I'm finding I'm using Amazon less as more retailers go online and offer better prices. Rarely does Amazon have the best price anymore.

I find their delivery times dropping.. Last order, I ordered and paided more for same day rush.. that came by the end of the next day instead. They gave a $10 coupon but I literally picked the product based on it arriving that day and would have made a different purchasing choose if I knew it was coming tomorrow.

> Rarely does Amazon have the best price anymore.

If you ignore shipping, maybe sometimes.

But I still find that 99% of the time, for items on Amazon.com that are sold by Amazon.com, it's cheaper on Amazon because of free shipping, while most others site charge $7-10 shipping or have a minimum of $75-100 for free shipping.

And even if you don't have Prime, the minimum for free shipping is just $25, and you can pretty much always add in stuff that you need to buy soon anyways (shampoo, paper towels, whatever).

And delivery times usually has zero to do with Amazon, obviously, they're best in class. With the pandemic and all, UPS and USPS are obviously straining in general. It's not like Wal-Mart, Kohl's, or any other online stores are any better. Despite their advertising, everyone knows you shouldn't be expecting UPS/USPS packages to be reliably arriving on time since March.

Just an anecdote, but Home Depot has lost its collective mind over shipping. Twice now I've ordered a single pack of 2 light bulbs for about $3 and had it shipped to my door for free.

I think other stores see what's happening and are trying to crowd in. Best Buy, too, seems to have no trouble shipping me anything I want for free. It'll take a week, but most of the time I don't really care vs Amazon's 2-4 days. And with Best Buy/Home Depot/etc I at least know I'm not getting a knock off.

>I'm not getting a knock off.

That is what has done it for me. Amazon has zero control over their inventory. I've gotten burned too many times at this point. Amazon is now a last resort or obscure items only retailer for me. That or I use it to find an item then buy it from the manufacture direct, funny how that has reversed from the old days.

I've even gotten unrequested refunds from amazon with a note about how the product I got was counterfeit. That's great and all but I needed the actual product not a refund and waste of time. Once you reach a livable income your time is worth much,more than saving a couple of dollars.

What are you buying?

I've bought 1,000+ items from Amazon over the past 10 years and exactly one item was counterfeit -- a camera battery from a third-party seller.

Honestly, worrying about counterfeits on Amazon, for items sold either by Amazon.com or reputable storefronts like Pharmapacks, just seems silly, it's so incredibly rare and easy to get fixed immediately with a single quick phone call to Amazon. And for third-party storefronts you've never heard of, it's no different than doing the same on Walmart.com or eBay.

It's easy to get counterfeit clothing, I'll tell you that. I'm confident that's happened to me a few times.

For electronics products, some reviews go into excruciating details on what counterfeit v real products look like.

Then some products literally explain how to avoid counterfeit products, especially the smaller producers of goods with niche products.

Finally there are articles in the press about it.

eBay has less of this problem because it's set up to select sellers based on reviews. Amazon's stores are more obscure, and often don't have many reviews, or sometimes you get an item fulfilled from a third party without knowing about it. I'm not sure if that still happens though.

Walmart lets you restrict search results to items shipped and sold by Walmart, whereas Amazon removed this option years ago.

Amazon removed it years ago because they do not want to be in the law margin retail business. They want to only be in the higher margin platform business. And that makes me not want to support Amazon.

Tools, Household Chemicals type stuff, tech parts.

Yeah easy to refund but I spent 2 hrs insect treating my house now I have to do it again, not a pleasant task. Oh yeah now I have a roach infestation because the traps were fake. The effects are much farther reaching than you make it out to be.

Is it very obvious? Is it more pronounced in specific categories? I keep hearing this, and I've never gotten an obvious fake, despite a large amount of Amazon usage. But maybe I've just been using fake stuff?

That said, I almost only buy the "shipped from and sold by Amazon.com" stuff, so maybe that's why. And if it's something that has obviously similar photos from a bunch of different "brands", I hop over to AliExpress to buy it at the source for 1/10 the price.

I wonder if there are a lot of people who go with the lowest price, don't even look at reviews, and are fine with FBA so long as it's cheapest. I order quite a bit off Amazon and just haven't had the counterfeit problem AFAIK.

My main concern is the non obvious fakes. The memory card that looks right but is slower than it should be or fails earlier than expected. The rechargeable battery that catches on fire. That sort of thing.

Or even worse, the knockoff toy with swallowable magnets that results in your baby needing surgery to remove part of their intestines: https://www.workingmother.com/mom-is-warning-others-after-po...

From https://www.inc.com/jeff-bercovici/amazon-dangerous-kids-pro...

> Twice now I've ordered a single pack of 2 light bulbs for about $3 and had it shipped to my door for free.

I can't tell if you think this is excessively bad or excessively good? Seems reasonable to me - they're just a couple of bulbs?

> I don't really care vs Amazon's 2-4 days

Isn't the big thing about Amazon is that it's next-day shipping? I don't live anywhere near a major city and Amazon still manage to deliver to me in about ten hours now.

You can't package and ship a parcel for less than $3 so they are losing money on small sales like that. It's clearly a loss-leading effort to compete with other online retailers.

Amazon free shipping has been terrible here. Weeks, at best unless you pay for the express options. And yes Walmart is better. One of my recent online purchases (cell phone screen protector) was estimated at 3 weeks delivery on Amazon. I bought the same item from Walmart.com instead and had it in 2 or 3 days.

Amazon's free shipping routinely delivers items worth a few dollars in about ten to twelve hours for me, and I don't live anywhere near a major city. Are you in some extraordinarily remote location?

Small-ish town (~80K) Midwest USA

Are we guessing? Parma, Ohio?

His point is easily seen if you go to the post office/fecex and try to mail 2 bulbs for $3 and see how far you get.

That's retail rates. Depending on the size of the bulbs, you could likely ship them first class for around $1.5. packaging might be another $0.20 assuming the bulbs are already in stuff boxes.

