The "just stop buying amazon" arguments never made sense to me in the first place, because most people who use it are the ones budget-stretched in the first place. A lot of rural communities have no other viable options for some items as well.

It will take massive government action and that's it. There's no other way we can fix this problem. Wages are suppressed because it's _legal enough_ to suppress them. Labor fines basically become a cost of doing business.

After the union busting that went on during the Alabama Amazon unionization votes, after all of these labor complaints against Amazon coming under media attention and not a single thing being done about it, it's clear that there is truly nothing that will stop it except a general strike.

https://www.inc.com/thomas-koulopoulos/100-years-ago-we-fear...

"It wasn't until the middle of the twentieth century that the tipping point came along for the driverless elevator as the result of a strike by the elevator operators' union in New York City in 1945.

The strike was devastating, costing the city an estimated one hundred million dollars. Suddenly, there was an economic incentive to go back to the automatic elevator. Over the next decade there was a massive effort to build trust in automatic elevators, which resulted in the elimination of tens of thousands of elevator operator jobs."

If Amazon is close enough to automating these jobs, then it will likely just automate it and fire whoever it can. If not, then you're likely making the path towards that faster.

I don't see any way for the employees to win this beyond buying a bit more time. Unless the employees, the government, and Amazon, find a way for them to get a profession in which they have more leverage thanks to the *high individual value* they provide, rather than being a temp for future robots.

One solution can be for a union, government, Amazon etc, is to put aside money for a fund that will invest in training these employees so they could one day not depend on these kind of low-leverage jobs.

While everyone was predicting that the dirty jobs would get automated, instead its a lot of midlevel jobs are getting automated, but we still don't have a robot that can take out the trash.

I am willing to bet my house thay we can automate away the CEO but not the janitor, and it will be hilarious.

Management is just analysis of data, we can do that. But the physical works requires dexterity and robotics that still escapes us.

Because it's hard to justify the $$$ on a robot to automate a job that takes 30 seconds once a week.

Modern people don't realize it, but an awful lot of household drudgery has been automated. I'm old enough to remember life before the microwave. What a marvelous time saver that is! You can even buy one from the thrift store for $10. I remember them being $1000, and that was back when a dollar was worth something.

My first encounter with a microwave was at far Bob's in Pasadena. Finals had just ended at Cal Tech and I walked to far Bob's to decompress. I had no knowledge of microwave ovens.

I ordered a piece of cherry pie. Waitress decided to warm it without telling me, using their then-new microwave oven.

The plate was ice cold when she passed it to me. When I bit into a piece of the pie, I burned the bejesus out of my mouth. I yelped and the waitress came running.

She showed me this magic box, which made sense as I'd just finished E&M. She comped me the pie and since it was a slow night (around 2am), we spent an hour testing different foods in the microwave. Bacon layered in paper towels was the clear winner.

The fastest tech revolution I ever saw was in the fall of '75, when I was a frosh. At the beginning of the semester, the Caltech bookstore had slide rules for $125. By December, they were on closeout for $5. Never saw them again. The calculators had arrived!

(Showing my age again. Kids today don't ride bikes to school. All you gotta do is look at the lonely single bike rack at elementary schools. In my day there were lots of racks festooned with bikes. These days when I pass a school, there's a long line of moms in SUVs with the motor running talking on their phones.)

In the USA. But in plenty of other places they do. In fact, at the bike rack of my sons school there is too little place, so some of them overflow onto the school yard.

There are the mothers of kitchen automation:

1. refrigerator

2. garbage disposal

3. dishwasher

4. electric / gas stove and oven

These are really marvelous inventions. It seems I spent half my childhood washing dishes by hand. Ugh.

The latter does not exist in Europe so I haven't ever thought it would be an important step in reducing chores. We have bio waste bins for food leftovers which seems pretty efficient already.

In my opinion they provide basically zero value but lots of trouble. They encourage putting all kinds of nastiness down your pipes and in my experience tend to break and leak. But they are virtually ubiquitous here.

But perhaps not as much fun, particularly if you forget to put the lid on?

> It seems I spent half my childhood washing dishes by hand. Ugh.

Yes, I remember that when I left home to go to university, the very first thing my parents did was to buy a dishwasher.

Mind you, I don't have one today - kitchen too small, and I don't like bending down to fill/empty it.

I'm really wondering about the garbage disposal thing and I'll go Google about them.

Pneumatic waste collection is a thing, and has been for quite some time.

See

- https://www.wired.com/2010/08/trash-sucking-island/

- https://untappedcities.com/2020/04/09/inside-roosevelt-islan...

- https://qz.com/1909600/the-future-of-garbage-collection-is-p...

What I think will happen is CEOs will be glorified actors that are tasked with delivering the decisions some ML system has made. It'll be like the "white guy in a suit" role that some Chinese companies have.

