7 ms·

The brutal business practices of Amazon

140 points by makerdiety 2y ago

mehulashah 2y ago
I was Amazon for quite some time, and also outside of Amazon trying to compete against them. The company is both decentralized and has a culture of delivering. While that sometimes has unintended consequences, the people there are quite aware that they can sometimes be an elephant in a china shop. There are practices in place to rein that in. Nonetheless, investigations like this book hardly ever give a balanced view.
- mangamadaiyan 2y ago
  What sort of investigations provide a balanced view, then?
  - NathanKP 2y ago
    Amazon employee here, seven years at the company so far. This is my personal opinion only: I don't know that there are many articles I've read about Amazon that have a balanced view. I will say that many people who are anti-Amazon have this picture of Amazon as being more ruthless (and smarter) than it actually is. For example, an Amazon seller can make the claim that Amazon used it's access to marketplace data to research info about their product sales and then compete with them. But as an insider I believe the reality is probably far more stupid: a seller who had their product "copied" by Amazon was likely just a middleman who was using a factory in China to make their product. The middleman is basically just extracting value from being a middleman. But most Chinese factories produce extra product on the side. Once they setup the toolchain and processes for building your product why not keep the assembly lines running a bit longer and produce a few thousand more copies of your product? Or maybe the factory keeps a big stockpile of the rejected product that was slightly bad quality, so they couldn't send it to the original middleman. And if you are this Chinese factory then why not sell this extra product (mixing in the lower quality rejects) directly to Amazon for Amazon to list as an Amazon Basic? The factory can make more money by cutting out the middleman, and some ignorant Amazon product acquisition worker will buy that stuff, not even realizing it is what it is. No "sensitive business information" needed. So "Amazon copied my product as an Amazon Basic" is probably way more dumb than it sounds. Or the "Amazon copied my product idea or roadmap" claim from the article. Do you realize how many ideas there are floating around in Amazon when you have >1 million employees? Any idea you can come up with has already been suggested dozens of times by Amazon employees and was probably also requested by Amazon's own customers via support a couple thousand times. The only question is whether that idea is worth building now versus worth building later. And as it turns out when there is real demand for an idea there tends to be multiple people who start building that idea at the same time. In fact sometimes there are multiple teams within Amazon who start trying to build the same thing at the same time, and they didn't even know about each other. Often one team fails to build it while another team succeeds. The duplicated effort eventually gets sorted out, but it happens a lot. This is the type of scenario that happens time and time again. It's fun to write a click attracting story about Amazon as this big brutal force when the reality is most likely much dumber than it seems.
    - eks391 2y ago
      As a former employee of a 100K+ person company, I've had these exact thoughts several times. I worked in acquisitions, and constantly was finding out that we were reinventing (or rebuying) the wheel internally in independent departments.
    - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
      Amazon is the only company I know of that has to have contingency plans for blowing through the available local workforce, their treatment of people is that bad. I have been at the very bottom of society, and everyone chose to work somewhere else than an Amazon warehouse, including the local refuse recycling plant sorting putrid trash that paid less.
      - theragra 2y ago
        My friend worked at the Amazon warehouse in Scotland, it was hard work, but paid relatively well. He ris extremely hard worker. Exactly one time he got stomach flu, came in green barely standing and said he can't work. Was fired on spot.
        int_19h 2y ago
        Is that kind of thing legal in UK?
        theragra 2y ago
        Protections are stronger once you work for some time (1.5y?). But he was immigrant and maybe could have fought it, but did not.
  - kmeisthax 2y ago
    The ones that don't give him moral injury for working at Amazon, presumably?
    - karaterobot 2y ago
      That's not exactly the most generous interpretation of that comment.
    - StressedDev 2y ago
      Please do assuming that the original poster is acting in bad faith. I have seen a lot of reporting about disfavored organizations, and it is often unfair. I do not know if this reporter has done a good job or not but I have seen a fair number of anti-Amazon articles which basically attack Amazon for being successful. The other problem with the article is it does not point out some obvious problems Amazon has. First, Amazon is expensive, and people can and do go else ware. Second, Amazon's retail side is mediocre. Amazon's retail web page is basically a product search engine. Outside of search, Amazon does very little work to help people find products they are interested in. Amazon also does almost no curation. This is why it is often hard to distinguish between good non-fiction books and books which spread disinformation. Third, a lot of Amazon initiatives have failed. Examples include Alexa (a giant money pit), the Fire Phone, Amazon's video game division (over a billion and basically only produced 1 moderate hit), Prime Video (a mediocre streaming competitor), etc. I have also heard Amazon has been destroying Twitch. My main point is, the article paints Amazon as an unstoppable machine when in fact it is very fallible. It does some great things (AWS), some good things (Kindle), some OK things, and sometimes some very bad things.