But still, not much room for profit. And from my experience, a lot of big box sellers will just put it in a huge box and pay a much higher rate than necessary for shipping.

I think the GP is implying that Home Depot might have lost money on the sale because the delivery probably cost them more than they earned from selling the light bulbs.

For Home Depot, assuming it's not a mistake, that's probably an investment in persuading customers to look to them first and not shop around.

I stopped ordering light bulbs from Home Depot as they always arrived smashed, and I had to enter the store to return them.

It’s a lot harder to smash LEDs though.

These were Cree LEDs. $10 each at the time

> while most others site charge $7-10 shipping or have a minimum of $75-100 for free shipping.

Target and Walmart both have free shipping for orders over 25/35 depending on which items.

Our local Target also offers drive up service where they'll load items into your trunk for you, and you can combine orders so you pick up $30 worth of items same day and get a $5 item (not in store) shipped free since the total is $35.

2 day shipping and 5% off with Red Card makes it a pretty compelling competitor to Amazon. Especially with all the fake/potentially unsafe items on Amazon, I prefer to get food related items from Target if possible.

The other thing is that, for a cheap item, especially one I'm reordering, Amazon takes me literally about 30 seconds to order something. Will I do some comparison shopping for a $100 item? Sure. I do order from other online sources as well but it's probably easiest to have a default whether that's Amazon or someone else.

To the parent point, even with 2-day delivery, most of the things I order aren't stuff I need right now. And the reality is that, normally, they'd have gone on a list where they'd have rattled around before I got around to going to the store with a shopping list. But, now, generally minimizing or at least reducing store trips, has reinforced the notion that a lot of in-person errands are pretty unnecessary given online options.

Target is always underplayed here. In many cases, you can have product pulled in 20-30m.

I was on my way to a meeting in Manhattan last year and it was pouring rain. I ordered an umbrella from the highway just north of the city, and had it in hand within 15m.

They makes me sad because Manhattan used to be a place where you could get an umbrella on very street corner without the bother of ordering ahead or entering a store

When I lived there, I thought that they sprouted from the sidewalks like mushrooms when it rained... Magical & a bit eerie!

Same here, very depressing to see how extreme, fake liberal policies have destroyed the city. No more street vendors, everything boarded up, no high class people paying tax anymore.

We need new leadership in NYC to fix this up!!

My comment wasn’t complaining about the lack of umbrellas in NYC. It was pointing out the really cool capability of Target.

I had to show up onsite in Midtown with a few hours notice, and was able to roll off the highway somewhere in Rockland county and pick something up rather than look around.

Without Prime the free shipping averages something like 2-3 week delivery times. It’s not like years ago before they made Prime. I tried ditching Prime; it’s painful. I still try to prioritize Target, Best Buy, etc. because I like having the option of the physical stores and easier returns.

Amazon is making this a lot easier now, too, with Kohl’s acting as return hubs.

I’m able to just drop off the item without packaging or label or really anything except my name and other info like the order number. Couldn’t be much easier (if you have a Kohl’s close).

I’m sure for areas that don’t have Kohl’s, they’re working on figuring out how to make returns as easy as possible (relative to the b&m experience).

They also do this "just show up with the item" sort of return system with The UPS Store, which is probably closer to some people than Kohl's.

(Allegedly you can also return to an Amazon Locker. Never tried that)

Non-Prime shipping is 5-8 days, usually faster. I think you are conflating "non-Prime" with "not Fulfilled By Amazon" which has delays before shipping.

That's just not true.

It's usually between 3-8 days. I used it for years and have friends who still do.

The first couple months of COVID a lot of stuff was taking 2-3 weeks but that was often true even if you had Prime. Then they hired tons more people and it stopped. Maybe that's what you're talking about?

I'm sure it depends on where you are located and what you're buying. I routinely see the free shipping estimates at 2-3 weeks these days for some things, but other things have 2-3 day shipping still. The longer times have certainly become more common than before.

I have a low tolerance for being fucked with, and a long memory. I have received enough broken, misrepresented, obvious returns-sold-as-new, etc. from Amazon that I avoid them most of the time these days. The one thing I still buy there is what they started with: books. Because there are no local bookstores anymore.

Supply chains as they are now, I think the MSRP of a lot of retail goods is significantly below what demand would dictate. As a result, a lot of things are only available at an inflated price from resellers, and not ‘sold by Amazon.’

In these cases, I’m willing to backorder from other retailers (or the manufacturer) and wait for their slower shipping.

I totally agree. I actively try other sources and unless you end up ordere $75+ at a site you're not going to get free shipping most of the time, and certainly not 2 day shipping which is almost always "true" to being 2 days.

The low minimum is what makes Amazon work, plus the same day shipping. Assuming that I do not take work time off to go get something, Amazon will deliver something faster than I can go get it if I order it in the morning.

Amazon also has clear quality and counterfeiting issues. I now purchase durable goods from the retailer's website rather than through amazon. My recent amazon purchase history is mostly consumables like snack foods and rice. Clothing, electronics, cookware, and almost everything else valuable gets purchased from somewhere else. This is also because the experience of shopping on amazon is extremely frustrating - they keep trying to force lower quality products on me instead of the things I want. It feels more and more like a digital walmart with fake brand names, sketchy products, and even sketchier fake reviews.

For example, a search for "snow pants" turns up products by Arctix and Outdoor Ventures. Outdoor Ventures is presumably a knockoff of Outdoor Research, a reputable cold-weather clothing brand. Outdoor Ventures seller page says their actual company name is "FUJIANSHENG SHANGFEI ZHIYI YOUXIANGONGSI". And Arctix is presumably a knockoff of Arcteryx, and seems to be owned by a very small financial services company in NY.

I rarely feel like I'm being presented with accurate or meaningful information when I look for things on amazon.

