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Amazon workers to strike at multiple US warehouses during busy holiday season

reuters.com

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Re: Amazon workers to strike at multiple US warehouses during busy holiday season

#61

Post by vouaobrasil »

vasco wrote: post #48
vouaobrasil wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are supporting is local sustainability. The world would be better off with less global trade and more local productions. Local productions means a stronger community and more visibility for business practices, because it's more sustainable. If a global business decides to just toss all the plastic it uses it in its backyard you'll never notice because it's 2000 miles away. If Amazon decides to treat their wo…

In my grandpa's village everything was local production and commerce but they all lived way worse than me and my friends that get paid through remote companies and spend our money online. It's incredibly unclear to me why a super poor and undeveloped local economy is better than a specialized globalized one. In my country there was a dictatorship with protectionism and when we opened things got way better, not worse.…

> In my grandpa's village everything was local production and commerce but they all lived way worse than me and my friends that get paid through remote companies and spend our money online.

(1) That is because technology also takes away components of life that one can enjoy without being rich such as accesss to nature and local food production.

(2) The global economy is only so "good" because it takes advantage of the commons in poorer places. We simply should not have the capability to do that. You only benefit off the suffering of others.

Re: Amazon workers to strike at multiple US warehouses during busy holiday season

#62

Post by vouaobrasil »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #49
vouaobrasil wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are supporting is local sustainability. The world would be better off with less global trade and more local productions. Local productions means a stronger community and more visibility for business practices, because it's more sustainable. If a global business decides to just toss all the plastic it uses it in its backyard you'll never notice because it's 2000 miles away. If Amazon decides to treat their wo…

> What you are supporting is local sustainability. The world would be better off with less global trade and more local productions. Local productions means a stronger community and more visibility for business practices, because it's more sustainable. This is true for the extreme minority of products that ARE produced locally. If you buy a screwdriver from the privately-owned DYI shop around the corner it will have b…

Well, also, if you don't support Amazon, then you don't support the growth of a large company like Amazon which is one more component of the collection of big corporations that are exactly those responsible for globalization in the first place.

Re: Amazon workers to strike at multiple US warehouses during busy holiday season

#63

Post by bmicraft »

spondylosaurus wrote: post #6
hiddencost wrote: post #2

Try avoiding Amazon this holiday season, to not cross the picket line.

Are they specifically calling for a boycott, though? Or just striking? (Because if it's the latter, getting orders that go unfulfilled may actually help their cause.)

So what you're saying is we should order a bunch of stuff and then cancel at the first sign of a delay in fulfillment so amazon loses more by waiting it out?

Re: Amazon workers to strike at multiple US warehouses during busy holiday season

#64

Post by zmgsabst »

vasco wrote: post #34
ramon156 wrote: post #5

Had to buy some simple toolkit today. It was 5 bucks on Amazon, but I decided to find a local store that sells it. Same price btw. I think we should be a bit more aware about the impact of ordering everything through Amazon. Not only regarding delivery, but also the message it sends to local stores.

I've had this exact sentiment for many years but... what are we supporting really? Is it because you want a distributed network of inventory across the country near you in case of emergency? Is it because you like talking to someone when doing purchases? Is it because you think someone is doing a societal good by parking money in inventory they brought near you? Is it because you just don't like someone doing it more…

I don’t think “efficiency” is the only priority.

A few reasons:

- market diversity matters, and we have a more functional market with many smaller actors

- similarly, a smaller local actor is more accountable for their behavior

- efficiency comes mostly from cutting things, some of which mattered (eg, individual buyers at companies do more due diligence on the product than Amazon)

- it’s better that every community have a local moderately rich person than one super rich person nationally, eg, in terms of charity to your community

- politics remains local and hence tractable

- smaller organizations have less of a “frozen middle”, which creates numerous problems with national scale organizations

There’s probably more reasons if I really stopped to think about it.

Re: Amazon workers to strike at multiple US warehouses during busy holiday season

#65

Post by krisoft »

euroderf wrote: post #20
sen wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I needed some 3D printing filament a few days ago. Shopped around locally and the absolute cheapest was ~$50. Amazon was $17 with next day shipping. The overheads of physical retail stores makes it all but impossible for them to compete with online shopping. I’d love to “support local” but I don’t have the expendable income to spend double/more on everything. What we ideally need is more “local online businesses”, bu…

It turns local businesses into showrooms for Amazon, and that is a failing business model. I do not patronize Amazon. But f I did, I would pick a margin - let's say 20% - and resolve to buy locally when the price is at least that close to the online price.

> But f I did, I would pick a margin - let's say 20% - and resolve to buy locally when the price is at least that close to the online price.