Whereas things humans have developed over millions of years and think are easy, like vision, dexterity, etc might be quite hard and the last things to be automated.

I feel like a lot of comments about what ML will do start with a misunderstanding of what ML actually is.

Saying ML will make a CEO’s decisions is like saying Excel will make CEO’s decisions. Neither is anything more than a system for keeping track of correlations.

I regularly consult management about technical decisions and the always chose something else than the best option. Based on feelings, opinions and kickback rates.

Well, right there's your problem.

Also, the vacuum now empties itself

Have you found those working? All my friends that have one just end up storing them somewhere never to be used again.

My apartment in Europe is suitable for it, as I do not have many rooms, so that it does a decent job on cleaning. I do not use the regular vacuum very often.

2) The CEO, and CEO pay, is already more of political action.

Have you ever seen a robot unclog a toiler? Get into a greasy kitchen vent to clean it? Clean out the molt between the tiles?

Of fuck that, there is no cleaning robot that can even recognise a stain a scrub it off with a brush.

Do you know there are different kinds of cleaning products and brushes for different surfaces?

Cleaning is a very complex process made up of hundreds of little actions, each fairly complex. They require loads of dexterity

I have seen a plunger-bot. I have never seen a commercial plunger-bot. I think I've also seen a mold scrubber bot. I'm not trying to minimize the skill involved. I'm trying to say that the labor it replaces (assuming the time value of money and minimum wage increases cancel out) is worth 362,500 over 25 years. That's a lot of money, but it's also not for a robot that can do all those things assuming it was as efficient as replacing a whole person. And less if the robot has to be replaced more frequently.

If the market supported a robot that cost a few orders of magnitude more than that, I can see a fleet of robots. Not 100% "let 'er rip" L-5 autonomy, but where one person managed a fleet of specialized robots. Mapping out the surfaces ahead of time, etc.

I will say, I was responding to a "janitor" in the office environment doing routine tasks emptying trash. Not a kitchen vent cleaner. There are a lot of deep cleaning actions that would be harder to automate, and given their rareness and extra difficulty are likely the last to go.

Unions have negotiated with companies that outsource or automate its members' jobs to secure compensation for the workers who were affected.

However, I think this is a problem that requires a larger solution. There needs to be compensation plans for workers as they're automated away or outsourced. Perhaps it can be a buyout, or a shared ownership scheme where workers get shares in the company or the automation itself that pay dividends. Or a tax on automation or outsourcing that gets returned to workers.

We're heading towards a world where most work is done by machines, and only a handful of people will own, control and profit from them. I think a tax and a shared ownership model would help prevent a world where workers and their progeny are relegated to peasantry.

People keep saying that but we are no closer than we were 50 years ago. A lot of jobs have been replaced but new jobs have been created and society has absorbed the increased productivity (cheaper goods, foods, and much more complex high end goods (iPhone, airplanes, etc).

Not in every case. You can look at workers in the Rust Belt. Their well paying jobs with benefits were "replaced" and new jobs never came, unless you think working at Walmart for close to minimum wage is one of those new jobs.

Even when, say, manufacturers come back and produce domestically, they've reduced what used to be a 1,000+ person job to one that requires 40 engineers and a handful of maintenance people. It's not like any of those factory workers who were laid off in the past were later rehired as engineers, either.

It isn't "society" that's absorbed absorbed increased worker productivity, but employers and those who own the automation. Worker productivity in the US increased dramatically over the last 20 years, and even more over the last 40. Despite that, worker compensation hasn't increased, and has roughly remained the same over those same 40 years[1].

[1] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

And the old coal mining towns in Northern England (and South Wales).

With wages the minimum wage in 1980 was $3.10, while the last increase from 2009 rose from $6.55 to $7.25 per hour

What society has "absorbed" is an expectation that stock markets will continue rising at a pace that significantly outstrips inflation and (related) wage increases. Pension funds and individual retirement savings (401k, RRSP) heavily rely on employers pocketing the bulk of productivity increases for themselves and continuing to exploit labour. It'd be interesting to see the chaos that would arise if governments decided at some point that workers should get an equal share of that.

Yes it has. Food is way cheaper now. Clothes are way cheaper. Transportation is way cheaper. Housing is way better (and cheaper if you want what passed for housing in the 40s).

It's important because wealth is essentially power, so concentration of wealth inevitably changes the balance of power in society. And that in turn creates a feedback loop where the wealth and powerful can undermine thelaws and regulations intended to keep the distribution of wealth and power from becoming too lopsided.

This is why I view the current everything-as-a-service model that takes things people used to own and turns them into things people rent pretty skeptically.

Really I think it’s a balancing act. Since we can’t just get rid of the concept of power, we try to regulate its use. This is pretty difficult.