Are those really counterfeit? I understand they're knockoffs, and it's a shitty practice, but Arctix / Arcteryx is not a hidden difference in name - especially if you're searching for "snow pants" rather than the brand you want explicitly.

These specific examples aren't counterfeit. But wirecutter had a good breakdown of the breadth of counterfeit products sold on amazon.

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/amazon-counterfeit-f...

Interesting, with the counterfeit problems the last things I would buy on Amazon are food items.

I find Amazon to usually have the best price, or quickly price match in case of sales. Even if higher, the I prefer the speed, convenience and reliability of Amazon. I know I get it quickly and any problems are sorted easily.

If it was that easy to beat them with just pricing then other retailers would've done it already. The only other company that gets close is Target which has vastly improved its online and digital experience.

Had the same experience here. Same day shipping has very limited availability here in Germany with a fairly limited inventory, most items are next day shipping. I ordered a product at 3AM with a huge text claiming "same day delivery when ordering within the next 5h". The order arrived at 8PM the next day, which was relatively annoying considering the same day arrival heavily influenced my purchasing decision.

I end up ordering from Amazon the things that Whole Foods, OfficeMax and BestBuy won't keep in stock. I moved recently, so we've been ordering 2-4x /week while getting the new place in order.

I buy locally what I can, but retail offerings are so anemic (even for, say, granola bars) that online options massively eclipse what stores carry.

I don't want to order from Amazon, but I don't want to get by with the meager brick-and-mortar offerings.

Another example: Recently I went to Best Buy to grab an HDMI-DisplayPort cable. They had it priced at $38. Amazon had it for $12. I'd have paid up to $20 for the retail stock surcharge, but that overage was obscene.

Cables have been this way for years for some reason, and it's not just Best Buy, it's the same here in the UK. Brick-and-mortar stores charge several times what you'd pay online.

edit I've heard they make more selling you a USB cable than selling you a printer.

Cables have been that way when I worked as a bestbuy black shirt 20 years ago

FYI, in the US, monoprice.com is usually the place to go online for cables, as long as you don't need them quickly.

A decade ago, I remember the experience from Monoprice being very fast. 1-2 days between ordering and having it delivered from Rancho Cucamonga to the Bay Area.

But earlier this month, I ordered something from them and it took 4 days to hand it off to some shipping company, 3 days for that company to deliver it to USPS, and another 2 days to get to my door.

Good if you need a lot of cables, if you just need one or two then amazon is still cheaper and you get it faster.

Cables is how best buy makes their money. They don't make anything on the TV you buy, its the 400% markup on the cable where the profit is.

People buy a TV. They need a cable. They comparison shopped and maybe bargained the hell out of the TV. They just buy the cable. I wrote an aticle about this ages ago: https://www.cnet.com/news/the-economics-of-cables/

> I'm finding I'm using Amazon less as more retailers go online and offer better prices. Rarely does Amazon have the best price anymore.

For me, I found this not to be true. I've been ordering gifts for people fleeing the company I work due to a merger and the changes, so there has been a lot. Literally everything I found on niche sites I found on Amazon for cheaper and at a faster delivery rate aswell.

Yeah, that's true. I also have send more things back, all the things they left in the rain or go back straight away.

Lately also more and more books are dented or damaged when they arrive so they get send back too. If I want a book that looks like second hand copies I would buy one of those.

The majority of my "next-day" and "2-day" orders have been late (often cancelled) for months.

Well, Amazon did say this would occur for non necessity items months ago because of the huge demand strain put on their system, which is exactly what this article is about.

Who cares? It's a competitive advantage they no longer have and less value for my expensive Prime subscription

Yep. This is a massive shift. My amazon order stats are:

2020 - 235

2019 - 107

2018 - 91

2017 - 112

2016 - 34

2015 - 39

2014 - 53

Note the two step jumps. I broke my arm at the start of 2017 for ref.

Edit: also to note I've had two (yes just two) issues with Amazon in that time and they just sent new items the next day without argument. Retail has been a shit show on that front for years. I remember standing in Argos arguing with the manager because the DVD player I bought had broken with one of my DVDs inside it and he wouldn't replace it until I'd got it out and I couldn't get it out because the thing had no release hole.

That's a lot of orders. It seems like many people are buying a lot of things and I'm just gobsmacked that you can come up with so many things to buy! I mean, I order groceries once a week online, but what are the _things_ that people buy? I buy things maybe three times a year in total (excluding things that are necessary for the household, like glue and leather oil).

Why would you exclude things necessary for the household? As a random datapoint, my most recent Amazon orders include cutting board oil, new bedsheets, winter tires, a couple of long sleeved shirts, a new cookbook, an ice scraper, a sewing machine and an air filter for my truck. That's all in the last month and all of those things are pretty basic things in my mind.

Other than the air filter, all of those things will last a person for years. I second GP's question. What exactly is everybody buying?

It's all over the map. 88 orders this year so far for one person. Some trivial things I'd probably have searched in the grocery store for normally, e.g. toothpicks. Though now I'm sort of "Why would I bother searching?" But also office gear. Stuff I'd have picked up at the pharmacy. Pandemic entertainment options. Etc.

I buy a number of personal products somewhat regularly. Things like deodorant, beard oil, toothbrush heads, etc. There are also things like pet treats and with one click it's pretty easy for people to purchase four or five things as they go through their day.

I have three children and a high throughout of some items. If you don’t have kids you will learn this one day.

This month: DisplayPort cable, blu tack, coffee, Mac mini, apple magic touchpad, blanket, 2 kindle books, laser toner, face masks, fleece, bulldog clips, replacement calculator for one that was stolen at school, 2 replacement lightning cables for family, cards against humanity, roller skates, two revision guides, glue sticks, thermometer, toilet paper, wallpaper repair kit, envelopes

A lot of this stuff would have traditionally come from retail outlets.

