What Amazon Does to Poor Cities

I think the best people for jobs like this are those that just want supplemental income. Teenagers, College Kids, Part-time or temp workers.

A common theme I see with these articles is how "grueling" the work is. People need some perspective on what grueling work is. I worked at a UPS hub during college, where I'd load, unload, and sort the contents of trailers. What they do seems pretty easy compared to what I did at UPS. Picking and packing orders is a lot less grueling than unloading trailers full of 60 pound paper boxes, or loading hundreds of packages an hour into outbound trailers (where if you backed up too much you could shut down the entire line), or sorting over a thousand packages an hour. None of us ever complained that the work was too hard or grueling -- at best we just wanted another person in our trailer to split the load with and BS with. I honestly miss that work; it's just too bad I can't make as much doing that as working in tech.

Compare that to an Amazon fulfillment center, where from what I've seen they walk a lot to pick packages (but even that's being automated away by Kiva robots), put the contents into boxes, and load the boxes into trailers. Amazon packages are relatively light compared to most business shipments of stuff that went through UPS (which are usually things packed in bulk). Maybe it's mind-numbing, but the horror stories about how physically grueling it is (save for maybe when they weren't properly air conditioning the facilities) seem overboard. Even then, there were days in the summer where I'd be unloading a trailer that was baking in the sun all day, and we didn't get AC in there -- we just sweated it out and drank a lot of water.

I don't really know what people expect when they work in a warehouse. It's not glamorous and it's not easy, and it doesn't require that much skill so it doesn't command that much pay. But it's better than no job at all.

You say that journalists are "just trying every way possible to create an anti-tech sentiment". You are implying motive here, it appears. On what basis?

I view it from this lens: journalists have both a professional code and a desire to have people read what they write. As a result, many journalists want to surprise and even shock people. It doesn't mean what they write is pleasant or what you want to read.

There are many other factors in play. For example, cities across the US are scrambling to offer (quite dubious, in my opinion) incentives to Amazon. I really value different perspectives that show the kinds of jobs that Amazon creates.

Lastly, I read your last sentence as getting it backwards. It is precisely because of noise that we have to focus on what matters. What you call noise may be someone else's signal. Noise makes it harder to sort through information, that's nothing new. Asking for less journalism in order to get less noise seems backwards. Journalism, to the degree to which it investigates, analyzes, interviews, helps offer different ways of viewing the world. To do so is hardly what I would call noise; rather, good journalism shows researched, sometimes novel perspectives on reality.

Consumers’ votes with our dollars is what drives it all and certainly what attracts (5).

Consider the effect of (2), (3), and (4) upon the worker at the margin: they will all constrict the number of jobs relative to what it is today. Great for the lucky fewer who get in, but the economist must consider both the seen (higher wages for some) and the unseen (unemployment for others).

As to (1), Amazon is at the Walmart end of the market and are driving up affordability; the two go hand-in-hand. Does sufficient demand for a Target or Costco exist?

An anecdote, for what it’s worth: the people I knew who drove their trucks several years ago had the opposite view of how they were treated, particularly about being chronically shortchanged on retirement contributions, leave balances, and other accounting matters. Maybe things have changed since then.