      - samatman 2y ago
        I was sure you were going to get to the counterfeit and substandard goods problem, but you cited plenty of things in your comment, so I'll just add it. Amazon's retail market is absolutely lousy with counterfeit goods, as well as products blindly imported from China (usually) which don't meet the standards required by regulation for such goods. This regularly causes injury, especially due to electrical fires, and Amazon has not been held to account for any of these practices. Try heading to a street corner and selling counterfeit products: it's a crime, you'll be charged accordingly. Amazon has gotten away with this for more than a decade.
- brevitea 2y ago
  By "balanced view," do you mean the one where Amazon lawyers attempt to erode the ever-growing list of credible reports outlining Amazon engaging in and encouraging the tactics outlined in the article/book? From what I can tell, the article is remarkably spot on. It begs the question, without government contracts[1], where would Amazon actually be? Would Amazon be out of business? Hmm... Makes you wonder. [1] https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2023/2024/Silicon%20Valley%20MIC.pdf https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/20...
  - woooooo 2y ago
    They file all sorts of forms for where their revenue comes from, they're very profitable without government help, it's an easily checkable fact.
    - brevitea 2y ago
      That's actually a point of contention. Aside from AWS, how successful is Amazon actually?
flerchin 2y ago
Whatever happened with the "false or perjurious" testimony at the beginning of the article? Nothing?
cxr 2y ago
The writer Rob K. Henderson has covered the hypocrisy of the upper and upper-middle classes in several of his pieces on what he calls "luxury beliefs". The case of Amazon def. fits into a similar theme. You can broach the topic with uppercrust folks (without even really trying) of whether supporting Walmart by shopping there is conscionable or not, and you'll get one set of responses/reactions. Meanwhile, it's nowhere near socially unacceptable to talk about all the stuff you order from Amazon, despite Amazon appearing to be by and large worse in its compensation/treatment of its employees and its effect on the economy and the environment—all things that aspiring bougie types ostensibly profess to rank highly in their meditations when it comes to Walmart.
- boredinstapanda 2y ago
  That seems to reason. Unless you buy all your stuff at Walmart online, you have to go in and see the people working and their working conditions. Amazon, you only see the checkout page. It makes it much easier to ignore the problems.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    Shopping in Whole Foods is shopping at Amazon, where you also have to go in and see the people working and their working conditions.
- silverquiet 2y ago
  I think Amazon is actually among the best compensated of the "shit jobs" out there, but it is about the shittiest (certainly it's the pissiest; I've seen the bottle bombs their drivers like to leave since they don't really accommodate bathroom breaks). I don't even really find much hypocrisy amongst the upper class here; they'll outright say that these are shit jobs not intended to provide a living wage; certainly not something you can raise a family on. Probably said as, "those people should have gone to school".
  - cxr 2y ago
    The Walmart distribution center built around where I grew up was not known as a hub of shit jobs. It was a source of envy. Amazon warehouse worker pay, in contrast, lags behind Walmart by several dollars per hour and offset several years. And that's assuming you're actually hired by the company directly, rather indirectly as a second class worker brought in through the timeless scam involving contractors employed by staffing agencies.
rqtwteye 2y ago
[flagged]
- euroderf 2y ago
  Maybe "nothing new under the sun" and/or "nothing to see here" are not sensible reactions to the article.
acl777 2y ago
https://archive.ph/vTO3D https://archive.ph/vTO3D
Nevermark 2y ago
Traditional business value comes from some innovation, and a lot of execution/logistics delivering the innovation. Logistics for product companies being manufacturing, and sales/delivery. But now most small product companies have outsourced production on the "input" side, and outsourced logistics on the "output" side. Which leaves harsher more direct competition for their innovation core, since that is a fraction of the original business and more easily copied. High componentization of any economy ratches up competitive pressure exponentially, whether it was Amazon, or a collection of service companies offloading the downstream logistics. But since Amazon is protecting itself by doing the opposite, by de-componentizing, i.e. preferencing and tying different sales and delivery logistics services to each other, that centralized leverage is going to squeeze small product companies even more. Especially those that don't have a unique manufacturing process, unique branding, or some other differentiating moat.
WalterBright 2y ago
> Dana Mattioli reveals how the company systematically stifles criticism, squeezes out competitors, and even pits its own employees against one another. “People tend not to last,” she says, “because it’s very aggressive and it can be bruising.” Wow! Wait till she does an investigation of professional sports!
- aidenn0 2y ago
  > Wow! Wait till she does an investigation of professional sports! At least those are union jobs.
jimt1234 2y ago
How does Amazon operate in countries outside the US. Does Amazon apply the same anti-competitive business practices? Is the workplace equally cut-throat? Just curious.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
neodypsis 2y ago
Can I read this on Kindle?
- disgruntledphd2 2y ago
  There was a link to buy on Amazon, so I expect so.