We can also do our grocery shopping via amazon here although that’s a shit show so I won’t be bothering with that until they’ve ironed out the kinks.

I have been wondering that. I've placed 12 orders this year and half of those were very cheap kindle books.

I have hated most in store retail experiences my entire life. The staff are low paid and hate their jobs. They are forced to create uncomfortable interactions with shoppers. The big box stores like Macy’s are often dirty and smell bad.

Aside from trying on clothes, I don’t know why anyone would shop in a store.

Now that low paid workers are away from eye sight

The's a lot driving this change. Shipping costs, shipping speed, selection, membership and retail's refusal to adapt to change. Ecommerce, and not just Amazon, has in many ways become a better experience. Will be interesting to see how retail adapts because at the core, selling something for more than you paid for it is really what business is.

Similar trend here -

2020 - 181

2019 - 124

2018 - 116

2017 - 93

2016 - 62

European here for perspective. During this time I've lived in four different countries, all without Amazon warehouses:

2020: 6

2019: 4

2018: 1

2017: 0

2016: 2

2015: 8

2014: 3

2013: 14

2012: 12

If I lived in US/UK/DE/IT or wherever they do have warehouses the numbers would probably look different.

Getting stuff shipped from Germany or the UK takes for even, and packages from amazon.co.uk frequently goes missing. Shipping cost are reasonable, given that it’s across borders, but you can get it cheaper by buying “locally”.

I’m down to just buying books on Amazon, because no one else really sells books anymore, at least not the books I want. For everything else there are better and cheaper local webshops.

Amazon is a mess, you can’t easily find what you want, filtering sucks and 25% of the stuff you want doesn’t ship to your country anyway. Oh, and they treat their warehouse staff terribly, so I minimize what I buy from Amazon.

I live in the UK.

2012: 19

2013: 28

2014: 61

2015: 27

2016: 41

2017: 64

2018: 22

2019: 2

2020: 0

There are alternatives. I'd rather use them.

Same here...

2012 - 1

2013 - 7

2014 - 109 (mostly free ebook)

2015 - 18

2016 - 76 (more disposable income + moved to a house)

2017 - 116

2018 - 214

2019 - 243

2020 - 212

> Before the pandemic, my household purchased items online for delivery perhaps 1x per week. Now, it's 2-3x per day. Clothing, LPs, pearl milk tea, ...

What are you ordering per day?

I'm happy knowing that I can survive not leaving the house if I need to by doing a single bulk online food shop once every two or three weeks. Then I might need the odd delivery for broken light bulbs and things I couldn't foresee. I also don't need a car at all as there's enough shops in walking distance and decent public transport.

I second the concerns about the carbon footprint of frequent orders. At the very least, people should try to do bulk orders and avoid buying stuff they don't need. Driving around 3 times a day to buy stuff shouldn't be the norm either.

How many trips to the store do these deliveries save? If I order something small it likely hitches a ride with my neighbors delivery and the delivery of the package itself will have negligible carbon footprint.

How much extra packaging are you introducing with many small orders vs bulk orders?

Food shops in the UK can deliver without any bags at all for example. A single bottle of something from Amazon for instance will likely come in a cardboard box with some kind of plastic bubble wrap.

And is it really true that the driver is going to have items to delivery to almost every block of houses every day? Not everyone is shopping from the same retailer either.

> And is it really true that the driver is going to have items to delivery to almost every block of houses every day? Not everyone is shopping from the same retailer either.

My apartment literally has Amazon drivers coming twice a day with a cart full of packages

Pandemic-style living with wife & 2 adult, self-sufficient daughters. All 3 of them working from home and shopping for entertainment & to battle boredom. Those items above are examples of what actually shows up at the front door. Groceries as well, either from Costco (usually a large order) or Whole Foods (for stuff they can't get at Costco). Sometimes baking HW (a new hobby for one of them). Sometimes, it's boyfriends that drop off Trader Joe's or In-n-Out...

None of us have set foot in a store since March.

From a climate change perspective, it just doesn't sound sustainable that everyone lives like this no matter how you do it. There's plenty of ways to learn, entertain, cook etc. that don't require weekly physical purchases. It's insane what you can do with just the internet compared to 20 years ago. You don't need fancy equipment and ingredients to get deep into bread baking either.

People shouldn't be discussing if it's better to do all these deliveries by car vs Amazon, but how we reduce excessive consumption and waste.

The convenience of online is too convenient. I'm not a "gotta have it now" person very often. I generally don't like the general public either, if I hang out with people it's someone I care about or have somehting in common with (meetups and such). I can generally wait a day or two, and will plan meals around amazon deliveries a couple of day in advance. I don't have a lot of fridge storage space so I'll order Amazon Fresh every couple of days for food. I get most of my household items the same way. I generally plan ahead well enough and "buy in bulk" so that emergency runs happen very seldomly. I love the freedom of ordering online, also it's a lot more efficient and environmentally friendly than driving to a brick and mortar store.

There should be less jobs in the switch; that's how automation is supposed to work, after all, increasing efficiency and whatnot.

The bigger question is whether the total number of jobs in the economy will stay high enough to not have permanent mass unemployment. My guess is, "yes it will, for now at least".

Most of these jobs are long term indeed going to be automated away. Order picking in a warehouse is still difficult enough that it involves some people but it's not hard to see how that could be reduced over time. Driving delivery vans is also an obvious candidate for getting automated away. However, short term this is just Amazon responding to increased demand because of Corona.

Mass unemployment would get accompanied by mass loss of disposable income, so that would actually be bad for Amazon. Automating the supply kind of automates away some of the demand.

The notion of bullshit jobs is basically about people doing busy work without actually doing or producing anything of real value. The industrial revolution produced a lot of that already. There's going to be more of it. Easy to predict, because there already is a lot of it.