Focusing on the price is a complete misunderstanding. Just looking at my recent amazon purchases. I have bought 3mm and 2mm thick brass sheets, 0.8mm endmills, a set of dwarven miner minis, and a highlander cow shaped slipper. I have no clue which shop would even hope to have these things. I could get on my bike and go to all the hardware shops around me in the hopes that maybe they have endmills, or all the department stores and walk up and down to see if they have the slippers I'm thinking about. And I would be still without brass sheets and dwarven miners.

Or I can from the comfort of wherever I am browse a wild selection of things and get them for reasonable price. I bought the miner minis while physically situated in a coffee shop waiting for my friend to return from the washroom. Just because I happened to have a minute to think about what I need for our next DnD session. That is insanely convenient.

Re: Amazon workers to strike at multiple US warehouses during busy holiday season

#66

Post by zmgsabst »

vasco wrote: post #47
lupusreal wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you spend money at businesses which are owned by people that live in your community, more of that money continues to circulate in your area. It's better for the local economy, if only marginally, and therefore better for you. This is more important for businesses that produce and capture a larger amount of value, like locally owned restaurants vs corporate owned chains, but any little bit helps at least a little…

This is an interesting take. I'm not sure it's true but I will look it up. My knee-jerk reaction is that most large purchases already siphon your money away (home, car, travel), and overthinking where to buy a random small object for the house makes no difference, but I hadn't considered the locality of money circulation!

Amazon discusses that every dollar of salary produces $2.5 of local economic activity, eg, because their workers buy coffees that then pay the salaries of baristas who then…

That money comes from many communities and is distributed to a handful; and I think it would be interesting to quantify the loss of economic activity from Amazon moving money out of a community.

Re: Amazon workers to strike at multiple US warehouses during busy holiday season

#67

Post by zmgsabst »

0xEF wrote: post #21
iLoveOncall wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not only regarding delivery. You do realize that an electric Amazon van delivering hundreds of packages to your neighborhood pollutes a lot less than you taking your G-wagon to the local store, right? > but also the message it sends to local stores "You're obsolete", which is true? Local stores are usually more expensive, carry less inventory, require you to go there or charge delivery fees, have inexistent or pred…

Ignoring the tone of your comment, I agree with you in a way, but I also wonder if that has something to do with where I live. The US suburbs don't really have what I would call "local stores," just big, well known corporate stores. So, when making the choice of where to buy Product X, my options are giving my money to Best Buy, Walmart, Ikea, Kroger, etc...or Jeff Bezos, whose online empire offers slightly more conv…

> Amazon can be held up as contributing toward the death of the small business

Amazon does more than most of those to let you buy from small producers, which also feature in their catalog. The volume SMBs ship on Amazon was in the double digit billions per year when I worked there — and is probably higher now.

Now, back to my regular Amazon criticism!

Re: Amazon workers to strike at multiple US warehouses during busy holiday season

#68

Post by iLoveOncall »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #62
iLoveOncall wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What you are supporting is local sustainability. The world would be better off with less global trade and more local productions. Local productions means a stronger community and more visibility for business practices, because it's more sustainable. This is true for the extreme minority of products that ARE produced locally. If you buy a screwdriver from the privately-owned DYI shop around the corner it will have b…

Well, also, if you don't support Amazon, then you don't support the growth of a large company like Amazon which is one more component of the collection of big corporations that are exactly those responsible for globalization in the first place.

[flagged]

Re: Amazon workers to strike at multiple US warehouses during busy holiday season

#69

Post by graemep »

vasco wrote: post #48
vouaobrasil wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are supporting is local sustainability. The world would be better off with less global trade and more local productions. Local productions means a stronger community and more visibility for business practices, because it's more sustainable. If a global business decides to just toss all the plastic it uses it in its backyard you'll never notice because it's 2000 miles away. If Amazon decides to treat their wo…

In my grandpa's village everything was local production and commerce but they all lived way worse than me and my friends that get paid through remote companies and spend our money online. It's incredibly unclear to me why a super poor and undeveloped local economy is better than a specialized globalized one. In my country there was a dictatorship with protectionism and when we opened things got way better, not worse.…

That is the other extreme that is also bad. In economies like that protectionism supports inefficient local production - favouring some people at the cost of others. It is designed to funnel money away from some people to others.

The dominance of the economy by a few big companies also has the same effect - elimination of competition.

Re: Amazon workers to strike at multiple US warehouses during busy holiday season

#70

Post by wiether »

lnsru wrote: post #3

I am just curious who still orders anything today with delivery expectation to get it before Xmas. From my experience the delivery drivers are today delivering tons of stuff ordered a week ago and they are so overloaded, that todays order might come only in January.

I ordered everything Christmas related before December 1st.

Now I'm just holding my usual orders until after Christmas to avoid having stuff lost in the big rush.

Better to go with a digital gift card if you haven't received everything for now.

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