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Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

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Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#851

Post by SeeDave »

alanfalcon wrote: post #830
SeeDave wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it be possible to expound on this comment with a decent source (first party is totally okay!)? I ask not as a personal attack on your credibility, this comment just seems a bit inconsistent with the Holacracy movement that he championed a couple of years back.

https://pando.com/2012/06/06/zappos-hands-over-warehousing-t... - as you can see, the warehouse isn't included in any of the good stuff, it was just unceremoniously handed over to Amazon to be run as Amazon warehouses are run. I agree that this is inconcsistent with the Holacracy movement (even if the move preceded the movement officially, clearly these workers were never fully Zappos employees in Tony's eyes, which…

Thanks for sharing, and I agree that it is always sad to see upper management marginalize the contributions of certain groups of employees.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#852

Post by pc86 »

sqeaky wrote: post #710
s73ver wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"SE is not IMO a vocation that needs to organize." The games industry disproves your theory.

I think game dev is the way it is because so many romanticize game development. A ton of grads fresh out of college want to get in and are competing for a the limited (but large) amount of work it takes to make a game. The big a-hole studios realize this and charge sub-prime wages because after they burn a dev out there will be another to replace them still starry-eyed from a childhood playing games. I have read seve…

> The big a-hole studios realize this and charge sub-prime wages

First of all, "sub-prime wages" is not a thing I've ever heard of. Absolutely nothing on Google so I'm assuming you mean below market wages, which game industry wages are by definition not.

Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, paying people what they are willing to earn does not make game studios assholes. Everyone developing software for game studios knows they could make more writing software for a bank or some YC CRUD app.

> I have read several stories of people leaving game deve for a nice boring job writing insurance software for more money and fewer hours.

With the right skills, you can leave any industry and go to any other industry and make more money. Not sure what your point is here.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#853

Post by naravara »

omegaham wrote: post #764
naravara wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our proclivity to treat all “unskilled labor” as if the people doing them are trained monkeys is one of the reasons customer service in large retail stores is so often horrible. If you treat your people like valuable members of society/your organization they will develop and improve on the actual skills that an unskilled job needs, like anticipating problems, knowing when an how to escalate issues, being warm to cust…

When comparing price to customer service, price wins every time. We can say all we please that we want great customer service, but we vote with our wallets, and our wallets say "Save $5 per trip to interact with the trained monkeys." Thus, we have Walmart.

>When comparing price to customer service, price wins every time.

This is very much a cultural problem that stems from treating service workers as subhuman and undeserving of a decent wage.

And the price difference is hardly as high as $5 per trip. Even places with really high minimum wages don't get that bad. It's more like a few extra cents, barely noticeable. Where the savings on payroll at the bottom are going is usually payroll further up the chain.

Some stores have much better customer service than others, like Whole Foods and Costco (just to cover both sides of the pricing models), and they seem to be doing all right.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#854

Post by s73ver »

pc86 wrote: post #852
sqeaky wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think game dev is the way it is because so many romanticize game development. A ton of grads fresh out of college want to get in and are competing for a the limited (but large) amount of work it takes to make a game. The big a-hole studios realize this and charge sub-prime wages because after they burn a dev out there will be another to replace them still starry-eyed from a childhood playing games. I have read seve…

> The big a-hole studios realize this and charge sub-prime wages First of all, "sub-prime wages" is not a thing I've ever heard of. Absolutely nothing on Google so I'm assuming you mean below market wages, which game industry wages are by definition not . Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, paying people what they are willing to earn does not make game studios assholes. Everyone developing software for game studi…

Your argument boils down to, "If they agree to it, there's absolutely nothing wrong," which is an argument that I've never accepted before. A person in a position of power, which the studios are, taking advantage of young people to pay them below market wages (which these are, despite whatever you try to argue) and work them insane hours, is wrong, full stop. There is absolutely zero reason why game wages should be below regular development wages.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#855

Post by upvotinglurker »

Spooky23 wrote: post #693
zebrafish wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The products Amazon is trying to distribute with this deal are.... food products.

Amazon could get rid of the big bullshit medicine section that Whole Foods has and replace it with useful products.

The bullshit medicine must be lucrative, though, or the section wouldn't be so big. (Not saying the medicine isn't bullshit, just that people apparently like to buy it anyway.)

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#856

Post by FormerAMZN »

nilved wrote: post #151
illumin8 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I work for AWS, but my opinions are my own. I don't think you have much to worry about if you're a WF employee. Amazon actually treats their employees very well. In my experience here, I've never seen any of the things the NY times article talked about, either on my team or any other team I've interacted with. People have a healthy work/life balance (40-50 hours a week), get paid very well (definitely abo…

> Disclaimer: I work for AWS, but my opinions are my own. > I don't think you have much to worry about if you're a WF employee. Amazon actually treats their employees very well. Normally when people say Amazon abuses their employees, they aren't talking about AWS.

I am, and do, talk about AWS. They treat their employees horribly.

Disclaimer: Former AWS

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#857

Post by FormerAMZN »

dpark wrote: post #291
uji wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is completely true. I was with AWS for 3 years as SW engineer and was working around 12 hours until I decided to switch. AWS has pretty messed up softwar services with lot of technical debt. Rather than fixing these, AWS relies on oncall (pager duty) to mitigate production issues. My team use to get 200 pages a week.

I've heard similar stories from several AWS engineers who were looking to leave or recently left. I can believe that pieces of AWS have good culture, because AWS is a large set of services and it's inevitable that it's not 100% consistent across the entire organization. But I also fully believe that parts of AWS are "duct taped together and on fire" because I've heard it from multiple sources. I've never had anyone i…

100% agree.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#858

Post by tracker1 »

walshemj wrote: post #683
tracker1 wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Some massively rich companies colluded to keep their 5%-er employees from making even more..." Not that I disagree that it was a huge deal, it's hard to gather greater sympathy/empathy from people that tend to make less than half of those aggrieved.

no it depressed the entire industry's wages

I agree... however, the reason it wasn't reported in the news, is because it wouldn't get a good response for the news agency, and likely piss more people off about the victims of that oppression. I'm not saying they weren't in the wrong, only pointing out why it wasn't more reported in mainstream news.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#859

Post by somecontext »

nunez wrote: post #841
somecontext wrote: post #832

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My research suggests that 42 states contain at least one Whole Foods. The eight states excluded are (west to east) Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, West Virginia, Delaware, and Vermont. These are exactly the seven states with population less than one million in the last US Census ... and West Virginia. (Note, however, that the District of Columbia -- also with a population under one million -- ha…

delaware totally has a whole foods; there is one near wilmington iirc

You're welcome to look at https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/stores/list yourself. The store you're remembering might be at 475 Wilmington West Chester Pike in Glen Mills, PA, which is plenty close to Wilmington (as the street name suggests) but is in fact ~2 miles outside of Delaware.

Re: Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B

#860

Post by jacobsenscott »

taway_1212 wrote: post #819
jacobsenscott wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The population of the US is 100x more than Iceland. There are a lot of well run small cities in the US. Iceland's policies would never scale up.

> The population of the US is 100x more than Iceland. Actually, it's 1000x.

Oops. Thanks for the correction.
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