IMHO the lockdown kind of revealed just how pointless some of our jobs really are. Masses of people suddenly worked from home and it did not really disrupt a lot of the supply chains or economy. Instead of being useless in some cubicle, people now got to be useless at home. Technically that should have been a huge productivity hit; except a lot of these people were never really that productive to begin with. The most important thing these people do in our economy is spending.

> The notion of bullshit jobs is basically about people doing busy work without actually doing or producing anything of real value.

I think this is real to a certain extent; think of it as bureaucratic 'cruft'. However, it's also hard to spot exactly which jobs are bullshit; if it was easy, you won't have this problem of dead weight positions in big companies. There are almost certainly jobs that look bullshit but aren't, and vice versa.

> Technically that should have been a huge productivity hit

....unless of course most of those jobs can be done effectively remotely.

If we'd instead had all the people now WFH not work at all the economy would look a bit different today, even if you'd kept sending them paychecks.

> and it did not really disrupt a lot of the supply chains or economy...

Your argument made sense up to this point, I agree we should have implemented WFH and Online classes years ago in order to lower traffic congestion and reduce our carbon footprint as inter-connectivity increased.

What I think you're missing is the critical flaw when we saw a massive hit in the Supply Chain, the Value systems within them responded in kind. I'd argue the Supply Chains remarkably broke down (specifically in food, gym equipment and toiletry). Distribution becomes an impossibility when demand far outweighs production and you have nothing to ship for weeks to months, or you have no one to harvest and it rots in fields.

> The most important thing these people do in our economy is spending.

Consumer based economies have this baked into the system, and is actually one of my gripes with this Crony-Capitalist system we've been operating under, but it has it's limitations: this year's black Friday which was a monumental failure by most economists metrics, but was actually a reversion to the mean wherein people have lost significant amounts of expendable income they spend this time of year (which is really debt driven) and overproduction was met with large price reductions that will likely remain. Target, one of the largest online retailers, had a month long 'black Friday' sale as did New Egg and these are the affects of supply forecasting done several quarters ago, perhaps some even from 2019. Unfortunately politicians make giving them bailouts a priority and the model never really seems to undergo the correction that needs to happen to reduce overall consumption to sustainable levels.

For someone who did Supply Chain and Logistics in the Auto Industry and is now returning back into it after a 4 year hiatus, its a Brave New World with immense challenges. Some things still remain, but it's definitely not the same animal at all.

> Mass unemployment would get accompanied by mass loss of disposable income, so that would actually be bad for Amazon

This is nonsense. You’re saying Amazon should keep paying wages so people can use those wages to shop at Amazon. When put that way you can see it makes no sense.

The only thing that matters is that as we increase productivity the benefits are relatively evenly shared. If a 4 or 3 day week becomes normal for everyone and we still output the same or even more, that’s great.

>You’re saying Amazon should keep paying wages so people can use those wages to shop at Amazon

This is exactly the idea behind UBI so the economy doesn't collapse under the pressure of millions of unemployed and unemployable.

UBI comes from taxes collected from across the state/country. It’s not a private industry thing.

There’s no way any company would pay wages to employees under the premise that it will keep their company afloat because they’ll spend the money they just gave them on their goods. Why not just not give them the money in the first place.

Jobs have constantly been automated away for 250 years of the Industrial Revolution.

We don't have to guess how it plays out.

I understand the attitude that this isn't a new phenomenon, but degrees can't be ignored. The labor force participation rate has been consistently falling for a long time (at least 20 years) in the USA (https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force-parti...). I'd argue that the data there still doesn't cover the full force of what's been going on: career positions have typically been replaced with a gig economy.

It's not hard to see that the scope of automation could increase in areas that would more drastically affect employment in the short to mid term than the other developments we've seen in the last 20 years. Either full long-haul automation or almost full automation with remote intervention could be a reality in the very near future, but almost certainly will be in 10 years. Call centers will be almost completely automated. Factories are automated to a much higher degree than they have been in the past. Every industry is solving problems with software that increase efficiency of workers (ie, fewer workers needed) and that trend is accelerating.

We can always say "this time isn't different". History tends to repeat itself. My point is: the trend is already there to see and the evidence suggests that it may accelerate very soon.

Sure you do. New technologies are new and do new things.

So far, there hasn't been problems with mass unemployment. But looking into the far future, when robots are advanced enough to do the basic labor of growing food, building homes, doctoring, shipping stuff around, etc. It's not super clear how much you'd really need human labor at that point, which could easily mean mass unemployment.

Of course, with the right societal design, mass unemployment could be a perfectly fine thing.

Dinosaurs lived for millions of years, till the moment they didn't.

Sweden (in the countryside):

Local smallish grocery stores have expanded their order-online-and-pickup-outside offerings massively. Also a lot of hiring of low skilled labor to do the picking. One of the nearby grocery stores I shop at even rented a chiller container as overflow for pickup storage over the spring/summer/autumn.

Edit: The reason these small stores have been able to do so: They are franchise stores in a chain a with a big enough national presence that's able to do software development. Or just owned outright by a large central outfit. They have some kind of centralized inventory management.

This simply doesn't scale. We have this happening to an extreme in the US because cities are spread out and people are already used to drive to get what they want (so roads are well-built for deliveries), but the more density you get the less this becomes practical (O(n^2)). Large cities everywhere else in the world perform distributions not point-to-point but point-to-hubs, where people are used to go out for a short walk to get what they want from their local grocery store, electronic store, restaurant, etc. I think we'll see more and more deliveries being made for semi-large items though.

Looking at my history, I made an average of 60 orders per year through Amazon while living in the US, an average of 4 orders while living in the UK, and an average of 5 orders while living in France.

Yeah, I'm really surprised by how dependent I've become on Amazon, a company I don't even really trust. The convenience can't be understated, especially as it's not really apparent until you start buying a lot from a site like Amazon.

I didn't realize I hate shopping in a physical store until I started using Amazon. You spend 99% of your time either wandering through aisles trying to find what you want (which they usually don't have) or waiting in the checkout line.