140 points by makerdiety 2y ago

I was Amazon for quite some time, and also outside of Amazon trying to compete against them. The company is both decentralized and has a culture of delivering. While that sometimes has unintended consequences, the people there are quite aware that they can sometimes be an elephant in a china shop. There are practices in place to rein that in. Nonetheless, investigations like this book hardly ever give a balanced view.

mangamadaiyan 2y ago
What sort of investigations provide a balanced view, then?
- NathanKP 2y ago
  Amazon employee here, seven years at the company so far. This is my personal opinion only: I don't know that there are many articles I've read about Amazon that have a balanced view. I will say that many people who are anti-Amazon have this picture of Amazon as being more ruthless (and smarter) than it actually is. For example, an Amazon seller can make the claim that Amazon used it's access to marketplace data to research info about their product sales and then compete with them. But as an insider I believe the reality is probably far more stupid: a seller who had their product "copied" by Amazon was likely just a middleman who was using a factory in China to make their product. The middleman is basically just extracting value from being a middleman. But most Chinese factories produce extra product on the side. Once they setup the toolchain and processes for building your product why not keep the assembly lines running a bit longer and produce a few thousand more copies of your product? Or maybe the factory keeps a big stockpile of the rejected product that was slightly bad quality, so they couldn't send it to the original middleman. And if you are this Chinese factory then why not sell this extra product (mixing in the lower quality rejects) directly to Amazon for Amazon to list as an Amazon Basic? The factory can make more money by cutting out the middleman, and some ignorant Amazon product acquisition worker will buy that stuff, not even realizing it is what it is. No "sensitive business information" needed. So "Amazon copied my product as an Amazon Basic" is probably way more dumb than it sounds. Or the "Amazon copied my product idea or roadmap" claim from the article. Do you realize how many ideas there are floating around in Amazon when you have >1 million employees? Any idea you can come up with has already been suggested dozens of times by Amazon employees and was probably also requested by Amazon's own customers via support a couple thousand times. The only question is whether that idea is worth building now versus worth building later. And as it turns out when there is real demand for an idea there tends to be multiple people who start building that idea at the same time. In fact sometimes there are multiple teams within Amazon who start trying to build the same thing at the same time, and they didn't even know about each other. Often one team fails to build it while another team succeeds. The duplicated effort eventually gets sorted out, but it happens a lot. This is the type of scenario that happens time and time again. It's fun to write a click attracting story about Amazon as this big brutal force when the reality is most likely much dumber than it seems.
  - eks391 2y ago
    As a former employee of a 100K+ person company, I've had these exact thoughts several times. I worked in acquisitions, and constantly was finding out that we were reinventing (or rebuying) the wheel internally in independent departments.
  - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
    Amazon is the only company I know of that has to have contingency plans for blowing through the available local workforce, their treatment of people is that bad. I have been at the very bottom of society, and everyone chose to work somewhere else than an Amazon warehouse, including the local refuse recycling plant sorting putrid trash that paid less.
    - theragra 2y ago
      My friend worked at the Amazon warehouse in Scotland, it was hard work, but paid relatively well. He ris extremely hard worker. Exactly one time he got stomach flu, came in green barely standing and said he can't work. Was fired on spot.
      - int_19h 2y ago
        Is that kind of thing legal in UK?
        theragra 2y ago
        Protections are stronger once you work for some time (1.5y?). But he was immigrant and maybe could have fought it, but did not.
- kmeisthax 2y ago
  The ones that don't give him moral injury for working at Amazon, presumably?
  - karaterobot 2y ago
    That's not exactly the most generous interpretation of that comment.
  - StressedDev 2y ago
    Please do assuming that the original poster is acting in bad faith. I have seen a lot of reporting about disfavored organizations, and it is often unfair. I do not know if this reporter has done a good job or not but I have seen a fair number of anti-Amazon articles which basically attack Amazon for being successful. The other problem with the article is it does not point out some obvious problems Amazon has. First, Amazon is expensive, and people can and do go else ware. Second, Amazon's retail side is mediocre. Amazon's retail web page is basically a product search engine. Outside of search, Amazon does very little work to help people find products they are interested in. Amazon also does almost no curation. This is why it is often hard to distinguish between good non-fiction books and books which spread disinformation. Third, a lot of Amazon initiatives have failed. Examples include Alexa (a giant money pit), the Fire Phone, Amazon's video game division (over a billion and basically only produced 1 moderate hit), Prime Video (a mediocre streaming competitor), etc. I have also heard Amazon has been destroying Twitch. My main point is, the article paints Amazon as an unstoppable machine when in fact it is very fallible. It does some great things (AWS), some good things (Kindle), some OK things, and sometimes some very bad things.
    - samatman 2y ago
      I was sure you were going to get to the counterfeit and substandard goods problem, but you cited plenty of things in your comment, so I'll just add it. Amazon's retail market is absolutely lousy with counterfeit goods, as well as products blindly imported from China (usually) which don't meet the standards required by regulation for such goods. This regularly causes injury, especially due to electrical fires, and Amazon has not been held to account for any of these practices. Try heading to a street corner and selling counterfeit products: it's a crime, you'll be charged accordingly. Amazon has gotten away with this for more than a decade.
brevitea 2y ago
By "balanced view," do you mean the one where Amazon lawyers attempt to erode the ever-growing list of credible reports outlining Amazon engaging in and encouraging the tactics outlined in the article/book? From what I can tell, the article is remarkably spot on. It begs the question, without government contracts[1], where would Amazon actually be? Would Amazon be out of business? Hmm... Makes you wonder. [1] https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2023/2024/Silicon%20Valley%20MIC.pdf https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/20...
- woooooo 2y ago
  They file all sorts of forms for where their revenue comes from, they're very profitable without government help, it's an easily checkable fact.
  - brevitea 2y ago
    That's actually a point of contention. Aside from AWS, how successful is Amazon actually?

