371–380 of 398 posts
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True. Hey, you haven't been doing any home deliveries lately, is everything ok? Oh, well we have to reduce your shifts next week.
Sorry, cars broke. Can I get a paycheck advance to get the repairs done?
Important Caveat though, you can only do it once in a lifetime.
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What if they offered overtime to workers who wanted extra money, or offered promotions to people who work particularly hard? Would you have the same dim view of these as you do of this package delivery thing? If they were able to cut wages in the future, surely they'd do it regardless.
Serious question: would you like a job at Walmart? Do you feel attracted to the idea of working there? I could imagine working at Trader Joe's. Downside, running a supermarket is a very tedious and unrewarding job. Upside, you don't have to take your work home with you, I like their products and business model, and the firm treats its employees really well, in terms of both pay and conditions. People I've met sociall…
> Would you honestly want to work for a Walmart Store in practice?
I state that because the corporate level options are extremely lucrative. Walmart Tech holds many events, seminars, and speakers for associates to attend during work hours. Although, there is the annoying Walmart Chant...
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Yeah, huge difference between "deliver this on your way home or your fired" and "if you want some extra money, deliver this on your way home." Not much difference between this and, say, LaserShip, aside from it being a small part of the overall job.
Needing money is its own kind of coercion, especially when being a walmart employee doesnt pay much.
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Reinforcement from an unlikely quarter! The Big Ugly for anyone working in retail the past 20 years is that stores have done almost nothing to improve workers' productivity. Price scanners were a 1990s innovation and there hasn't been much to follow. So it's very hard for workers to make an economic case that they should be getting paid more. (There's a human-decency case, but that doesn't always prevail.) In fact, a…
> stores have done almost nothing to improve workers' productivity They also got their lesson with Amazon and other online retailers taking productivity to the max by streamlining warehouse operations and removing physical retail with its inefficiencies and expensive leases out of equation. Currently US retail market can be broken down into three large groups - already bankrupt (Circuit City, Good Guys, Borders, Fore…
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Incentive: their hourly wages. Routes are selected to minimize extra time on commute. Up to 10 packages per person. Will get a navigational app. Source: https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/walmart-begins-testing-usi...
So not only do I work for you, but you want me to install your custom app on my personal device, too? I can't imagine there are any privacy backdoors here at all. Definitely not when I'm required to give it location permissions for it to function. /s
I can say with absolute assurance that it does not.
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Ugh. I think that this sort of attitude (which was my initial reaction too) is a big part of what's wrong with our current economy. If you take the concept at face value, this is Walmart offering to let their employees make some extra money in exchange for a bit of extra work, once they've clocked out. What a nice company. But realistically, this is Walmart shunting the costs of delivery onto their employees. Instead…
You could be totally right, but honestly this whole idea sounds like something a union would do. I don't wonder if this is to throw the employees a bone, in hopes of staving off employees trying to unionize. My main worry is the safety. Who is controlling how many hours are worked? This may not seem safety related at first, but many state DOT's might have a problem with 8 hour shift employees then going and working 5…
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Walmart has less than 3% profit margin. It'd go bankrupt if it paid its employees $15/hour.
If you compare Costco to Sam's Club, you'll notice that it's not that simple.
At Sam's, I'm constantly bombarded with questions of if I need help.
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If you don't understand why businesses don't like unions, you've never owned a business. Also, historically, unions in the USA for whatever reason a lot of times end up becoming mafioso (not sure if it's the same in other countries).
Yet without unions, employees are on their own to evaluate the non-obvious risks and hidden costs in deals such as this one. It's massive information asymmetry leading inevitably to exploitation; it's far from the ideal of perfect information and distorts the labor marketplace, leading to huge inefficiencies in the labor economy. We desperately need innovation in how labor unions are structured and compete with each…
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Why F#?
https://tech.jet.com/blog/2015/03-22-on-how-jet-chose/ The app for associate delivery was written by Jet developers. Pretty much all of Jet's code is written in F#. Edit: Actually I think it was written mostly by a contractor who had experience writing Xamarin apps in F#, possibly with contributions from full-time Jet developers.
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Ask yourself if you think you're stupid, then read the entirety of the agreement for your car insurance (or any insurance, for that matter), and then ask yourself if you think you're stupid.
And even if you read it, you're not actually qualified to understand it unless you're a lawyer. Even if you think you understand it, you don't.