It’s why these wage debates get so heated - they threaten the core social power of people.

And it absolutely is a feedback loop. Something about absolute power corrupting absolutely.

People have been saying it for far longer than 50 years:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

The trouble is, both sides of the argument are correct. When disruption occurs, many people are badly disadvantaged even if society as a whole moves forward. It would be best to find ways to reduce the impact on the affected people without holding up automation and other improvements which have been shown to be beneficial to productivity in the long term.

http://nws-sa.com/rr/Inequality/Lindert.pdf

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001

They will do this anyway. The reason it mattered for elevator operators is that you had to convince a bunch of end users that it was reasonable to self-operate the elevator after they had been trained for years to have an attendant, and you probably had to modify the deployed elevators all over the city--which weren't owned by and one party but had been installed by various buildings--to have additional safety features. Amazon can replace out how Amazon works internally and I would have no clue.

it's hard to make this argument when you apply it to the industrial revolution which has already happened, and people aren't completely destitute because of it. In fact, people, on average, are wealthier because of it!

Automation means wealth, and this new-found wealth means more demand for goods/services - of which may not yet exist today. How many people would have guessed that a youtube content-creator is going to be a thing?

> I don't see any way for the employees to win this beyond buying a bit more time.

Why can't the government increase minimum wages? If those jobs are likely to get automated away then that's going to happen either way At least let them make decent wages _while_ they have a job.

I get my groceries from Ocado in the UK. Their warehouses are almost entirely automated, including increasingly picking and packing groceries that often include soft or easily breakable products into bags.

They're moved from focusing on growing their own direct sales to increasingly licensing that platform globally.

Yeah a big part of the work is automated. But these warehouses still need people.

E.g. a few years ago the packing into bags was still done by people across the board from trays brought by robots. They've systematically automated more and more of it at a pretty astounding pace.

It should be done today and held in escrow for when it happens.

They're always pushing for automation as fast as they possibly can.

Cool story about the elevator. :)

I sometimes fantasize about what it would be like to live in a mild-to-moderately isolated community - moving to Hawaii, northern Alaska, some random island. It's fascinating reading blogs by people who live there, and many of them have a "So You Want to Move to _____" type of post. In virtually all of them, there is some comment along the lines of "It's really hard to find all the things you're used to buying out here, but at least Amazon delivers to us." One of those that I was reading about Hawaii said the big island only has a few big box stores but Amazon can deliver in two to three days.

Just thought that was an interesting tidbit.

Source: Grew up in one of those shitholes, actively rooting for sea level rise wipe it off the map, there is nothing of value there.

There is only 185k people living on the "big island". I'm not sure why people would expect something other than a rural America level of services, when it is really just a small city of people effectively in the middle of no where.

Note that smaller cities in rural America service a much larger population than just the city itself. The island does not have a surrounding population that can drive an hour in once a week to make use of a big box stores.

Google maps says there is a Walmart, Kmart, Sears and a number of other well known American brands. It's not like they are being blocked from entering the market.

I think you misunderstood me. Your comment was in response to:

> I was actually very surprised how sparse the retail was. Felt very much like rural America.

You then went on to argue that retail is not more developed because existing retailers are conspiring to keep the bigger retailers out.

I am arguing that there need not be a conspiracy. The real reason is more likely that it is not economical for a lot of big box retailers to serve such a small population.

I was also responding to the great grandparent's comment. They should not be surprised at a rural America level of retail on the big island of Hawaii, as it is pretty much rural America, what with low population density and isolated location.

Of course we ended up at Walmart because the people I was with are suckers. Lovable suckers, but all-day suckers nonetheless.

I'm not an Amazon defender by any means, but doesn't Amazon pay the best in terms of comparable work which is why the warehouse jobs are so competitive to get? Or is that just Amazon PR to stave off regulations

Among all Amazon workers, the median pay is $28,446 a year ($13.68 an hour), a figure the company revealed this year for the first time because of a new regulatory requirement. That’s a worldwide figure that includes full and part-time workers. Glassdoor, an employment site, says average pay at U.S. fulfillment centers has been $13 an hour, according to nearly 900 people who submitted their data to the site.

Amazon’s pay is significantly above the $10.28 an hour that the typical retail worker makes, but it’s less than the $15.53 that a median warehouse employee is paid, according to Labor Department data.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/amazons-15-m...

Article is from 2018, but is about a wage increase to $15/hr.

>Amazon’s pay is significantly above the $10.28 an hour that the typical retail worker makes, but it’s less than the $15.53 that a median warehouse employee is paid, according to Labor Department data.

It might be tempting to conclude from that amazon is under-paying for that, but it's unknown what the median "warehouse job" at amazon entails compared to the median "warehouse job" elsewhere. If the jobs at amazon is mostly low skill (comparable with retail), then it wouldn't be fair to compare to the median warehouse job that has higher proportion of skilled labor like forklift drivers.

