This may have a bigger impact than they think. Is Amazon good for the world? For some, the answer is no but still buy at Amazon as any sins are compensated by the the small donation to a NGO of choice.
There warehouses are significantly worse than average in terms of injuries per hour. They also frequently sell fraudulent items directly harming consumers.
I can’t think of a metric where they aren’t worse than the average retailer.
>There warehouses are significantly worse than average in terms of injuries per hour.
Per man hour? Amazon is rich and super high volume relatively speaking. I got the impression their warehouses were pretty damn good compared to other warehouses handling consumer goods because the cost of hiccups is so high and they have a huge target on their back.
They don’t seem to be very concerned about injuries. One example that comes to mind is storing 40 lb bags of dog food such that people had to duck and lean over and drag them under a low shelf, that’s practically designed to cause back injuries and in fact caused multiple in a single warehouse.
> They don’t seem to be very concerned about injuries. One example that comes to mind is storing 40 lb bags of dog food such that people had to duck and lean over and drag them under a low shelf, that’s practically designed to cause back injuries and in fact caused multiple in a single warehouse.
I used to work for Amazon a few years ago. I'm uncertain whether it was 12 pounds or 12 kg, but when a *tote weights more than this, you are supposed to handle the tote with two people.
Yes. The workstations in our receiving and sorting lanes were right next to each other, and people can theoretically interrupt their current task within a few seconds.
The bigger issue is that no one is actually asking for help because of culture.
Yeah but are they actually worse than the competition though? The whole industry is rife with that kind of crap (not like you're expect otherwise for a razor thin margin industry). I once worked somewhere they'd crib between the ground level pallets and first level racking so they could overload the racking (but my immediate manager was good and they put me on a forklift so I didn't care).
If anything the dehumanizing algorithmic tracking and optimization crap they do annoys me far more than the safety stuff.
Actual comparison of injury rates show yes they are much worse than the industry average.
Amazon’s extreme turnover rate is also significant. Someone that’s been doing a job for longer has both the skill and physical capacity to avid injury doing the same tasks as a new employee. This compounds over long shifts as people get tired, so limiting new employees to 8 vs 12 hour shifts would make a real difference among other options.
> I got the impression their warehouses were pretty damn good compared to other warehouses
This is the correct impression. Amazon warehouses are almost always a step up in both pay and quality of life vs. the other local employment options.
Source: many friends work(ed) the industry. Amazon was seen as trading your autonomy in for a better overall place to work.
The memes about their warehouses being the worst in the world only really exist in white collar circles.
I could never work for them in such a job, because I require too much autonomy to be happy. I don't deal will with strict metric systems that they enforce. However, others really do enjoy that aspect of not having to put an ounce of thought or problem solving into their dayjob.
Ex con here, lived in the halfway house. No one, and I mean NO ONE took Amazon warehouse jobs. And that is saying a lot. We took jobs with metrics requiring we pull 60 pieces of cardboard per minute out of garbage and trash from a 75mph conveyor belt over working Amazon. We had to wear kevlar glove 'sharps' protection so the needles in the trash didn't poke us and give us HIV. This was still preferred over Amazon warehouse jobs. Just saying....
I've noticed two personality types on this one. Those that don't mind trading one sort of "shitty" working conditions like you describe (challenging/dangerous work), because for lack of a better term you are treated like actual human beings.
The other personality I've noticed is someone who prefers a much more "sane" (boring but very predictable work) working environment with a ton of rules around it. They enjoy being treated more like robots.
I could be projecting here, but I've seen more than a dozen or so datapoints - of course directly connected to my personal bubble so there is bias at play.
I'd absolutely never take an Amazon warehouse job. I'd be looking at jobs like you describe.
Injuries per item picked or per capita might be a better metric. It's pretty easy to say the injuries are higher if you have more employees and higher volume than the competitors. Same thing with fraudulent items on Walmart.com.
Inferior in what way? If you are trying to do some kind of moral calculation to figure out how many marginal injuries you are creating by ordering an item, then injuries per item picked is probably the right metric.
If I sit on ass all day, I assume my injury rate will be lower. Using an injury rate on items picked (or items picked per man hour) could at least show the correlation between increased productivity and injuries.
