> The company shut down in the country after a court ordered it to cease delivering “nonessential” items during the pandemic.

Here in India, Amazon has been required by law to sell and ship only essential items, nationwide from 25 March until 3 May, and in all "Red Zones" (which include nearly all urban centers) through today. They've happily complied, and in fact stopped taking orders on non-essential items before the legal requirement kicked in. That just shows the only reason they've refused to do that in France is because they don't want to give a win to labour organisations. What an awful company.

Did the Indian government also levy fines of around $100000 per item if only 1 item was categorized as essential but later turned out not to be?

The French court explicitly used Amazons own product categories for its whitelist. Amazon would have held the full definition of whitelisted items in its hands the whole time if it decided to comply.

Amazon’s product categorization is not particularly reliable.

For example, if you go to Electronics -> Headphones -> Earbuds and sort by price, this book comes up: https://www.amazon.com/Wentworth-Letter-Joseph-Smith-ebook/d...

Although visiting it by that link then shows it as a book, so I’m a bit lost.

Amazon's categorization system is entirely broken. It's quite sad that on of the largest companies in the world has one of the worst product filtering systems I've seen. Hell, they even remove results when sorting by price low to high, but not high to low. They're Also missing thousands of sub categories and filters. Sellers even have the free reign to deliberately mislist their items, what good that does I have no idea.

EBay suffers similar problems but is more consistent witha mostly functional sorting system.

We've ordered a couple of things from Amazon France in the last two weeks and they were getting shipped from Amazon warehouses in Germany.

Our conclusion at home (just a guess based on noticing where our Prime deliveries were coming from...) is that Amazon shut down most/all of the warehouse operations in France in line with court orders, put the staff on 'chômage partiel' so that most of the salary would be paid by the state, and then continued fulfilling orders from their warehouses across the border in Germany. Our Prime deliveries still arrived on time, Amazon still got my money, but the workers were sent home and the state pays for them to be there (mostly anyway).

Impressive and nimble by Amazon, and not sure that's a big win for labor here in the longer term.

> put the staff on 'chômage partiel' so that most of the salary would be paid by the state

No, amazon requested it and the French government told them to fuck off, as they should have.

https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2020/05/04/coronavir...

Ah, thanks for that - I didn’t realize that was the case.

So the court orders you to close your operations and on top of that you have to pay for it? liberte egalite fraternite much.

The court ordered them to a) start following safety guidelines. b) as made necessary by repeated failure to follow a) start to plan improvements and correct issues with their current safety procedures. c) reduce operations to a whitelisted subset of Amazon(TM) product categories until such time that b) is finished and approved.

At no point did the court force Amazon to close its warehouses. That was pure, spite on Amazons part. I even think we are already past the date the court considered for the review and improvements, so if Amazon had complied its warehouses would be running and serving the full product spread again.

Safety guidelines based on what evidence exactly? Because just back in February the WHO guys were saying masks were useless before completely reverting their position, so you hear everything and its opposite even from experts.

They were never ordered to close, they were ordered to only ship first necessity goods and _they_ decided to close themselves.

I'm not going to cry for Bezos, especially after they had the audacity to ask the government to pay for their employees unemployment benefits. Fuck them and fuck them good, at least it's happening in France and not in the US, these employees are 100% covered and won't end up bankrupt.

PS: It all started when amazon union said that "employees risking their lives and their family lives to ship and deliver video game consoles to strangers is non sense", amazon was found guilty of not following basic health regulations, after which it was ordered to limit their business to essentials items.

The funny thing is that it's exactly what's happening in the US right now but their law doesn't protect employees and puts businesses before people: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/01/retail-workers...

So please explain why Amazon can still operate in Germany at the very same time.

Germany and France are separate countries with different laws, isn't that obvious ?

Liberty, equality and fraternity yes. For humans, for their safety. Who the fuck cares about Amazon's margins?

I keep saying this in real life: the point of economies and companies is to serve people. We have absolutely lost sight of why we have these things.

Economies don't serve anything. The economy is the way we measure productivity. People really must stop thinking of it like some kind of mysterious beast from another dimension that we must tame into subservience

> Economies don't serve anything.

Oh really? Considering that an economy is a system of consumption and distribution of goods and services, how exactly do you arrive at the conclusion that consuming and distributing goods and services don't serve anything?

> The economy is the way we measure productivity.

Wrong. The economy is a system of exchange and consumption of resources. Productivity is a secondary attribute and a side-effect, and one that is secondary to the whole reason of having an economy.

> People really must stop thinking of it like some kind of mysterious beast from another dimension that we must tame into subservience

I would refrain from judging other people on their ignorance if you show so little understanding of the subjects you're discussing.

If you live in any kind of city then your everyday life is made possible by economies running to feed every single person on a given day. You should realise that.

which part of `liberte egalite fraternite` does worker exploitation come from?

Amazon is free to do business in France, and they are free not to (as they threatened)

They are not free to exploit people. That is equality and fraternity at it's best.

Always surprised when neocons come out the woodwork with their hetero economic view about some God-given-right to exploit the poor and desperate because they are rich.

"chômage partiel" was denied by the gouvernement, Amazon is paying for their salary.

Thanks for that - I missed that and assumed where I shouldn’t have.

I get a strange buzz from this piece, it feels like an Amazon 'whitewash'.

I am sad to see this style of employer-employee relationship creep into Europe through globalization.

Amazon should just be banned in Europe.

We don't need what is essentially a monopoly, or at least targeting becoming a monopoly, controlling internet sales. It's not beneficial. It may have been in the very short term, but now the effects of pushing out small businesses are clear, we can just not have it.

The labour practices are almost besides the point, anti-trust should break them up.

I'm happy with Amazon, if you don't like them then don't use them, but don't punish us all with going back to the shitty local commerce.

Not having Amazon =/= only using local commerce. The problem is their centralization siphoning all of the money and attention out of the business, vertically integrating delivery, etc.

It's not like online retailers don't exist. Well, for now. They _will_ go under if we just let Amazon run everything unchecked.

Protectionism is anti-consumer

Yeah, see, me and my neighbours are not bloody "consumers".

What matters is that we provide an environment within which we can trade amongst each other as (relative) equals, not one in which the Great Overlord owns all of the means of production.

This isn't a border dispute, this is about behaviour within a country.

> Protectionism is anti-consumer

Forcing the adoption of exploitative labor practices is helpful to consumers within that jurisdiction?

Which is nice as long as you have work.

Protectionism creates less employment and opportunity than free trade. This is like saying immigrants take jobs from Americans

Stop buying from them if you don’t need them?

The problem is not whether I "need" them. No-one "needs" them - they're more convenient, they provide a better service in the short term, that's why they are winning.

The problem is that a massive company essentially owns online commerce, anti-trust legislation should be addressing this and somehow it's not. Let them own a few % of the market, don't let them literally take over.

I'm in Germany, so I quickly googled for some stats on Amazon's market share. [1] In Q2 2019, their biggest market share is in electronics at 24%, with toys/sports at 18% and books at 15%. Everything else is 6-10%.

I understand your concern, but the reason that anti-trust legislation is not addressing this is that there is frankly no monopoly here.

[1] https://de.statista.com/infografik/16018/marktanteile-von-am...

In the UK they have 30%, followed by eBay and the major supermarkets, so basically ~3 companies own half of online commerce.

The current percentage is almost irrelevant anyway, the endgame of this is monopoly whether or not they have it right now, the vertical integration of delivery alone is enough.

I'd split up the major supermarkets as well FWIW, but that's a different discussion.