparse the retail was. Felt very much like rural America.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    They're probably using highly restrictive zoning/permitting to keep it out. Local businesses that are charging tourist prices don't want big box stores (who can't get away with a very big local markup) to compete with and local consumer facing businesses hold basically all the influence in that kind of economy.
    - zizee 5y ago
      There is no need to look for conspiracies. There is only 185k people living on the "big island". I'm not sure why people would expect something other than a rural America level of services, when it is really just a small city of people effectively in the middle of no where. Note that smaller cities in rural America service a much larger population than just the city itself. The island does not have a surrounding population that can drive an hour in once a week to make use of a big box stores. Google maps says there is a Walmart, Kmart, Sears and a number of other well known American brands. It's not like they are being blocked from entering the market.
andreilys 5y ago
Wages are suppressed because it's _legal enough_ to suppress them I'm not an Amazon defender by any means, but doesn't Amazon pay the best in terms of comparable work which is why the warehouse jobs are so competitive to get? Or is that just Amazon PR to stave off regulations
- james4k 5y ago
  It is mostly PR. Among all Amazon workers, the median pay is $28,446 a year ($13.68 an hour), a figure the company revealed this year for the first time because of a new regulatory requirement. That’s a worldwide figure that includes full and part-time workers. Glassdoor, an employment site, says average pay at U.S. fulfillment centers has been $13 an hour, according to nearly 900 people who submitted their data to the site. Amazon’s pay is significantly above the $10.28 an hour that the typical retail worker makes, but it’s less than the $15.53 that a median warehouse employee is paid, according to Labor Department data. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/amazons-15-minimum-wage-doesnt-end-debate-over-whether-its-creating-good-jobs/2018/10/05/b1da23a0-c802-11e8-9b1c-a90f1daae309_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/amazons-15-m... Article is from 2018, but is about a wage increase to $15/hr.
  - dlgeek 5y ago
    Wait, so they're taking a part time pay for a year in which someone didn't work full time and dividing it by full time hours, even though those aren't worked to calculate an hourly salary below the minimum hourly salary that's actually paid?
    - james4k 5y ago
      Yeah, I wondered about the methodology there, but they provide an additional data point.
  - gruez 5y ago
    > It is mostly PR. >Amazon’s pay is significantly above the $10.28 an hour that the typical retail worker makes, but it’s less than the $15.53 that a median warehouse employee is paid, according to Labor Department data. It might be tempting to conclude from that amazon is under-paying for that, but it's unknown what the median "warehouse job" at amazon entails compared to the median "warehouse job" elsewhere. If the jobs at amazon is mostly low skill (comparable with retail), then it wouldn't be fair to compare to the median warehouse job that has higher proportion of skilled labor like forklift drivers.
kortilla 5y ago
> The "just stop buying amazon" arguments never made sense to me in the first place, because most people who use it are the ones budget-stretched in the first place. A lot of rural communities have no other viable options for some items as well. This is all bullshit. Walmart is still the cheaper price for groceries and most general goods (at least in my experience living somewhere rural). Amazon is purely convenience at an OK price.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
underseacables 5y ago
I’m always curious about the cost of labor, and the breaking point for AI to be a solution to that. I’m thinking mostly autonomous robotics to pick, pack, and ship the products, make the burgers, and heck probably restock the shelves at night. I also ask that Because I think humans are losing. The big one will be autonomous trucking. Once that hits, I think we’re going to see massive layoffs and unemployment, as robotics replaces humans.
hinkley 5y ago
Any rural community that has a trade deficit with the outside world slowly spirals into poverty. Buying local increases the number of times a dollar travels around the community before leaving. There's a huge useful area between giving Amazon less power and giving them no power. Amazon is always the 4th place I look for something. Most of the time I never even have to go there. And things like their little tantrum where they stopped selling a bunch of Apple products just made that easier for me. Also remember the audience. Most of the people who can't afford to shop anywhere but Amazon also can't afford to hang out on hacker news. Most of the people here can do better.

dstick 5y ago

And it’s a negative cycle. Those already budget stretched people are getting paid poorly by Amazon, so they too will shop at Amazon. We’re not there yet but the cycle is reminiscent of the factory owners with factory stores and pubs where the workers spend all their money during the industrial revolution. Unions and worker laws stem from that era. So who knows - maybe we’re on the cusp of another revolution that’s similar, but in our current digital revolution!