That's a good point, but if i put myself in the shoes of one of Amazon's warehouse workers, i would probably weight not being injured more heavily than being more productive, so for instance if i had an opportunity to double my productivity at the cost of doubling my likelihood of injury, i'd choose to be less productive if that decision were up to me. However I'd imagine corporate would look at it differently, where injuries are liabilities for the company but productivity is the end goal, so a situation that increases employee productivity proportionately greater than it increases probability of injury might be looked upon more favorably. I am trying to come across as neutral as I can here but bringing it back to the previous commenters' discussion on "the good of the world", I'm finding it hard to defend the injuries/item picked metric here
The point is that then you'd have a job that would let you sit on ass all day in this case. if Amazon warehouse workers could sit their ass half the day or have better working conditions, their injury rate would be lower too.
Or maybe they're just a lot better at reporting minor injuries. In the same vein, countries with stronger women's rights have higher rates of rape and sexual harassment.
They pay a lot more than the average retailer, which is why they feel they can work their employees so hard. I think they also tend to see less employee on employee violence.
Shared hatred of <outgroup> leads to increased cohesion among <ingroup>. Tale as old as human civilization. Maybe one day we'll be able to hack this quirk of humanity on a large scale without needing <vulnurable marginalized population> to be the artificial outgroup.
One I've seen that I think might have promise is "white people" being the outgroup for "white people." Any collection of white people forms an ad hoc in group where some nondescript "everyone else" is the outgroup. Now everyone has a shared thing to hate but everyone you interact with becomes temporally part of your ingroup so you're never hating an specific person or group of people. And even though it's impossible to actually become part of the outgroup you still have some of the fear that if you embody the negative traits that are ascribed to the outgroup you might join them so it also gradually norms.
More that employees who show up to work drunk or high can be easily fired and replaced, while more normal warehouses usually start the shift with people who just don't show up and are stretched enough as it is.
But that price and convenience is at the cost of quality and employee safety. And honestly not even worth it as a consumer even if you don’t care about the ethical issues. I’ve been severely disappointed with the quality of the average item on Amazon over the last few years, to the point that I have stopped using them completely. Even Walmart is better, which is saying a lot.
I don't think I've had too many quality issues. The vast majority of the brands you buy at Amazon are also at Walmart or Walmart.com. If you're having issues, then you probably need to start evaluating brand vs seller. For your current discussion, you need to compare buying the same exact item from each. The big win in my eyes is being able to buy from Amazon Warehouse for a big discount.
I haven’t had too many (any?) quality issues with Amazon I’m no shill - I don’t advocate for them since I’ve heard about plenty of quality issues, but I’ve never actually gotten the wrong product or a fake (unless the fake was so good it was equal to original… which is fine?).
What is everyone ordering that is subpar? Do people not just buy the same brands they’d buy at Walmart or target?
If you buy cheap stuff that was drop shipped off AliExpress, but reputable name brands from walmart… why not buy reputable brands from amazon?
I ordered a pair music monitoring speakers. Only one came in the box. Amazon wouldn't accept my return because I only returned one speaker, not two. I had to fight them on the weight of the 'two' speakers they shipped me and finally they realized they were hit and that based on weight the package they sent me couldn't have contained two speakers. The amount of time that took locked up a fairly large chunk of my funds for way too long. I will never make a high dollar purchase on Amazon again.
Unless you have metrics for the average retailer, that's probably not true. Local corner shops vary widely, but are not the least bit shy about hiring undocumented workers, stealing wages, skimping on safety and avoiding taxes. They just do it at such a small scale, it doesn't make the news.
The statistics I gave where in comparison to the average. They also have higher rates of injury and pay less in taxes.
Amazon has had wage theft issues, but I don’t know how they stack up on undocumented workers or the average retailer which includes Costco etc not just tiny corner stores.
I don't doubt that Amazon has abused workers in various ways, I'm just saying the headlines exist because of their massive scale and visibility. EPI estimates (which are probably a bit aggressive, but backed by sources) say of 2.4M workers in the 10 most populous states, $8B/yr are lost to wage theft. Amazon, with about 1M employees, is not stealing billions per year. In fact, they consistently pay well above minimum wage. My point here isn't that Amazon is great and we should stop complaining, but rather that worker abuse is rampant across all industries and Amazon is likely exceeding what is a very low bar.
You are misusing that statistic the average of all employers would include all workers not only those workers that experienced wage theft.
