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1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

businessinsider.com

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Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

#91

Post by drdec »

throwslackforce wrote: post #17
traceroute66 wrote: post #6

Rant time.... ;-) What's with these stupid "X in Y" numeric expressions that the dumb media insist on continuing to heap on the world ? Why not consistently use a standardised means of comparison. Like, I don't know .... percent. Or "X in 100" if you think your newspaper/blog/website readership are too dumb to know what the % symbol means. The clue's in the name FFS ... per... cent ... that's what its there for !

You can't have a fraction of a person. The probability of having .65 out of 100 people working for Amazon is zero, no matter which 100 people you select. 1 out of 153 can at least happen.

We should start using the birthday paradox number (BPN) to express these things. That is, the smallest group of people such that the probability that at least one of them will exhibit the criteria is greater than 50%.

In this case, the BPN for working at Amazon is 107 (assuming everyone in the group is a worker).

Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

#92

Post by QuarterReptile »

barbazoo wrote: post #41
binaryblitz wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having had to get a passport recently, yes. At least better in the sense that you are actually receiving a service you've paid for. It is virtually impossible to get an appointment at the passport office in the US right now. Not a local passport office, ANY passport office. There were people outside the one I went to offering a Nintendo Switch to people to trade for a time slot. The shortest wait time I had on the ph…

I'm not sure what you are arguing here. You can buy things on Amazon but it's difficult to get a Passport right now. How is one thing related to the other?

Probably parent is writing in terms of the common line of thinking that Amazon exercises significant control over our lives by being so enormous and saying that it's not nearly so abusive a relationship as ones he's trapped in with other large institutions.

And if you have only a single citizenship, being stuck with the passport office is about as stuck as you can be.

Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

#93

Post by underseacables »

jdavis703 wrote: post #86
underseacables wrote: post #72

I’m torn badly with Amazon. After read The Everything Store, and what has been written all over the place, Jeff Bezos is a massive turd. Employees are horribly treated, wages suppressed, and all sorts of terrible and abusive practices. Then it comes time for me to buy something. I needed a new pair of size 14 sneakers. I drove to Adidas, Footlocker, dicks, and a few other stores but I just couldn’t justify $100 sneak…

Aren’t size 14 shoes on the long side of the tail? Amazon will always be better at that than a brick and mortar retailer.

For YEARS I bought Merrills in 13W from Dicks or REI. I made do but I hoped PayLess were still around. Shoes are really expensive, but fair point, I got big feet.

Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

#94

Post by shakezula »

fridif wrote: post #81
underseacables wrote: post #72

I’m torn badly with Amazon. After read The Everything Store, and what has been written all over the place, Jeff Bezos is a massive turd. Employees are horribly treated, wages suppressed, and all sorts of terrible and abusive practices. Then it comes time for me to buy something. I needed a new pair of size 14 sneakers. I drove to Adidas, Footlocker, dicks, and a few other stores but I just couldn’t justify $100 sneak…

>"So aside from just stop buying from Amazon, what can we do?" Lower the barriers to entry for business. It is not easy to comply with regulations and reporting. A scrappy startup can replace Amazon if they can focus on things that are not burdensome and arbitrary, like rent + insurance + tax reporting + legal.

Lol, no a startup can't replace Amazon without themselves having all of those rents, and insurances, and reporting accountants and lawyers. Amazon has a logistics network that rivals the U.S. military's right now. You can't just "displace & disrupt" that with a trendy San Francisco office.

Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

#95

Post by shakezula »

missedthecue wrote: post #82
underseacables wrote: post #72

I’m torn badly with Amazon. After read The Everything Store, and what has been written all over the place, Jeff Bezos is a massive turd. Employees are horribly treated, wages suppressed, and all sorts of terrible and abusive practices. Then it comes time for me to buy something. I needed a new pair of size 14 sneakers. I drove to Adidas, Footlocker, dicks, and a few other stores but I just couldn’t justify $100 sneak…

Why do you accuse them of suppressing wages when they lead the way to $15/hr, and when they literally spend money lobbying congress to raise the federal minimum wage? https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-15-minimum-wage-lobby...