Neither of those things apply to online shopping. The biggest hassle when shopping online is having to login and navigate to dozens, if not hundreds of different websites, re-entering your personal info each time. But a site like Amazon is the Internet equivalent of a department store that has everything, so you only have to login once.

Even if Amazon's prices are the same as physical stores, or even a little more, the time I save not having to drive in traffic and waste walking around a store or standing in lines still makes it worthwhile.

You never even have to leave your chair, it's the future.

~450,000 employees over 300M people, equals about 37 employees over 25K people.

Plus 500K delivery drivers , it's another 37 employees.

So 74 employees. How many did work retail in that 25K town ?

I guess this is added global workforce, not US.

I'd imagine the vast majority of that was in the US, since while Amazon operates in many countries, in most it's only a pale shadow of the US juggernaut. For example, in Singapore it's nearly useless for anything except books, and even there local inventory is pretty sad.

Don't underestimate Europe, we have a population of about 500 Million people and Amazon is big here too.

Nowhere near as big as in the US though, and it's only active in the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy[1]. They have a total of 341 million people. In 2019, Amazon employed 600 000 people in the US, and only 115 000 in Europe[2].

[1]: The Swedish site did just open, but it's rubbish. [2]: https://ir.aboutamazon.com/files/doc_financials/2020/ar/2019...

For what it's worth, I'm in Portugal and have ordered from several amazon sites. Mostly it's from the Spanish one which gives free shipping on orders of 29€.

Amazon is only in 7 countries in Europe. However, Amazon is in China and India. Both countries have a larger population than the US and EU combined.

Why are they in only 7 countries ?

Is it because they won't likely to sucseed ? Or is it just a matter of time until they expand to more countries ?

Because why setup a warehouse in Denmark when workers are half the price in Germany and shipping from Germany to Denmark is only marginally more expensive? I suspect the same is true for other countries like The Netherlands and Belgium.

They ship throughout Europe from those 7 countries but serve most, if not all, of Europe.

In fairness, not all the employees in a town work for one company, and Amazon isn't all there is now in that hypothetical town.

The point is that the retail service industry was a big source of "bullshit jobs" that America needs to a) keep wealth distribution reasonable^, and b) keep people believing that success is all about hard work and gumption&.

   ^ There are differing opinions on what is "reasonable".
   & It sometimes is, but is usually about circumstance.

javajosh, you seem to have a very strange model of the motives of managers in retail, a famously low-margin business.

450k employees globally, not just in the US.

Do you really need to buy things online 2-3x a day? With the planet getting heated like an oven, the least you could do would be to purchase things in bulk, so the transportation cost (to the environment not just to your pocket) is a little smaller.

Even before the pandemic I try to buy everything online, either through Amazon or another retailer. I really do not understand how brick and mortar retails stores stay in business. Just today I needed to buy some plumber's putty. I ordered it from my phone on Amazon in about 30 seconds, that's not even enough time to put my shoes on and get in the car if I were to go to the hardware store. Going to the store is such a gigantic waste of time I don't understand why anyone would do it unless they really need an item immediately.

I’ve honestly found online shopping to become increasingly anti-consumer. The absolute worst trend is what I would consider to be aggressive dynamic pricing, especially on Amazon.

Where specific items cost double on Amazon? Yeah, its better to shop around.

For me, Amazon has become very slow since the pandemic. I only shop on Amazon when I can't find it elsewhere

That's actually perfect, as you can game the system for non-immediate items.

I don't think you've been in stores much then. The entire experience is designed to be anti consumer and to trigger impulse purchases as much as possible.

Some would say this is the impact of late stage capitalism. There is no money left to be made on conventional purchases, but instead the profit is in trickery or deception.

I haven't ordered anything online all year. I'd rather support the local retailers in my town that have been suffering and on the brink of shutting down all year.

In Australia with COVID mostly eliminated we are still seeing numbers that would indicate a step change in the portion of retail happening online. The slow move towards online seems to have been accelerated by a few years.

> satisfactory

No just satisfactory, but retail stores also need to learn that if they want my business they need to have interesting, quality products.

My local hardware store only has Philips drywall screws. Guess what, Philips heads are shit, that's why I'll even wait 2 days to get Torx head screws from Amazon. Hardware store wants my business? Learn that Philips head is shit and get with the beat.

My local Asian grocery store has the shittiest brand of Thai tea leaves. I get good ones from Amazon. Local store wants my business? Taste the tea you sell, learn that it is shit, and have better tea on your shelves.

You underestimate how many people either like or are fine with shitty tea. My parents still drink folders coffee (yuck). I've never bought Folgers yet look at the store shelf, there are generally 2 or 3 shelves dedicated to only Folgers.

We are part of the ultra customized product generation or I think the marketing calls it the "Jeans" generation of shopping. It used to be levi's only. Now even old navy has at least a dozen various on cut let alone style.

Philips sucks but what sucks worse is mixing screw types in an already built product/house. People still need them.

Well, times are changing, an increasing number of people are NOT okay with shitty tea, people are discovering better things online, which is why they are losing business to online sellers like Amazon.

And how is the store supposed to carry 50 different brands of tea catered to the 5 bags that you buy once a month?

They are losing business because there is no route to competition on a local level.

They don't need to carry 50 different brands, they just need to carry a selection of a few good things. Just get rid of all the shit brands.

Trader Joe's has an excellent model that keeps me going there. A huge amount of their stuff is decent and interesting. Although I can't vouch for their tea they have plenty of stuff that is original and well-priced that you can't find online easily.

Tj's also targets wealthy clientele, not the average shopper. The difference in your cart between them in Walmart at the end of the day is huge. I too would rather shop at Joe's, but its likely both your and my income is significantly higher than most Americans simply because we are on HN. We are not a good measure on what stores should cater for.