If the US labor US labor force is ~161.2 million workers and had 8B/year in wage theft then the average per 1 million workers is ~50 million. Seeing multiple payouts well over 50 million suggests Amazon could be worse than average here.
The definition disagrees with you. Facts are just that - facts. The analysis of how you arrived at that fact is statistics. It requires numerical analysis. If you've ever taken a stats class you'd know an answer like "more than average" without any numerical work shown would be marked wrong. You'd also know that saying "more than average" provides no real information since it's a huge range.
Average of X > average of Y fits “a collection of quantitative data”
For more detail, I have taken statistics, even tutored PHD students.
Showing your work is required if the answer is 4.415 or more than average. A sample refers to a single element, statistic encompass a sample, a parameter covers to the full population.
You will often hear statistics communicated as something like “more than four times as likely” and assume it’s referring to 4<X<5 but they can also be used in cases when a measurement exceeded the range at which you can quantify it. As in you checked the rain gauge and it was full, in such cases the only option is to use > X.
I don't think that meets the definition. Where is the collection - there isn’t one. Without showing your work, why should I believe a "fact" you present? You need to prove a fact. That's where statistics is helpful. Maybe you did tutor people from a pure math perspective. You might need to learn how to actually apply statistics in real life.
None of the stuff you mention actually means anything when you try to apply it to policy if you don't know how the result was achieved, what it's actually measuring, and what the baseline is. Any good statistical analysis will cover this as well as things like biases, corrections, and confidence. Otherwise I could give you a fact of my opinion is more liked than your opinion...
The samples that make such a calculation true. That’s what you’re missing an actual statistic X>Y is based on the underlying data.
Further someone can just as easily make up X = 27.24 +/- 0.01 with a 95% confidence interval as X > Y, it’s the actual data that makes something a fact rather than an option.
“None of the stuff you mention actually means anything when you try to apply it to policy if you don't know how the result was achieved, what it's actually measuring, and what the baseline is.” Again that applies equally to all statistics and you can provide them just as easily with either format.
> I don't think the sins of Amazon are any worse than most other major U.S. retailers.
monopolies are bad, for consumers and for competitors. Even if you build your monopoly "fairly" by inventing a better mousetrap, putting the competition out of business is a reward that that is unfair and does not belong to the owner of the mousetrap. For example, Amazon could be split into 3 smaller Amazon mousetraps that compete with each other. Is that unfair to Jeff Bezos? No, he would own the same percentage of mousetrapping companies as he did before. What he would not own is a monopoly.
The sins of Amazon the monopolistic competitor are worse.
>Even if you build your monopoly "fairly" by inventing a better mousetrap, putting the competition out of business is a reward that that is unfair and does not belong to the owner of the mousetrap.
Antitrust laws exist to protect consumers, and if you're forcing consumers to buy inferior mousetraps, you're not helping.
we don't actually have anti-trust laws, we have laws against the abuse of monopoly power, a standard that can be difficult to prove and well after the commission of the injustices. I think there is sufficient theoretical and practical experience to have anti-trust laws simply be anti-market concentration.
I'm arguing for it because it's an example of "third way" regulation, regulation that should be embraced by left wing socialist and right wing capitalists.
in what way does breaking Amazon into three companies reduce your choice of product? and monopoly in common usage also refers to monopsony, the choice of vendors for different marketplaces in which to sell their goods.
Most people either forget or were too young to remember the time when Walmart was king. Despite their many, many faults Amazon was (and still is) considerably better for almost everyone than Walmart was in the 90's and early 00's. Walmart would destroy communities, bankrupt manufactures, and paid their employees so little on average that many of them still needed food stamps. The damage that Walmart did in the period 1995 to like 2010 really was incredible.
I really do think the expiration is coming up on Amazon too, with the same 15 year run. You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the bad guy.
People are completely addicted to Amazon. Some of my friends and neighbors get things from them literally daily without thinking twice about where to shop. I do not get the allure of cheap Chinese product on my doorstep in 2 days nor do I understand getting overly charged fine dining on my doorstep upside down and cold. But everyone else is addicted to those services.
Sadly, I don't see Amazon losing any steam, but I sure hope it does.
It's not any more "cheap Chinese product" than anywhere else. CoolerMaster keyboard is made where it's made whether one buys from Amazon or Best Buy.