flerchin 2y ago

Whatever happened with the "false or perjurious" testimony at the beginning of the article? Nothing?

cxr 2y ago

The writer Rob K. Henderson has covered the hypocrisy of the upper and upper-middle classes in several of his pieces on what he calls "luxury beliefs". The case of Amazon def. fits into a similar theme. You can broach the topic with uppercrust folks (without even really trying) of whether supporting Walmart by shopping there is conscionable or not, and you'll get one set of responses/reactions. Meanwhile, it's nowhere near socially unacceptable to talk about all the stuff you order from Amazon, despite Amazon appearing to be by and large worse in its compensation/treatment of its employees and its effect on the economy and the environment—all things that aspiring bougie types ostensibly profess to rank highly in their meditations when it comes to Walmart.

boredinstapanda 2y ago
That seems to reason. Unless you buy all your stuff at Walmart online, you have to go in and see the people working and their working conditions. Amazon, you only see the checkout page. It makes it much easier to ignore the problems.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  Shopping in Whole Foods is shopping at Amazon, where you also have to go in and see the people working and their working conditions.
silverquiet 2y ago
I think Amazon is actually among the best compensated of the "shit jobs" out there, but it is about the shittiest (certainly it's the pissiest; I've seen the bottle bombs their drivers like to leave since they don't really accommodate bathroom breaks). I don't even really find much hypocrisy amongst the upper class here; they'll outright say that these are shit jobs not intended to provide a living wage; certainly not something you can raise a family on. Probably said as, "those people should have gone to school".
- cxr 2y ago
  The Walmart distribution center built around where I grew up was not known as a hub of shit jobs. It was a source of envy. Amazon warehouse worker pay, in contrast, lags behind Walmart by several dollars per hour and offset several years. And that's assuming you're actually hired by the company directly, rather indirectly as a second class worker brought in through the timeless scam involving contractors employed by staffing agencies.

rqtwteye 2y ago

[flagged]

euroderf 2y ago
Maybe "nothing new under the sun" and/or "nothing to see here" are not sensible reactions to the article.

acl777 2y ago

https://archive.ph/vTO3D https://archive.ph/vTO3D

Nevermark 2y ago

Traditional business value comes from some innovation, and a lot of execution/logistics delivering the innovation. Logistics for product companies being manufacturing, and sales/delivery. But now most small product companies have outsourced production on the "input" side, and outsourced logistics on the "output" side. Which leaves harsher more direct competition for their innovation core, since that is a fraction of the original business and more easily copied. High componentization of any economy ratches up competitive pressure exponentially, whether it was Amazon, or a collection of service companies offloading the downstream logistics. But since Amazon is protecting itself by doing the opposite, by de-componentizing, i.e. preferencing and tying different sales and delivery logistics services to each other, that centralized leverage is going to squeeze small product companies even more. Especially those that don't have a unique manufacturing process, unique branding, or some other differentiating moat.

WalterBright 2y ago

> Dana Mattioli reveals how the company systematically stifles criticism, squeezes out competitors, and even pits its own employees against one another. “People tend not to last,” she says, “because it’s very aggressive and it can be bruising.” Wow! Wait till she does an investigation of professional sports!

aidenn0 2y ago
> Wow! Wait till she does an investigation of professional sports! At least those are union jobs.

jimt1234 2y ago

How does Amazon operate in countries outside the US. Does Amazon apply the same anti-competitive business practices? Is the workplace equally cut-throat? Just curious.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

neodypsis 2y ago

Can I read this on Kindle?

disgruntledphd2 2y ago
There was a link to buy on Amazon, so I expect so.