1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by godot » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 9:28 PM UTC

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…

This is only tangentially related to your post at all, but as a budget-conscious shopper, I've come to realize that in America, there is usually a retail shop or two locally that consistently has the best deal for a category of things. Don't get me wrong, I still have to buy from Amazon for a lot of really miscellaneous things, but I think I manage to find good local deals (better than Amazon in most cases) for most category of items I buy, more so than most people. You just have to put in the work to do the research to find where those are (a lot of times that's about going to all these stores often enough that you get an understanding).

In your example of sneakers, Adidas/Footlocker/Dicks are not the places to go for me. Here in California there is a store called Big5 Sporting Goods that consistently has incredible prices (on sale or not). In the past decade I've pretty much never bought shoes anywhere else; most sneakers or hiking shoes I've bought are under $35 and they are the most comfortable shoes I've tried anywhere. There may be a similar store in whatever state you're in.

For clothes and some home goods items, similarly I wouldn't go to brand name stores at the malls; Ross and Marshall always have the best deals. For random home goods, Daiso (an Asian/Japanese brand store) which, fortunately for myself, has a lot of stores in California, has tons of super affordable options, as it's basically a Japanese dollar store. Then there are random things that Target has the best deals for; and other random things that Walmart has the best deals for (I know, buying from Walmart is not much better than buying on Amazon).

My main point is, you don't always have to resort to Amazon for budget, you just have to do enough research work to find out where else to go.

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

#202

Post by taeric » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 9:29 PM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #170

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.

This sort of begs the question on how Walmart is growing.

Actually, the more I think on this claim, the less it makes sense. The xkcd of how many weddings someone will have the day after their marriage comes to mind.

What am I missing?

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

#203

Post by drorco » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 9:30 PM UTC

shakezula wrote: post #90

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 ? The "just stop buying amazon" arguments never made sense to me in the first place, because most people who use it are the ones budget-stretched in the first place. A lot of rural communities have no other viable options for some items as well. It will take massive government action and that's it. There's no other way we can fix this problem. Wages are su…

There's also the other option similar to what happened after the New York Elevator Operator Strike in 1945 -- the total elimination of a profession.

https://www.inc.com/thomas-koulopoulos/100-years-ago-we-fear...

"It wasn't until the middle of the twentieth century that the tipping point came along for the driverless elevator as the result of a strike by the elevator operators' union in New York City in 1945.

The strike was devastating, costing the city an estimated one hundred million dollars. Suddenly, there was an economic incentive to go back to the automatic elevator. Over the next decade there was a massive effort to build trust in automatic elevators, which resulted in the elimination of tens of thousands of elevator operator jobs."

If Amazon is close enough to automating these jobs, then it will likely just automate it and fire whoever it can. If not, then you're likely making the path towards that faster.

I don't see any way for the employees to win this beyond buying a bit more time. Unless the employees, the government, and Amazon, find a way for them to get a profession in which they have more leverage thanks to the *high individual value* they provide, rather than being a temp for future robots.

One solution can be for a union, government, Amazon etc, is to put aside money for a fund that will invest in training these employees so they could one day not depend on these kind of low-leverage jobs.

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

#204

Post by TedDoesntTalk » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 9:31 PM UTC

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…

Buy directly from the manufacturer's website whenever possible. It's not hard, especially for big-label names like those who make sneakers.

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

#205

Post by rossmmurray » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 9:32 PM UTC

runnerup wrote: post #3

I wonder what the largest private employers as % of total labor force have been throughout history. We currently have a labor force of ~160 million people and Walmart employs "1 out of every 72 American workers" or ~1.3%

The UK's National Health Service (NHS) is definitely up there.

There are 1.6m people working for NHS and about 41m people of working age in the UK. So that's about 1 in 26 (or 3.9%).

Sources: https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/nhs-in-a-nutshell/nhs-..., https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTGBQ647S

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

#206

Post by vmception » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 9:33 PM UTC

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

There are two issues here: One is that you want to boycott a company that treats its employees bad, and two is that you buying local makes money circulate in the local economy.