Personally I get stuff from Amazon almost daily because I don't want to go to, e.g., Walgreens to buy toothpaste and dishwasher detergent. For a large number of items, there is no benefit to inspecting the item prior to purchase. Going to store for such items would be a waste of time.
Moreover, I can buy the thing immediately ftom my phone. No need to set up going to buy x as some chore in the future.
Brand names are probably identical regardless of middleman. Seems a difference between not wanting to go to the store. So much funny shit happens at Walgreens.
They're absolutely not - but the people that attack Amazon don't care about that. Amazon to many represents Capitalism, and so acts as a catchall for criticisms of Capitalism.
Ironically, small family shops use WAY more child labor, unpaid labor etc as a percentage than Amazon. They also produce more plastic per item, take only cash to evade taxes, etc.
It’s hard to imagine the average small business successfully evading taxes as well as Amazon.
In 2019 Amazon paid zero taxes receiving a net $129 million refund from the federal government, in 2018 they received a $137 million refund after paying 0$ on a net income of 11.2 billion dollars.
In 2020 they paid a net tax of $162 million on $13.9 billion of pre-tax income a net tax rate of 1.2%.
I was just listening to a small business owner yesterday. She paid a $120K down payment on a property, and has set everything up so that the tax benefit of that property is $180K.
That's not $180K deduction, but a $180K credit.
She'll rent the place out for a meager profit, so doesn't have to pay the rest of the mortgage. Essentially, the taxpayers bought her the house - she got a house + cash out of the deal.
Small business owners definitely play games with taxes.
The Range Rovers... don't forget about all the Range Rovers (and similar large vehicles small business owners tend to use)[1].
Write off practically the entire vehicle (sometimes the entire vehicle) in the first year... making it nearly or completely free.
There's a lot of credits and deductions available to those who seek them out, or are in a position to best use them. They are not loopholes - these provisions were explicitly laid out by Congress.
Yes, but because of the high value of the property, your deductions can be huge. I was using the word "credit" a bit loosely. The point is that her deductions is well above the quoted $180K. The equivalent extra refund she'll get due to them was $180K.
This is also because they are high income earners (one of them has a regular job), and they've manipulated things so that they can apply the deduction to the W-2 income (not usually possible). The federal tax bracket is 35+% - not sure if they can apply it to their state's income tax, but if they can, it's another 10-11%. So you don't need a massive deduction to get the equivalent of $180K refund.
net tax rate is meaningless in this context. Besides the fact that they're doing what each one of us do (take deductions following the law), it completely ignores all the other tax they pay - like payroll tax on a massive employee base and so forth.
To imply Amazon (or any corp) are floating by with a total tax load of ~1% is either profoundly disingenuous or profoundly naïve.
That's just an accounting/presentation gimmick. Mathematically, it would be the same if the deduction was 0% or 100% shown in paycheck, instead of 50%.
They where profitable and paid net taxes in 2016 and where hugely profitable yet paid zero taxes in 2017, 2018, and 2019. So I don’t see how this could be loss carry forward offsetting a several billion dollar annual tax bill for 4+ years.
"Tax evasion" is illegal and what the parent poster clearly meant by "taking cash". Companies (and individuals for that matter) take the entirely rational step to use all legal methods to pay as little tax as they can.
Additionally, receiving a refund indicates that Amazon overpaid on their income taxes and that the government agreed.
Also additionally, the figures you are throwing around are income taxes only. Amazon likely pays many other taxes far in excess of the net worth of anybody involved in this conversation. Implying that Amazon "paid zero taxes" without further qualification is wholly dishonest, and you know it, and you should stop doing it.
I am not making a specific accusation, but illegal tax evasion occurs at both large and tiny companies. The form of this evasion varies where small companies may need to handle things under the table large companies have plenty of other options. Considering how often Amazon has been caught breaking other laws I would be shocked if they kept things strictly legal.
Also getting a refund does not imply you paid any income taxes can get refunded even if they send in 0$ money as was the case for Amazon in 2017, 2018, and 2019. The refund simply refers to getting money back.
Calling a family business "child labor" or unpaid labor is like saying a founder is doing unpaid labor, or if he is under 16-18, child labor.
Family, ownership, and business are concepts that overlap and mean much different things than a $1 trillion company with countless nameless faceless employees around the globe, that you can buy shares of.