OK. so now the retail store has to hold both Philips and Torx screws. Over the their whole store, they need to hold double the selection/inventory. All while keeping prices low.

They can't do that.

Switch to Torx only and they'll have my business instead of Amazon. They don't want to take the leap of faith? Too bad, I'm buying from Amazon or McMaster then because Philips is just shit and shouldn't exist anymore.

I'm not here to defend anyone, I'm just saying very matter-of-factly why I often don't use retail stores anymore, and what they can do to make me want to use them.

Interestingly my Amazon purchases have gone down. I'm down to 25 this year, from 116 in 2016. I can't really explain it beyond I got tired of (and maybe a little guilty for) buying so much junk online.

No doubt many of the merchants and businesses that are being put out of business and/or complaining about amazon are in fact buying from them for the same reasons others are.

I have decreased my online shopping. I am supporting local retailers who are having a tough time right now.

2-3 times per day? Until transports are carbon neutral, free shipping should be made illegal....

A delivery to ten houses from one delivery truck is less carbon than ten household cars driving to the store (10 roundtrips). Or more likely, 2-3 different stores per each household.

What you propose would reverse that and increase carbon.

Its also worth pointing out theyre moving to electric delivery vans

> What you propose would reverse that and increase carbon

You forget that by adding a price tag on delivery certain purchases wont be made. Also I would certainly batch my purchases instead of going three times a day to the retail store.

If I buy 3 things separately in a day from Amazon, usually I get one box. (It's only when the things are not all at the closest fulfillment center that there's multiple shipments).

Same, I'm pretty sure if the products are all available in the same warehouse they will get shipped in the same box for efficiency purposes. I don't think such a simple system efficiency would be overlooked by Amazon logistics engineers.

Before the pandemic i saw many people make multiple trips per day to different retail stores. This isn't new behavior for these people and disincentivizing their behavior is going to be difficult.

That's not my experience with Amazon here in the UK... Two separate orders ordered on the same day are arriving at different time slots

They were probably from two different warehouses.

But it's also an example of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

That would entirely depend on the distance to the store, and the assumption you'd always use a car.

> the assumption you'd always use a car.

which seems like a reasonable assumption for anyone

- living in a rural area - living only close to a city but not within - city parts with poor public transport connections

Also, the kind of product also heavily influences that. For more specialized products, people tend to be willing to drive longer distances, therefore making the carbon emissions worse. If the store doesn't carry the item but has to order it first, it also means you double the round trips. Overall, Amazon certainly has a massive environmental impact, including GHG emissions, but in terms of emissions, everyone going to the store by themselves wouldn't really be a better option I imagine.

Over in Germany, 77% of people live in cities. You don't need a car to do grocery shopping in a city in Germany, since public transport works well. In Switzerland, public transport is even better, so you might not need a car even if you don't live in a city.

I know that the US is very different - many cities are not necessarily pedestrian-friendly - but over here, the idea that it's more environmentally friendly to have stuff delivered to you is definitely false.

I live in Germany, in the city. If asked, I guess about 60% of people in my street still need a car. Why do you ask? Because public transport is slow and expensive in lots of instances. Even if you'd be able to cover 60% of your needs without a car, you'd still need a car for quite a lot of cases.

Public transport is certainly better than in some other countries, presumably better than in the US. But it still has to become a lot better the be an actual complete replacement for a car for the majority of people.

"needing a car" and "doing all your grocery shopping by car" are two different things though.

Yes, some people, especially with kids, might take the car when they need to buy lots of stuff, but when it's "oh I ran out of milk", people will probably just walk to the nearest store, or take a bike, etc.

I think the context here was that some people were ordering from Amazon multiple times per week or so and claiming that that was environmentally friendly which I find... doubtful.

> which seems like a reasonable assumption for anyone

Absolutely not. There's plenty of people who live without needing cars.

The gp itemised which sorts of people they were talking about

I disagree. They most certainly need cars, they just do it byproxy. While they certainly reduce their footprint by not having a personal car, they exist at the far end of a very carbon heavy chain that allows populations of our size to exist.

I do my shopping when I'm near the shops anyway. It's creating negligible extra emissions.

It's not like Amazon (or others) dispatch one truck with one item per order. They will batch these to save cost, and I have to imagine it's more carbon friendly than having an individual car from every household making trips, parking in parking lots, etc. etc.

I’m consistently surprised by how bad Amazon is at this. Admittedly this might be because I’m in NYC and there are multiple distribution centers but even when I specifically choose to have things bundled up and delivered at once on my “Prime Day” (or whatever they call it) they still deliver separately on different days.

Not the end of the world but it does annoy me. I’ve been doing a bunch of shopping at Target since the pandemic too, to balance out reliance on Amazon. They’re much better at delivering items together on the day they originally state.

Try ordering online from Walmart. You might order five items and get four packages in four days. Amazon used to be like this 15+ years ago.

Good point, let's also make driving yourself to the store illegal unless you hit a minimum item count while there.

Companies already have a natural incentive to batch orders, because doing so reduces their costs. I don't think you need to lean on them to do what they already want to do.

I have a better idea. Let’s make driving to the store a net positive for the environment, and then people can do it as much as they damn well please.

Considering the overall environmental impact of any personal vehicle on the street, regardless of power source, that seems like a close to impossible task.

Public transit seems like a promising solution, but only goes so far. With the strong automotive industry here in Germany, there is no incentive to get cars off the streets.

> Let’s make driving to the store a net positive for the environment.

Impossible. Even if the car is powered by renewable electricity, each trip to the store contributes to wear and tear on the vehicle, and the parts on the vehicle were almost certainly not produced with renewable energy but with polluting sources, and plus the industrial process producing them likely produces some toxic waste.

They meant by pricing the externalities. An emissions trading scheme can mean that carbon-emitting activities just displace each other. A carbon tax can mean that carbon-emitting activities can result in net reductions in emissions. Road user charges, taxes on vehicles bought, you get the picture.

