"White areas get organic grocers and designer boutiques" - no faster way to get out of poverty than shopping at Whole Foods
The basics at WF's are reasonably priced. I want to hate stores, but the CEO did a good job lowering prices on certain items. 1/2 gallon milk is $2.29. Some bread is reasonable. Their store brand (nature someting) is a good deal. They got a $2.49 bottle of wine that's a lost leader. Everything else is priced for Thurston Howell III.
Been a bit since I bought a gallon of milk, but I distinctly remember it being But then again, I also balk at paying >$1 for a loaf of bread so maybe I'm just a cheapskate.
They're also pretty bad at rolling out their services to countries outside of the US. In Canada we've been told that we're getting Amazon's MP3 music store for years, but it still hasn't come, let alone any Amazon video. I'm actually somewhat surprised that we got Kindle books, although that was years after the US. You can forget things like the Echo at all. Amazon Prime is just shipping in Canada. Where I live, I'd…
Amazon is also pretty bad with services in Europe. Amazon Germany is used to try out new services and was also the test region for Prime years before Amazon US got it. The Prime advertisement and nag screens are so annoying on Amazon Germany, so many now many use Amazon UK and US which have a far better user experience and things are cheaper as well. The packages come from the same warehouses anyway. And Amazon Germany's warehouse label now all packages with a Prime package. And the package come on the next day. (Due to introducing Prime as testing object in Germany many years ago, the delivered slowed down from 2-3 days to 4-6 days for any non-Prime member) Maybe it's the fault of their chaos. No wonder the Amazon Germany webshop is running on an years old software version, with good but long gone features like sorting items by lower prize or popularity, but otherwise rotten experience. It used to run on the 1999-ish version until 2006 or so, basically unchanged. The US version got several new relaunches back then. If an Amazon exec reads this, please do your A/B tests and product testing somewhere else and scrap the old forked codebase of Amazon Germany.
The article answers its own question. Amazon decides which neighborhoods get Prime Same Day service by the number of Prime subscribers in that neighborhood. Predominantly African-American neighborhoods have fewer Prime subscribers, so they don't get Prime Same Day; presumably it would be even less profitable to serve those neighborhoods than it is to offer Prime Same Day to neighborhoods with high concentrations of P…
Of course, there was that bit recently where some arm of the US gov't said that discriminating based on criminal record might be illegal because minorities have proportionately more criminal records, making discrimination based on criminal record, racism. So I no longer know which way is up in regards to this stuff.
Black people are more likely to be convicted of drug crimes even when they use drugs at the same rates as white people. Similar for traffic crimes.
Many crimes are poverty-related theft for subsistence, which rich people never need to be tempted with (as they get handouts from their parents) aren't particularly relevant if someone gets a job that eliminates poverty. And childhood poverty is correlated to race.
So yeah, screening by criminal record is intertwined with structural racism.
I'm disappointed though not surprised by comments suggesting that Amazon only pay attention to their bottom line. Why shouldn't they do more for racial inequality? That's just as meaningful as $$. Powerful corporations are more and more like governments -- they should be looking out for us, and we should be asking them to. Why not raise our standards?
Because that's not how the economy works. Companies are designed to make money, and "solving the inequality" only costs them money, hurting their employees, their investors, and their other customers (services may decrease if stretched too thin). Stop worrying about making a social justice war about everything, and do your job well.
I'm disappointed though not surprised by comments suggesting that Amazon only pay attention to their bottom line. Why shouldn't they do more for racial inequality? That's just as meaningful as $$. Powerful corporations are more and more like governments -- they should be looking out for us, and we should be asking them to. Why not raise our standards?
You're proposing that Amazon's employees, customers, and shareholders pay out of their pockets to fund your social engineering project.
How about this instead: You get together with a bunch of your social justice-y friends, pool a few hundred million dollars, then offer it to Amazon, on the condition that they start serving these neighborhoods.
Everyone wins! The only difference is that now you are the one who has to pay for your virtue-signaling social crusade. But you're cool with that right?
My god, how could anyone be expected to overcome poverty and inequality without same-day prime delivery? Sure there's still two-day prime delivery that the majority of Amazon Prime members of all races have, but clearly that's no different than the grim inequality of segregated water fountains and poll taxes. The implied conclusion is that a business should do something that loses them revenue if the alternative is a…
That's a bit of a reductio ad absurdum. Same-day Prime service is a bit of a luxury now, but so was internet access twenty years ago. Widespread internet access has had many positive economic effects in poor communities. Better Prime access may do to the same, as the article says, by increasing the range of available goods and reducing their prices - both positive effects in poor communities.
I'm disappointed though not surprised by comments suggesting that Amazon only pay attention to their bottom line. Why shouldn't they do more for racial inequality? That's just as meaningful as $$. Powerful corporations are more and more like governments -- they should be looking out for us, and we should be asking them to. Why not raise our standards?
You're proposing that Amazon's employees, customers, and shareholders pay out of their pockets to fund your social engineering project. How about this instead: You get together with a bunch of your social justice-y friends, pool a few hundred million dollars, then offer it to Amazon, on the condition that they start serving these neighborhoods. Everyone wins! The only difference is that now you are the one who has to…
Hmm. Amazon puts a few pennies extra onto my items, and poor communities get access to a service that's much cheaper than shopping at a convenience store? Freeing up their capital to spend elsewhere in the economy, like on products and services my company offers?
I'm disappointed though not surprised by comments suggesting that Amazon only pay attention to their bottom line. Why shouldn't they do more for racial inequality? That's just as meaningful as $$. Powerful corporations are more and more like governments -- they should be looking out for us, and we should be asking them to. Why not raise our standards?
You're proposing that Amazon's employees, customers, and shareholders pay out of their pockets to fund your social engineering project. How about this instead: You get together with a bunch of your social justice-y friends, pool a few hundred million dollars, then offer it to Amazon, on the condition that they start serving these neighborhoods. Everyone wins! The only difference is that now you are the one who has to…
My god, how could anyone be expected to overcome poverty and inequality without same-day prime delivery? Sure there's still two-day prime delivery that the majority of Amazon Prime members of all races have, but clearly that's no different than the grim inequality of segregated water fountains and poll taxes. The implied conclusion is that a business should do something that loses them revenue if the alternative is a…
That's a bit of a reductio ad absurdum. Same-day Prime service is a bit of a luxury now, but so was internet access twenty years ago. Widespread internet access has had many positive economic effects in poor communities. Better Prime access may do to the same, as the article says, by increasing the range of available goods and reducing their prices - both positive effects in poor communities.
This is equivalent to an article arguing that 50 mb/s internet isn't fast enough and every community should be offered 100 mb/s internet, even if doing so causes large net losses to the providers.
They don't produce any evidence that the difference between one day and two day shipping has a negative impact on people's ability to increase the amount of available goods and obtain them at lower prices. Is there some mysterious perishable, necessary good that can only be ordered 24 hours in advance that unlocks upward mobility?