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Re:Amazon Jumps into Freight Brokerage by swoongoonz on Friday May 17, 2019 @04:45PM (#19943397)
it's improve your life because you're probably a highly paid software developer or engineer (guessing because here you are on hacker news). I would like to hear more from the people who work for amazon (not the devs reaping all of the rewards of stock shares) and the retailers selling their goods on amazon to see if the company has "improved" their lives.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17243026/amazon-warehouse...

Re:Amazon Jumps into Freight Brokerage by Reedx on Friday May 17, 2019 @05:19PM (#19943672)
Engineers are not the majority of Amazon's customers. Nor are they the ones that benefit most from buying there.

For example, consider single mothers working two jobs, ordering from Amazon.com to save time & money. And depending on where they live, they might even get the order within a couple hours. That's a new kind of efficiency that many benefit from.

Re:Amazon Jumps into Freight Brokerage by ethbro on Friday May 17, 2019 @05:55PM (#19943956)
Consider why that person has to work two jobs, and the contribution Amazon made towards that.

Low prices aren't free. Some of it came from efficiency, the rest comes from simply paying labor less.

Re:Amazon Jumps into Freight Brokerage by Reedx on Friday May 17, 2019 @08:10PM (#19944745)
That's a different discussion and it's hard to untangle and weigh all of the effects. But it's worth noting that the % of people working multiple jobs has actually decreased with the rise of Amazon.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2018/4-point-9-percent-of-worke...

That's not to say it's casual. Maybe it would've decreased more sans Amazon. Who knows.

Anyway, the point was simply that it's not only/mostly engineers who derive value from their existence. It includes every Amazon customer who saves time & money - especially those who have too little of both.

Re:Amazon Jumps into Freight Brokerage by twoandfifteen on Saturday May 18, 2019 @12:29AM (#19945617)
It also includes every person who lives in a city whose tax base has been eroded by Amazon, so those "hard working single moms" send their kids to shitty schools that will perpetuate the cycle of poverty.

For tens of millions of working poor who live in apartment complexes, Amazon provides absolutely zero benefit since they cannot order anything bigger than a kumquat without risk of it being stolen off of their porch. The office? The office doesnt exist or is closed during the hours they are working - and UPS wont deliver there anyways a lot of the time.

Re:Amazon Jumps into Freight Brokerage by comex on Saturday May 18, 2019 @09:57AM (#19947399)
In theory that’s what Amazon Locker is for, though it’s less convenient.
Re:Amazon Jumps into Freight Brokerage by HeyLaughingBoy on Friday May 17, 2019 @05:30PM (#19943753)
Those people aren't the customers, though.