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I am surprised this is not talked about more: Amazon Full Time Employees: 154,100 Walmart Full Time Employees: 2,200,000 (Based on Yahoo Finance Company Pr
by kumarm 11y ago
I am surprised this is not talked about more:
Amazon Full Time Employees: 154,100
Walmart Full Time Employees: 2,200,000
(Based on Yahoo Finance Company Profile Stats)
There is a growing need for Human's to work Lesser Hours going forward rather than more Hours.
- jackreichert 11y agoImplicit in that is the growing need for humans to support themselves comfortably on fewer hours going forward as well.
- minot 11y agoI could argue that fewer people need to work and lean towards a basic income. Sadly, this is not very palatable to most people.
- seanflyon 11y agoI think it would become much more palatable if someone came up with a plan for basic income that didn't require tripling the federal budget.
- sitkack 11y agoTaxing the rich comes to mind.
- jessaustin 11y agoIncreasing taxes to fund increased services is exactly increasing the federal budget.
- afarrell 11y agoParent said "budget", not "deficit".
- _delirium 11y agoThat difference is partly due to different things being valued: Walmart's valuation is primarily its current business, while Amazon's valuation is primarily its future growth prospects. That future growth is valued in the market cap today, but its actual materialization will only take place in the future, so doesn't show up on the payroll today. If Amazon does actually succeed in growing to Wal-Mart levels of sales, it will end up with a lot more employees than it currently has, though quite possibly still fewer than Wal-Mart.
- crabasa 11y ago> That difference is partly due to different things being valued This is misleading. All valuations are based on the discounted value of future cash flows. There are three variables at work here: today's cash flows, the growth rate of these cash flows and the discount rate. The market is simply saying that Amazon's growth prospects outweigh it relatively smaller size.
- chronic40 11y agoDifferent things are being valued. You simply pointed out they are using the same metric.
- crabasa 11y agoThere is only one thing being valued by a rational investor: net present value of future cash flows. Edit: The only point I'm trying to make is that an investor, when they exchange money for a stock, is placing a bet on a single outcome: future cash flows. Of course there are plenty of ways to get those cash flows, but I find that most people get caught up in details like employee headcount and fail to grasp the single most important factor: compound growth.
- _delirium 11y agoSure, but there are many ways to get future cash flows. A significant difference in the valuation of the two companies is that with Wal-mart, the expectation of future cash flows (and therefore present value) comes primarily from its present size, the cash flows that brings, and its expected ability to continue bringing in such flows. Whereas with Amazon, which has much lower current market share and cash flow, the market is "saying that Amazon's growth prospects outweigh it relatively smaller size". Hence the proportion of expected future cash flows that investors expect to come in the form of future growth is significantly higher with Amazon than with Wal-Mart. Therefore you would expect Amazon to have a lower current size and current headcount per unit present valuation, even if there were no differences in productivity. What I was criticizing was just using the ratio of present market cap and present headcount as a meaningful metric, when comparing companies with very different growth expectations. That effectively becomes a restatement of the different growth expectations: Amazon has the same market cap as Wal-Mart but its present size is smaller in almost any way you could count present size (sales, headcount, etc.).
- AceJohnny2 11y agoI don't know if it's funny or sad. Remember how economists predicted that productivity increase would lead to everyone being richer and having to work fewer hours? Yeah...
- chongli 11y agoIt will happen, just don't expect "the invisible hand of the market" to do it. The mechanism for bringing about these benefits will be political in nature.
- dylanjermiah 11y agoI don't know if you missed it, but everyone(for the most part) are far better off than 10, 20, 30 etc years ago. I'd say in spite of the politics.
- bduerst 11y agoNot according to the growing wealth gap in the U.S. If you considered the entire globe, then yes, there are growing middle classes in certain Asian and Latin American countries.
- dylanjermiah 11y agoWealth gap is meaningless to me. I care about quality of life, which has dramatically increased.
- bduerst 11y agoQuality of life has increased because of technological advancements. To say that we shouldn't care about the growing wealth gap because the world has smart phones is disingenuous.
- dylanjermiah 11y ago
- CydeWeys 11y agoThe average Amazon employee is paid a lot more than the average Walmart employee, too. That matters a lot.
- fiatmoney 11y agoAmazon's employee count would look much higher if they counted subcontractors working in their warehouses.
- hyperbovine 11y agoPlus all the UPS/FedEx/USPS employees.
- MichaelCrawford 11y agoThat's the case with Microsoft and Apple too, I expect many companies. When I was a contract programmer at Apple In 1990 I was told that it hired so many contractors so it could inflate the ratio of revenue to employees, which would inflate the stock price. While Apple still had to report our pay it was some other kind of business expense, like office furniture.