Make sure to decouple those.

I like to play a game of "how is this retail employee going to lie to me today" when I walk in any brick and mortar establishment. Its entertainment.

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

#207

Post by annoyingnoob » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 9:33 PM UTC

morelandjs wrote: post #160

I’m not sure why everyone continually romanticizes brick and mortar retail. Its terribly inefficient, and wasteful of time, energy, space etc. Think of all the Walmart, Dicks, Big Lots parking lots and strip malls that could be converted into better space. Think of how much waste there is when you have to pack, unpack, stage and repack merchandise. Amazon’s distribution is a superior business model which is why it is…

Amazon is putting in a new warehouse near where I live. They bought up farm land and are converting into a crazy large building that spans the distance between to major roads. Its going to impact traffic on both of those roads, construction already has. We'll probably need a bigger bridge on one of those roads too. It will also have a huge parking lot for the people that will work there. This building is bigger than Walmart, Dicks, and Home Depot combined. I don't see how this is an improvement, just another big addition.

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

#208

Post by Ericson2314 » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 9:34 PM UTC

jhallenworld wrote: post #106

tptacek wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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?

That makes me feel a lot better. Much of Amazon is "worth nationalizing", but the is nothing I'd want from GM.

Saying "well GM is better to labor" I think is highly paternalistic. Labor was stronger in the postwar era, and the unionization of the auto industry is a holdover from that.

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

#209

Post by Animats » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 9:34 PM UTC

Most of Amazon's workforce does very narrow jobs. Robots will be doing picking and boxing as soon as Amazon can make that work. Then will come the massive layoffs. Except that Amazon turnover is so high, they will just be non-hires, so it will be invisible in statistics.

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

#210

Post by hogFeast » Fri, Jul 30, 2021, 9:38 PM UTC

oezi wrote: post #183

hogFeast wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I come at this from the other point of view: I used to work as an equity analyst (analysing companies), and I ended up gravitating towards retail. The issue, as you imply, isn't only that Amazon is very good but the experience at many physical retailers is very poor. It is difficult to simplify this down to one thing imo. Managers in physical retail are unusually bad. Retail used to be ludicrously profitable, so most…

> There is nothing structural or inevitable about Amazon's success (compare them with the large Chinese retailers, they actually look quite blundering and incompetent, they have made mistakes in distribution already that are going to choke them). Could you elaborate? What mistakes did they do in distribution? I am just seeing them out-compete everyone. With their own dedicated shipping they can grab that essential pe…

AMZN hasn't built out close to consumers fast enough (I don't necessarily mean last mile here). Chinese online retailers, as an example, were able to same-day delivery, do lots of volume, hold lots of SKUs but do this with less space because they have a denser network (and denser population).

This was done for rational reasons (partly US population density, zoning issues) but, I think, the mistake was motivated largely by going into third-party in the way they did, which necessitated tall and narrow distribution. And I think it is going to be difficult to make that space economic if third-party softens (imo, inevitable because they went for a free-for-all, which can only devalue your brand over enough time).

Maybe, the position in the US is defensible. Outside the US, particularly in Europe, I think it is unrecoverable (this is partly my biased experience, AMZN has one of their largest warehouses globally near me, and the economics make zero sense given population density). So I think you will see companies that already have very tall and narrow distribution in some verticals compete within third-party (I am seeing this locally, apparel retailers suddenly becoming platforms), and then the short and wide distributors will cut them to pieces with less SKUs/faster delivery/more control over products (if you look WMT, their failure online is unbelievable...they probably had better infrastructure than AMZN until very recently, and maybe still have an advantage because of their locations).

EDIT: I will add, this is measurable in terms of a rather standard retail metric: sales per sqft of warehouse space (inc. system/third-party sales). Right now, I think they are in a self-reinforcing cycle but if this softens, all the strengths become weaknesses (again, quite like standard retail). But if you see sales per sqft keep trending up for the next five years then I am wrong.