shakezula 5y ago
There was an article on the front page about how Amazon does this in some places already. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
marcusverus 5y ago
> We’re not there yet but the cycle is reminiscent of the factory owners with factory stores and pubs where the workers spend all their money during the industrial revolution. Is it? Amazon employees (presumably) have the same options as everyone else. Many of those options are, generally speaking, cheaper than Amazon. Whatever your feelings about Amazon in general, fact that Amazon’s supposedly cash-strapped employees choose to pay a premium for convenience is not evidence of Amazon’s malevolence.
XorNot 5y ago
See also: Walmart and its standard practice onboarding employees by signing them up to food stamps.
- gruez 5y ago
  Why is helping employees get government aid bad? Isn't that what government aid is supposed to be for?
  - snypher 5y ago
    It is to stop the employees from wondering why their wage does not cover their living expenses.
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    Because if you tax Bob who makes 24 bucks an hour to feed Sam who is making 12 then Sam is in effect working for below market wages because in a functional market Sam would never work for less money than he required to eat. This arrangement is a transfer of wealth between the middle class and Walmart regardless of whether they opt to shop at Walmart.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      In a world where Bob makes $24/hr and Sam doesn’t work (because he won’t take the $12/hr job), Bob’s probably not going to pay less taxes or be better off.
      - XorNot 5y ago
        In a world where Walmart didn't post a gross profit of 24.3% for 2020[1], you might have a point. But in a world where Walmart posted that much profit on it's $559 billion 2020 revenues[2], somehow Walmart is being allowed to tax me, not a Walmart shopper, via my taxes, and transfer it to Walmart's owners and shareholders, by forcing me to pay for part of their employees wages. Which they clearly have the money to actually pay for. Unless Walmart is a break-even business, there is no excuse, period, for them to not be paying a living wage and getting sponsored by the government for it. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/269414/gross-profit-margin-of-walmart-worldwide-since-2006/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/269414/gross-profit-marg... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/shelleykohan/2021/02/18/walmart-revenue-hits-559-billion-for-fiscal-year-2020/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/shelleykohan/2021/02/18/walmart...
kortilla 5y ago
It’s not reminiscent of it at all. The factory stores had shitty prices and were the only option. Amazon employees can choose to spend their money anywhere. The company towns are gone.
- dstick 5y ago
  Which is precisely my point. Amazon is forcing competitors out of business. And once they have a monopoly, history teaches us they will have no incentives left to keep their prices down, and introduce the very shitty prices you speak off. Hence: we’re not there _yet_
  - kortilla 5y ago
    > Which is precisely my point. No it’s not. Your point was completely the opposite (factory towns had shitty prices due to exclusivity). > Amazon is forcing competitors out of business. And once they have a monopoly They are forcing little shitty stores that have nothing to add over ordering online out of business. They aren’t anywhere near a monopoly in any segment of the world. They aren’t even on a path to it. It’s so trivial for people to sell things online that they will never be anything close to one unless they get online sales banned for the rest of the Internet.
hinkley 5y ago
My relatives come from a town of <10k people who got a Walmart around the time everyone was figuring out Walmart's tactics. They tore up the side of the road from the highway to grandma's house to install bigger storm drains, and as we know now the town usually never recoups those costs. My aunt went to be a manager at the Walmart while everything else in town slowly went out of business. They carried sewing supplies until Franklin's went under and then they got rid of that section. It's the same story with louder music.

pwillia7 5y ago

There's 152 other families to work as scabs for each striking worker. I worry all of this won't be resolved until the next State level paradigm shift, like when the world mostly did away with kings and queens for liberalism.

shakezula 5y ago
The vast majority of those other workers won’t be flexible enough to be able to just drop and work for Amazon. This is a problem inherent to neoliberalism, you’re right, I’m just not sure I’d agree that it requires a nation state level shift in politics to make Amazon pay their fare share in taxes and wages.
- jdgoesmarching 5y ago
  No, but it will be a constant struggle when companies are incentivized to infinitely reduce costs and their political power far outweighs ours. Significant tax and minimum wage increases are almost a generational event at this point. Those are features, not bugs of our system.
- 8note 5y ago
  Are there no federal corporate taxes? Or would the US be discluded since it's not a nation state?
  - bradknowles 5y ago
    With the correct arrangement of holding companies, etc… in various countries around the world, corporations usually get away with paying virtually no taxes themselves. They might have to collect local sales taxes or some such, but going through Ireland, the Netherlands, and various other tax havens, the company itself pays effectively no taxes. And that’s assuming they choose to make a profit. Amazon intentionally makes virtually no “profit”, because they take the revenue that would otherwise have become “profit” and spend it in a way that counts as “re-investing”. So, Amazon shows billions and billions of dollars of revenue, but relatively little profit. And it’s only profit that would get taxed at the federal level.

