Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 272 posts

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

#251

Post by 8bitsrule »

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.

Or maybe they could solve this problem by permanently sharing more of their obscene profits with their workers, fully recognizing how essential their sacrifices and contributions (regardless of any 'hazard') are to those profits. If we're not learning that right now, we're rather missing the point of it.

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

#252

Post by cyphar »

WhyKill wrote: post #13

Amazon sucks now. I can't buy most of the specific items I use in my work, and when I do find something it's swimming in a sea of clone crap. The best thing it does still is books. Anything else is a mizxed bag. AMZ is just Ali Baba for people who can't wait for the ship.

> The best thing it does still is books.

Well, that's a pretty strong indictment of how badly their business operates. Every book I've ever ordered from Amazon has been damaged (either badly folded covers or even ripped pages). I started buying from local bookshops and the experience is infinitely better.

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

#254

Post by ethagknight »

MattGaiser wrote: post #186
ethagknight wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies that have the ability to price according to the strain on their system, like FedEx and UPS, are presumably far more robust in this scenario. Here's the rub: Amazon Prime is a contract for services at a certain annual price between the customer and Amazon. Amazon cannot easily just ask for more if their end of the deal ends up more costly to deliver than forecasted.

They can just not deliver the service. Amazon Prime doesn't guarantee that any item you want will come in two days.

Thats what they are doing, and I, the customer, am no longer getting the value I signed up for.

For a "customer obsession strategy," this one should hurt their bottom line, either with cancellation of prime subscriptions or lost sales. I am not saying amazon should be penalized or taken to court. This is just the biggest vulnerability I have seen out of the Amazon machine, and I think its very interesting.

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

#255

Post by pythonaut_16 »

Retric wrote: post #190
MattGaiser wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is still far smaller than other pandemics in the last 100 years. The 1957 "Asian flu" had around 1–4 million dead. AIDS is sitting around 770,000 dead per year and the total is vastly higher etc. What makes things different about COVID-19 is how people are responding to it in the hope of saving vast numbers of lives.

AIDS isn't really a relevant comparison to COVID-19

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

#256

Post by cs2818 »

jdoliner wrote: post #82

Has anyone else noticed Amazon shipping them more of items than they ordered? I've recently had this happen in two separate orders, including receiving 3 SSDs when I'd just ordered 1, for a free $300 of SSD.

Yep, received 5 of a product instead of one.

It wasn't anything expensive, but it looked like it didn't get split out of the bulk packaging it was likely received in (barcode for single item was applied to bundle of 5).

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

#257

Post by jjeaff »

Scipio_Afri wrote: post #171
CalRobert wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You just cited the gross income, not what you get after taxes. You still get taxed on that AND you don't have benefits like health insurance - COBRA for continuing health care is expensive as is the alternative, although slightly less so, of paying for health care through an the ACA health care exchanges 100 percent out of your own pocket. For health care all that extra money will more than exceed health insurance fo…

If you make $40k for a family of 4, your ACA premiums will be much lower than that.

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

#258

Post by vageli »

ashtonkem wrote: post #248
ardy42 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon Prime doesn't guarantee that any item you want will come in two days. So you're saying their deal is "pay us $120/year but we make no commitment to provide anything in exchange?"

It’s sadly not uncommon for businesses to promise various services and then unilaterally change their minds. While I’m sure that there are some exceptions, most TOS have a ton of “we reserve the right to change our minds whenever for whatever reason, without warning” Now that’s kind of different from the PR fallout. Amazon is risking a mass walkout of their customers over this; it just depends on whether or not custo…

> It’s sadly not uncommon for businesses to promise various services and then unilaterally change their minds. While I’m sure that there are some exceptions, most TOS have a ton of “we reserve the right to change our minds whenever for whatever reason, without warning”

I was under the impression that one party cannot unilaterally modify the terms of a contract without offering consideration to the other party, and the consideration can't be "we will continue to perform according to the terms of the contract".

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

#259

Post by gowld »

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…

Has Amazon refunded everyone's Prime membership fees yet? At least partially? Or offered cancellations for people who don't use Prime digital services? That's an obvious first step to stop needlessly angering people.

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

#260

Post by gowld »

Scipio_Afri wrote: post #171
CalRobert wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You just cited the gross income, not what you get after taxes. You still get taxed on that AND you don't have benefits like health insurance - COBRA for continuing health care is expensive as is the alternative, although slightly less so, of paying for health care through an the ACA health care exchanges 100 percent out of your own pocket. For health care all that extra money will more than exceed health insurance fo…

If you earn $30K/yr you pay very very little taxes, possibly negative
Post reply on HN