- krstck 11y agoA (non-tech) company I used to work for hired temp workers as a way for HR to hit some kind of "low headcount" performance bonus. It was terrible for everyone else, including the temps themselves.
- Zach_the_Lizard 11y agoSome Federal agencies are restricted to X number of employees by law. They hire a bunch of contractors to get around this. It's not a great system.
- MichaelCrawford 11y agoMy father once complained about the hot weather making his work at the naval shipyard unbearable. But dont you have air conditioning my mother asked. The federal regulations specify the temperature in which AC is permitted he replied. Washington DC is the coolest place that permits air conditioning.
- 11y ago
- krstck 11y agoIs that number including all of the contractors in their warehouses? I believe they make heavy use of temp services.
- kevin_thibedeau 11y agoI don't think the Amazon employee total includes their warehouse workers who actually work for Integrity Staffing Solutions rather than Amazon itself.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- mandeepj 11y agoOf course Walmart have more employees because they have physical stores. Amazon have more computers instead :-)
- stephengillie 11y ago> Amazon Full Time Employees: 154,100 Post-Seattle construction: 224,100 Amazon is building office space for 70,000 workers in downtown Seattle.
- codeonfire 11y agoBut what part of that is just hubris or real estate investment? They arguably have enough people to run their retail and AWS operations and to expand those businesses without expanding people. A large portion of their other projects are just sort of grasping at straws to see if there is some sort of business there.
- vehementi 11y agoAre they moving any workers from existing sites into that building? Or will that new flagship building be fresh-hires-only?
- demian 11y agoCreative Destruction is nothing new.
- ChuckMcM 11y agoWell there is a couple of things to consider there, one of which is that WalMart has everyone on its payroll between you and the product. Amazon does not. In particular Amazon doesn't count vendors who just selling through their platform, (they would be part of buyers/stockers at WallMart) Amazon doesn't count any of the delivery personnel for things like OnTrak etc. And at one point I thought the warehouse workers were actually subcontracted through another firm but I may be mis-remembering that. Thus from a business perspective you get rewarded by keeping workers off your payroll, but I don't think it means people aren't working for you. The poster child for this is the 'sharing/gig/slaving' economy type places. Because of that I am not convinced there is actually less human capital in moving the goods through Amazon or Walmart, but I do agree its accounted for differently. And that means I really can't agree with it as evidence to support the claim that humans should work fewer hours. It would make for a great paper, maybe even a nice book, on comparing how many hours of labor are invested and how many people in getting a product from manufacturing to your hands using the two different product flows (and doing that for a representative sample of all products offered).
- mayukh 11y agoYou bring up an interesting aside (Not related to growth prospects or productivity improvements per se) By Marketcap: Facebook > Amazon > Walmart By FTE: Walmart(2.2 million) > Amazon (150K) > FB (10K) I realize FB is not in the same business, but I wonder what view those picketing Walmart for unfair and unjust labor practices have of the 'new economy businesses' that are being valued higher yet employ fewer Americans. Do you protest the jobs that were never created ?
- 88e282102ae2e5b 11y agoSure. You can protest for a higher minimum wage.
- eru 11y agoThere are companies in the world that don't employ any Americans at all! (I heard China has a lot of them.)
- a_c_s 11y agoWalMart revenue: $482bn Amazon revenue: $89bn WalMart sells over 5x as much: if Amazon were to scale proportionally it would have 835,000 employees. (And if we looked only at the non-AWS portion of Amazon I'd imagine the difference would be even smaller)
- jimbokun 11y agoWell this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9945053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9945053 has Walmart revenues about 5x Amazon revenues, and your numbers have Walmart employees about 10x Amazon employees. So a very naive linear extrapolation implies Amazon would have about half the employees of Walmart if their revenues were equal.
- tomjen3 11y agoYou may, possibly, replace one unskilled worker with two who work part time (but then where are the extra money going to come from?), but you know that Amazon doesn't have 154,100 unskilled labors and skilled labours can't be divided like that, which you should know well enough.
- manachar 11y agoAmazon is also working as quickly as possible to remove humans from everywhere they can, especially in the warehouses.
- csomar 11y agoIn 2015, Market cap means nothing. Also Amazon has many other things not related to product delivery/sales like AWS. We should compare by total product sales.
- codemonkeymike 11y agoWalmart has its own trucks and truck drivers on pay roll. That could be a decent part of the difference.
- maaku 11y ago> There is a growing need for Human's to work Lesser Hours going forward rather than more Hours. Or fewer humans working more hours?
- troyinjapan 11y agoHow many of Amazon's employees ask for government aid versus Walmart's employees?