I wish Amazon would offer some "green" packaging for items not needed immediately. Pool them and then send them out together, not in 5 different packages by 3 delivery companies.

They do offer that in the Amazon Day program - "Order throughout the week and select FREE Amazon Day Delivery to get all your items in fewer boxes on a single day"

I ordered some Christmas presents to be delivered to my parents' house yesterday and was amused to see that I could choose to have them delivered on my Amazon Day.

Seems like Amazon Day should be tied to an address, not an account, but I guess it's an edge-case not worth addressing.

Cool, may I ask in which country you live? Unfortunately it's not (yet) available here in Germany.

This seems to be available only in US unfortunately. https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/28/amazon-prime-members-can-c...

In addition to the other commenter's "Amazon Day Delivery" option, I often also have another option of "No rush delivery" which usually includes $1-$5 credit for digital items (ebooks, music, movies...) - https://imgur.com/a/XtmOmv3

Agreed. The amount of superfluous packaging is sickening. I dont need russian nesting dolls of packaging. Especially when most stuff is not even breakable or at least is not fragile.

Then sign up for a delivery day for items that you don't need right away. That's what I do. It's pretty simple.

Or... we could just tax carbon.

This is what everyone thinks is the only solution, the issue is that it will have different winners and losers than today. And some of the current winners that will be losers have immense political capital and are willing to spend it.

I don't think it's the only solution, but it's pretty much a necessary part of any comprehensive plan of attack. It's the best tool we have.

You're totally right that some current "winners" who benefit from the current state of affairs are fighting and will continue to fight it. That's the case of any major change worth making, though, I think.

So we just pay the losers a fee to go away.

If that means giving Exxon, BP, Shell ... a trillion dollars to just cap all their wells and F'off.... fine. Amortize it over 100 years and pay it down with the tax revenue from carbon.

Fine. As long as we also charge them damages for lying to the public about climate change for all these years.

Consumers willingly purchase and burn hydrocarbons. Joe average consumer is as culpable as some C-suite executive.

And the only viable alternative until very recently... nuclear... is endlessly disparaged as unsafe by 'save the earth' types. So as far as I'm concerned, the green movement is equally culpable on the lying front. Should we charge the Sierra Club luddites too?

what are the 1, 5, and 10 year effects on food prices for a carbon tax at a rate of your choosing?

They go up. Probably by a lot. I didn’t say the taxes would be fun.

Amazon is probably batching a lot of these orders into one delivery.

I'm really curious about this. I've noticed though time Amazon seem to be batching orders less often (This is in the UK, and merely anecdotal.)

I was recently looking at the courier's parcel tracking app, i was interested recently to see that my delivery was '120 stops away'. If this is typical, the marginal cost of delivering a parcel must be small in terms of miles driven and driver time. (Obviously this is highly contingent on population density).

Another good example of this is Royal Mail, where the cost of a marginal piece of post or small parcel must be tiny (since the postman is already delivering to 50%+ addresses every day).

It occurred to me that in some situations, it might actually be more efficient _not_ to batch. The complexity of attempting to batch at the warehouse must be very high, and take up quite a bit of warehouse space, and slow down dispatch significantly.

A related and relevant observations why are courier companies not a natural monopoly? If the marginal cost of delivery were high, a courier company with higher volumes would naturally make more profit, and so the market would push in the direction of fewer bigger couriers. This seems to suggest that the volume of parcels means that we're already in a situation where couriers are pretty efficient and marginal costs are low. It'd be interesting to know empirically how this works out.

> A related and relevant observations why are courier companies not a natural monopoly? If the marginal cost of delivery were high, a courier company with higher volumes would naturally make more profit, and so the market would push in the direction of fewer bigger couriers.

I think you are onto something, that the courier business enjoys huge advantage from economies of scale. However, I think that there is no actual monopoly, because the advantage of higher volume in last-mile delivery probably saturates fast enough that you can take it all at relatively low total levels of volume.

For example, if you have higher volumes, you can optimize courier routes so that they waste less time driving around. However, at some point fixed per-package overhead like parking getting in and out of the truck, walking up to front door, etc become so large that time spent actually moving between deliveries becomes smaller and smaller part of your time, and so optimizing it becomes less and less valuable. Then, the issue is how much volume you need to hit that level, and I think that the answer is "much less than monopoly level".

This is a fascinating comment

In particular -> It occurred to me that in some situations, it might actually be more efficient _not_ to batch. The complexity of attempting to batch at the warehouse must be very high, and take up quite a bit of warehouse space, and slow down dispatch significantly.

And once again the responses are about personal rights and freedoms while ignoring the good of society and the planet. This is exactly why developing countries tell first-world countries to shove their lofty and hypocritical demands for others to reduce their carbon footprint.

If first-world countries and their citizens can't be bothered to reduce their consumption and behavior, why should developing nations?

Especially the comments about "batching orders" somehow having an impact is just ludicrous. Aren't we in a thread about a company forced to hire more people because of the amount of orders coming in, forcing more deliveries? How does it not click in your brains that more orders = more boxes = more resource consumption = more drives = more weight = more fuel consumption = more carbon?

It's way more carbon efficient than driving to three different stores in a day yourself.

But far less carbon-efficient than just not buying so much unnecessary crap in the first place.

Moralizing hasn't solved the obesity crisis, so I don't think it will solve the climate crisis either.

Using cars too I'd guess then?

Cars are not free, one of the biggest household budget posts.

what's a budget post? I don't think I've ever heard that term before.

They do a lot of work to combine multiple orders placed within short windows (motivated by cost savings, rather than carbon savings, but the effect is the same)...

I live in Massachusetts and I have been boycotting Amazon for over a year now. Fact is, I just don't need to buy that much shit. I can go to microcenter for needed electronics, and otherwise grocery / hardware stores have what I need.