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Jeff Bezos has returned to day-to-day management of Amazon

businessinsider.com

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Re: Jeff Bezos has returned to day-to-day management of Amazon

#131

Post by ignoramous »

ethagknight wrote: post #126
MattGaiser wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a friend at Amazon and they say absenteeism among employees is through the roof. They can neither hire nor keep the employees they do have.

That would fall under the "they can't afford to deliver the orders they have" bucket if they can't find anyone that wants to do the proposed work. If true, Amazon is selling a service that isn't robust or flexible enough for such a season. Will be interesting to see how it shakes out.

> Will be interesting to see how it shakes out.

Long term is probably a combination of autonomous robots, self-driving vehicles, and delivery drones. The current crisis might even accelerate its development and deployment.

Re: Jeff Bezos has returned to day-to-day management of Amazon

#132

Post by hansthehorse »

stevenmays wrote: post #129
MattGaiser wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a friend at Amazon and they say absenteeism among employees is through the roof. They can neither hire nor keep the employees they do have.

Unemployment compensation is high, so the incentive to show up to work has decreased. They can solve this problem by paying more, although wage increases are hard to turn back time on. Maybe they should consider "hazard pay" during the pandemic.

In Florida unemployment is a max of 235 dollars for a max of 12 weeks. Nobody is going on unemployment for a raise here.

Re: Jeff Bezos has returned to day-to-day management of Amazon

#133

Post by ethagknight »

ethagknight wrote: post #109

My theory: Prime, and its 2-day shipping service, is a flat rate deal, priced according to 10.5 normal months and 1.5 batshit crazy delivery months. Since they can't charge on a demand basis for shipping like FedEx can, they've run into an internal train wreck where they can't afford to deliver all the orders the've received. So their bottleneck is actually a bottleneck of budgeted "delivery slots" for these Spring m…

One more little note: I can't think of any other stores that have had to make a similar claim of 'focusing on the essentials.' At the other end of the spectrum, my local Costco has been fantastically stocked at all times except for the few super-demand items like toilet paper and soap.

Re: Jeff Bezos has returned to day-to-day management of Amazon

#134

Post by jonknee »

arkades wrote: post #9
sytelus wrote: post #4

This is quite significant given market is very bullish on Amazon (Goldman is just all over it). The expectations are set sky high to do well during these times. But if you look at things as consumer, it doesn't look so good. Personally, I've significantly less orders on Amazon these days because of huge delivery times. Sure, orders for "essentials" might have gone up but can that offset the gap? Also, sellers are ver…

Delivery times are up because of the volume of business. As essentials business falls down (or 'if', if people get used to using Amazon over their local store), delivery times will fall as well. This isn't a meaningful long-term criticism.

I am skeptical of this because there are almost no essentials that are available to order.

Re: Jeff Bezos has returned to day-to-day management of Amazon

#135

Post by mcintyre1994 »

libria wrote: post #100
whoevercares wrote: post #88

Buy Amazon. It’s seeing Black Friday traffic everyday and AWS can’t be feeling better then ever during this period

I think retail will be more consistent than AWS. IMO the economic impact to AWS is delayed a few months. Businesses are making personnel cuts now and will shore up ops costs by Q4 2020 if not sooner. From Q1 2021 it'll be hard to sell and onboard new service till the economy recovers.

There’s also the apparently massive use of Azure, if the companies currently jumping in there are looking to do huge cloud spend in a few months I’m not sure AWS will be the winner there. Though maybe this is all a big enough market for them both to see massive growth, I’m definitely just speculating.

Re: Jeff Bezos has returned to day-to-day management of Amazon

#136

Post by stevenmays »

hansthehorse wrote: post #132
stevenmays wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unemployment compensation is high, so the incentive to show up to work has decreased. They can solve this problem by paying more, although wage increases are hard to turn back time on. Maybe they should consider "hazard pay" during the pandemic.

In Florida unemployment is a max of 235 dollars for a max of 12 weeks. Nobody is going on unemployment for a raise here.

+600 from the feds per week. In most states, it is higher.

Re: Jeff Bezos has returned to day-to-day management of Amazon

#137

Post by cosmie »

geerlingguy wrote: post #108
willio58 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, this is a great example of an echo-chamber that's developed in the HN community. Some of it is deserved, but not all.

It's highly dependent on what you're looking for. If you search for "Belkin USB charger", you'll usually end up getting some good results at the top of the listings. But if you search for "USB charger", you need to prepare yourself for pages upon pages of identical-looking chargers from "Amoner", "RAVpower", "iSmart", "Ailkin", "Anker", "Power7", "Nekmit", etc. And most of them have hundreds or thousands of 4/5-star…

Some of those are legitimately good brands (Anker and RAVpower being two I'm personally familiar with). Anker has even grown in North America to the point of having distribution within physical stores such as Sam's Club[1].

That said, your point still stands. These are not household names in the North American market, and it's not immediately obvious what is a legitimate and reliable option vs. a throw-away brand selling imported fire hazards.

[1] https://www.samsclub.com/p/anker-6-port-qc-blk-spring2017/pr...

Re: Jeff Bezos has returned to day-to-day management of Amazon

#138

Post by emmp »

hansthehorse wrote: post #132
stevenmays wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unemployment compensation is high, so the incentive to show up to work has decreased. They can solve this problem by paying more, although wage increases are hard to turn back time on. Maybe they should consider "hazard pay" during the pandemic.

In Florida unemployment is a max of 235 dollars for a max of 12 weeks. Nobody is going on unemployment for a raise here.

In normal times, true. However unemployment insurance has been significantly boosted by the CARES act during the pandemic

Re: Jeff Bezos has returned to day-to-day management of Amazon

#139

Post by CalRobert »

hansthehorse wrote: post #132
stevenmays wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unemployment compensation is high, so the incentive to show up to work has decreased. They can solve this problem by paying more, although wage increases are hard to turn back time on. Maybe they should consider "hazard pay" during the pandemic.

In Florida unemployment is a max of 235 dollars for a max of 12 weeks. Nobody is going on unemployment for a raise here.

Except it's now $835 a week, or over $40k a year. You'd have to pay me a lot to get me back to work if I had that option.

Re: Jeff Bezos has returned to day-to-day management of Amazon

#140

Post by MattGaiser »

ethagknight wrote: post #126
MattGaiser wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a friend at Amazon and they say absenteeism among employees is through the roof. They can neither hire nor keep the employees they do have.

That would fall under the "they can't afford to deliver the orders they have" bucket if they can't find anyone that wants to do the proposed work. If true, Amazon is selling a service that isn't robust or flexible enough for such a season. Will be interesting to see how it shakes out.

> If true, Amazon is selling a service that isn't robust or flexible enough for such a season.

Nobody in that area is robust enough for a once in a century pandemic.

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