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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

#161

Post by allturtles »

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…

I'm increasingly put out by Amazon and am trying to stop the habit of shopping there. I like books, and Amazon was founded on books, but the way they ship books now (typically loose in a soft envelope or mostly empty box) means that >50% of the books I've ordered recently have arrived damaged and had to be returned. They used to shrinkwrap books to a cardboard plate inside the box.

There are other problems: 1) Search is just terrible. Often I have to search in Google to find the product I'm looking for at Amazon. The "other people bought/looked at these items" functionality which partially made up for bad search has been pushed out in favor of sponsored products (i.e. ads).

2) Shipping is only fast and cheap if you get Prime, which basically means paying for your shipping in advance and buying constantly at Amazon to amortize your initial investment.

3) Because Amazon no longer actually controls its own catalog, duplicate listings, misleading listings, merged listings that amalgamate multiple different editions of the same book, etc. abound. e.g. search for "Norton Anthology of English Literature". Instead of a neatly sorted list by volume/edition/condition, you get a whole mess of duplicate/overlapping listings, and also misleading garbage like this (shows 3 books but you only get 1 of them): https://www.amazon.com/Norton-Anthology-English-Literature-P....

I'm shifting towards just using Amazon as a 'wishlist' shopping cart and then finding the actual thing to buy elsewhere.

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

#162

Post by _delirium »

tptacek wrote: post #89
cs702 wrote: post #59

That makes Amazon #3, after the federal government and Walmart: Entity US Employees 1. US Government 2.7M 2. Walmart 1.6M 3. Amazon 1.0M If Amazon continues to grow at current rates, it will surpass Walmart's figure within 2 years. Looking at these figures, it's evident that these three entities are far larger, wealthier, more connected, and likely more powerful than the vast majority of US cities, the vast majority…

Is this level of concentration a totally new phenomenon? In the 1970s GM employed almost 700k people, and the US population like 30% lower. Is it just different companies every generation?

U.S. Steel peaked around there in the 1940s too, somewhere in the ballpark of 1 out of 175 U.S. workers.

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

#163

Post by dalbasal »

hammock wrote: post #64
dalbasal wrote: post #48

Also consider that quite a lot of people work within Amazon's greater sphere, with degrees of dependence ranging from significant to absolute. Eg all the people employed in parts of the ecommerce industry where amazon wields most of the power. AWSland. Etc. Since everyone is using government works as the comparison, government employees + government contractors, and those in the government contracting sphere. so, yea…

There are still more Walmart employees than Amazon employees.

True, they're big too.

That said, amazon is just more of a moving target. So, news.

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

#165

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

cs702 wrote: post #59

That makes Amazon #3, after the federal government and Walmart: Entity US Employees 1. US Government 2.7M 2. Walmart 1.6M 3. Amazon 1.0M If Amazon continues to grow at current rates, it will surpass Walmart's figure within 2 years. Looking at these figures, it's evident that these three entities are far larger, wealthier, more connected, and likely more powerful than the vast majority of US cities, the vast majority…

The law grants cities powers that corporations do not have. Corporations are only more powerful if wealth can be used to subvert the rule of law.

And that never happens. /s

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

#166

Post by glial »

echelon wrote: post #139
jhallenworld wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh boy, the new quote: "What's good for Amazon, is good for America." When GM was "good for America", we pretty much lost public transportation, so what are we losing now?

- Book stores (which were pretty awesome, actually) - Open source - Concentration of compute resources - American cinema (well, I suppose Disney has a hand in this too)

- family-owned retail businesses

- distribution of ownership of the 'means of retail production'

- worker rights (looking at you, gig economy and Amazon delivery drivers)

- brand reliability (so much on Amazon is brand-free)

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

#167

Post by lotsofpulp »

MattGaiser wrote: post #149
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? Motivate other retailers to not be such lazy louts about technology?

I am quite impressed with all the other retailers websites, much more than Amazon’s actually.

I can see which aisle things are in the store, what can be picked up today, what can be ordered to the store, etc.

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

#168

Post by tyingq »

"Amazon employs 950,000 workers in the US"

Is that the count of actual "employees with an employee number", or does that include contractors?

Edit: Apparently, yes, actual US employees. From the Q2 2021 Quarterly Results:

"Amazon introduced a new mental health benefit for all of its 950,000 U.S. employees..."

https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2021/q2/...

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

#169

Post by niij »

seattle_spring wrote: post #141
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 !

Why is "1 in X" so much worse than "X in 100"?

It's not. They just need something to complain about.

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

#170

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

mcguire wrote: post #85

Burying the lede: " Amazon is still a distant second to the country's largest private employer, Walmart, which employs nearly 1.6 million people in the US, or one out of every 91 workers. "

It's the derivative that matters.
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