Because they participate in union busting?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/09/amazon-...

Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

#96

Post by ethbr0 »

underseacables wrote: post #72

I’m torn badly with Amazon. After read The Everything Store, and what has been written all over the place, Jeff Bezos is a massive turd. Employees are horribly treated, wages suppressed, and all sorts of terrible and abusive practices. Then it comes time for me to buy something. I needed a new pair of size 14 sneakers. I drove to Adidas, Footlocker, dicks, and a few other stores but I just couldn’t justify $100 sneak…

Amazon is Amazon because they didn't let size dull their edge.

Unfortunately, that cuts both ways. There are a lot of ways to be exploitive, to your and your customers' benefits, when you're a $113 B revenue/quarter company, that simply aren't available when you're a startup.

Hell, Walmart pioneered the "How'd you like to sell in our stores?" + "You need to reduce prices, or it'd be a shame if we, your biggest customer, had to drop you" two step. And Amazon pioneered hyperscale logistics efficiencies. Both of which only work if you're giant.

If we want a return to competition of yore, I think it's only going to happen if we (a) prevent "extra-large" companies from having in-house logistics & (b) prevent predatory contracts and pricing when a size disparity exists (e.g. Walmart/supplier).

And given both of these are pretty fundamental to the way many companies work, I'm not even sure they'd be feasible.

Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

#97

Post by robocat »

fridif wrote: post #81
underseacables wrote: post #72

I’m torn badly with Amazon. After read The Everything Store, and what has been written all over the place, Jeff Bezos is a massive turd. Employees are horribly treated, wages suppressed, and all sorts of terrible and abusive practices. Then it comes time for me to buy something. I needed a new pair of size 14 sneakers. I drove to Adidas, Footlocker, dicks, and a few other stores but I just couldn’t justify $100 sneak…

>"So aside from just stop buying from Amazon, what can we do?" Lower the barriers to entry for business. It is not easy to comply with regulations and reporting. A scrappy startup can replace Amazon if they can focus on things that are not burdensome and arbitrary, like rent + insurance + tax reporting + legal.

> burdensome and arbitrary, like rent + insurance + tax reporting + legal.

If "rent + insurance" are unnecessary overheads, you might as well say employee protections are completely useless regulations too.

Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

#99

Post by krapp »

fridif wrote: post #81
underseacables wrote: post #72

I’m torn badly with Amazon. After read The Everything Store, and what has been written all over the place, Jeff Bezos is a massive turd. Employees are horribly treated, wages suppressed, and all sorts of terrible and abusive practices. Then it comes time for me to buy something. I needed a new pair of size 14 sneakers. I drove to Adidas, Footlocker, dicks, and a few other stores but I just couldn’t justify $100 sneak…

>"So aside from just stop buying from Amazon, what can we do?" Lower the barriers to entry for business. It is not easy to comply with regulations and reporting. A scrappy startup can replace Amazon if they can focus on things that are not burdensome and arbitrary, like rent + insurance + tax reporting + legal.

You expect a scrappy startup which has few or no regulations to comply with to treat their employees better than Amazon, which only treats their employees as well as they do because regulations force them to?

Re: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee

#100

Post by TheSoftwareGuy »

underseacables wrote: post #72

I’m torn badly with Amazon. After read The Everything Store, and what has been written all over the place, Jeff Bezos is a massive turd. Employees are horribly treated, wages suppressed, and all sorts of terrible and abusive practices. Then it comes time for me to buy something. I needed a new pair of size 14 sneakers. I drove to Adidas, Footlocker, dicks, and a few other stores but I just couldn’t justify $100 sneak…

> Employees are horribly treated, wages suppressed, and all sorts of terrible and abusive practices

We need to make those things illegal and we need to make sure those laws are enforced. This is the greatest downfall of capitalism, morals cannot be enforced by consumers because business operations are completely opaque to them. No company should be able to outcompete another by using such terrible, exploitative practices.

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