drorco 5y ago

There's also the other option similar to what happened after the New York Elevator Operator Strike in 1945 -- the total elimination of a profession. https://www.inc.com/thomas-koulopoulos/100-years-ago-we-feared-a-different-kind-of-driverless-vehicle.html https://www.inc.com/thomas-koulopoulos/100-years-ago-we-fear... "It wasn't until the middle of the twentieth century that the tipping point came along for the driverless elevator as the result of a strike by the elevator operators' union in New York City in 1945. The strike was devastating, costing the city an estimated one hundred million dollars. Suddenly, there was an economic incentive to go back to the automatic elevator. Over the next decade there was a massive effort to build trust in automatic elevators, which resulted in the elimination of tens of thousands of elevator operator jobs." If Amazon is close enough to automating these jobs, then it will likely just automate it and fire whoever it can. If not, then you're likely making the path towards that faster. I don't see any way for the employees to win this beyond buying a bit more time. Unless the employees, the government, and Amazon, find a way for them to get a profession in which they have more leverage thanks to the *high individual value* they provide, rather than being a temp for future robots. One solution can be for a union, government, Amazon etc, is to put aside money for a fund that will invest in training these employees so they could one day not depend on these kind of low-leverage jobs.

zapataband1 5y ago
retraining does not work https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/01/the-false-promises-of-worker-retraining/549398/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/01/the-fa...
saurik 5y ago
> If Amazon is close enough to automating these jobs, then it will likely just automate it and fire whoever it can. They will do this anyway. The reason it mattered for elevator operators is that you had to convince a bunch of end users that it was reasonable to self-operate the elevator after they had been trained for years to have an attendant, and you probably had to modify the deployed elevators all over the city--which weren't owned by and one party but had been installed by various buildings--to have additional safety features. Amazon can replace out how Amazon works internally and I would have no clue.

ProAm 5y ago

> The "just stop buying amazon" arguments never made sense to me in the first place, because most people who use it are the ones budget-stretched in the first place. A lot of rural communities have no other viable options for some items as well. They've become the new Walmart, they killed off all other options so now its the only place left for a lot of people.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> they killed off all other options Is it that difficult to imagine the amount of value it created for those communities, too?
- ProAm 5y ago
  Walmart is known as a town killer, Amazon is an industry killer.
  - iamthepieman 5y ago
    The "big town" (8000 residents) near my town (2500 residents) rejected Walmart on these grounds 25 years ago. The town that accepted Walmart has grown tremendously whereas my big town has 14 empty storefronts on the two main streets which is about 25 percent of the walkable storefronts. It's probably a confounding factor more related to my town's resistance to change and growth than the fact that Walmart isn't there but that's my anecdata.
    - wccrawford 5y ago
      Another anecdote: Walmart moved into our rural town around, IIRC, 1980. The population chart takes a large upturn around that year. It was about 1000 then, and it's over 3000 today. It certainly didn't kill that town. Walmart even moved locations closer to the highway into a bigger store, too.
- fakesheriff 5y ago
  > Is it that difficult to imagine the amount of value it created for those communities, too? "Value creation" generally reveals itself through a rightward shift in the distribution of household incomes, increased standards of living, and resilient supply chains. At least that's what Adam Smith had in mind when he wrote "The Wealth of Nations". If the only "value creation" KPI that ticks up is corporate earnings in offshore tax havens, the system starts to look like a non-governmental tax authority.

Gene_Parmesan 5y ago

> A lot of rural communities have no other viable options for some items as well. I sometimes fantasize about what it would be like to live in a mild-to-moderately isolated community - moving to Hawaii, northern Alaska, some random island. It's fascinating reading blogs by people who live there, and many of them have a "So You Want to Move to _____" type of post. In virtually all of them, there is some comment along the lines of "It's really hard to find all the things you're used to buying out here, but at least Amazon delivers to us." One of those that I was reading about Hawaii said the big island only has a few big box stores but Amazon can deliver in two to three days. Just thought that was an interesting tidbit.

hokumguru 5y ago
After having just taken my first trip to the big island I was actually very surprised how sparse the retail was. Felt very much like rural America.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  They're probably using highly restrictive zoning/permitting to keep it out. Local businesses that are charging tourist prices don't want big box stores (who can't get away with a very big local markup) to compete with and local consumer facing businesses hold basically all the influence in that kind of economy.
  - zizee 5y ago
    There is no need to look for conspiracies. There is only 185k people living on the "big island". I'm not sure why people would expect something other than a rural America level of services, when it is really just a small city of people effectively in the middle of no where. Note that smaller cities in rural America service a much larger population than just the city itself. The island does not have a surrounding population that can drive an hour in once a week to make use of a big box stores. Google maps says there is a Walmart, Kmart, Sears and a number of other well known American brands. It's not like they are being blocked from entering the market.

andreilys 5y ago

Wages are suppressed because it's _legal enough_ to suppress them I'm not an Amazon defender by any means, but doesn't Amazon pay the best in terms of comparable work which is why the warehouse jobs are so competitive to get? Or is that just Amazon PR to stave off regulations

james4k 5y ago
It is mostly PR. Among all Amazon workers, the median pay is $28,446 a year ($13.68 an hour), a figure the company revealed this year for the first time because of a new regulatory requirement. That’s a worldwide figure that includes full and part-time workers. Glassdoor, an employment site, says average pay at U.S. fulfillment centers has been $13 an hour, according to nearly 900 people who submitted their data to the site. Amazon’s pay is significantly above the $10.28 an hour that the typical retail worker makes, but it’s less than the $15.53 that a median warehouse employee is paid, according to Labor Department data. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/amazons-15-minimum-wage-doesnt-end-debate-over-whether-its-creating-good-jobs/2018/10/05/b1da23a0-c802-11e8-9b1c-a90f1daae309_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/amazons-15-m... Article is from 2018, but is about a wage increase to $15/hr.
- dlgeek 5y ago
  Wait, so they're taking a part time pay for a year in which someone didn't work full time and dividing it by full time hours, even though those aren't worked to calculate an hourly salary below the minimum hourly salary that's actually paid?
  - james4k 5y ago
    Yeah, I wondered about the methodology there, but they provide an additional data point.
- gruez 5y ago
  > It is mostly PR. >Amazon’s pay is significantly above the $10.28 an hour that the typical retail worker makes, but it’s less than the $15.53 that a median warehouse employee is paid, according to Labor Department data. It might be tempting to conclude from that amazon is under-paying for that, but it's unknown what the median "warehouse job" at amazon entails compared to the median "warehouse job" elsewhere. If the jobs at amazon is mostly low skill (comparable with retail), then it wouldn't be fair to compare to the median warehouse job that has higher proportion of skilled labor like forklift drivers.

kortilla 5y ago

> The "just stop buying amazon" arguments never made sense to me in the first place, because most people who use it are the ones budget-stretched in the first place. A lot of rural communities have no other viable options for some items as well. This is all bullshit. Walmart is still the cheaper price for groceries and most general goods (at least in my experience living somewhere rural). Amazon is purely convenience at an OK price.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

underseacables 5y ago

I’m always curious about the cost of labor, and the breaking point for AI to be a solution to that. I’m thinking mostly autonomous robotics to pick, pack, and ship the products, make the burgers, and heck probably restock the shelves at night. I also ask that Because I think humans are losing. The big one will be autonomous trucking. Once that hits, I think we’re going to see massive layoffs and unemployment, as robotics replaces humans.

hinkley 5y ago

Any rural community that has a trade deficit with the outside world slowly spirals into poverty. Buying local increases the number of times a dollar travels around the community before leaving. There's a huge useful area between giving Amazon less power and giving them no power. Amazon is always the 4th place I look for something. Most of the time I never even have to go there. And things like their little tantrum where they stopped selling a bunch of Apple products just made that easier for me. Also remember the audience. Most of the people who can't afford to shop anywhere but Amazon also can't afford to hang out on hacker news. Most of the people here can do better.