I'm sure the competitiveness varies wildly in different areas though.

The downside, especially for the managers, is that they bring their toxic attitudes with them. Diluted of course, but removing it entirely would be a huge effort.

Generally the conveyor doesn't go faster when you get faster. The warehouse robots are just working on queuing theory. However fast you go, they'll just schedule more shit to come to you.

Is it? Amazon employees (presumably) have the same options as everyone else. Many of those options are, generally speaking, cheaper than Amazon. Whatever your feelings about Amazon in general, fact that Amazon’s supposedly cash-strapped employees choose to pay a premium for convenience is not evidence of Amazon’s malevolence.

No it’s not. Your point was completely the opposite (factory towns had shitty prices due to exclusivity).

> Amazon is forcing competitors out of business. And once they have a monopoly

They are forcing little shitty stores that have nothing to add over ordering online out of business.

They aren’t anywhere near a monopoly in any segment of the world. They aren’t even on a path to it. It’s so trivial for people to sell things online that they will never be anything close to one unless they get online sales banned for the rest of the Internet.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store

My aunt went to be a manager at the Walmart while everything else in town slowly went out of business. They carried sewing supplies until Franklin's went under and then they got rid of that section.

It's the same story with louder music.

This arrangement is a transfer of wealth between the middle class and Walmart regardless of whether they opt to shop at Walmart.

But in a world where Walmart posted that much profit on it's $559 billion 2020 revenues[2], somehow Walmart is being allowed to tax me, not a Walmart shopper, via my taxes, and transfer it to Walmart's owners and shareholders, by forcing me to pay for part of their employees wages.

Which they clearly have the money to actually pay for.

Unless Walmart is a break-even business, there is no excuse, period, for them to not be paying a living wage and getting sponsored by the government for it.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/269414/gross-profit-marg...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/shelleykohan/2021/02/18/walmart...

How is it a transfer to walmart? The people who get paid the benefit are eligible for it regardless of whether they're employed by walmart or not. Suppose walmart automated their jobs and replaced them with robots, you'll still be on the hook for paying those benefits.

I'm skeptical of this. If anything amazon's push for minimum wage makes me think they're better able to afford the increased cost of labor than their competitors.

You need to look at an operating income figure to make such a conclusion. (Or another financial measure that’s “after” labor, but OI is probably the standard one.)

They are literally taking your tax dollars to do this.

This is the simplest possible economic calculus: a business that doesn't pay full time employees a living wage is getting sponsored by your tax dollars for its profits.

This is all bullshit. Walmart is still the cheaper price for groceries and most general goods (at least in my experience living somewhere rural). Amazon is purely convenience at an OK price.

There's a huge useful area between giving Amazon less power and giving them no power. Amazon is always the 4th place I look for something. Most of the time I never even have to go there. And things like their little tantrum where they stopped selling a bunch of Apple products just made that easier for me.

Also remember the audience. Most of the people who can't afford to shop anywhere but Amazon also can't afford to hang out on hacker news. Most of the people here can do better.

I also ask that Because I think humans are losing. The big one will be autonomous trucking. Once that hits, I think we’re going to see massive layoffs and unemployment, as robotics replaces humans.

They've become the new Walmart, they killed off all other options so now its the only place left for a lot of people.

Is it that difficult to imagine the amount of value it created for those communities, too?

"Value creation" generally reveals itself through a rightward shift in the distribution of household incomes, increased standards of living, and resilient supply chains. At least that's what Adam Smith had in mind when he wrote "The Wealth of Nations".

If the only "value creation" KPI that ticks up is corporate earnings in offshore tax havens, the system starts to look like a non-governmental tax authority.

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this point.

This is a problem inherent to neoliberalism, you’re right, I’m just not sure I’d agree that it requires a nation state level shift in politics to make Amazon pay their fare share in taxes and wages.

So, Amazon shows billions and billions of dollars of revenue, but relatively little profit. And it’s only profit that would get taxed at the federal level.

Yes, so that’s not profit anymore. What’s the problem?

Would you prefer that businesses be taxed on revenue and not profit?

Just because a company buys and owns something doesn't automatically make it an investment that shouldn't be taxed as profit.

well you'll be glad to know that these are not what's being spent on - because if they did, it'd be an open and shut case from the IRS.

But

> boosting stock prices they already own

that is not considered investment, and i do not believe a company can avoid paying tax on profits used to perform this action.

That’s not even a thing. We’re not living in an Austin Powers movie.

> or boosting stock prices they already own

Who is “they” in that sentence? Do you know how public traded companies work?

Unfortunately, that cuts both ways. There are a lot of ways to be exploitive, to your and your customers' benefits, when you're a $113 B revenue/quarter company, that simply aren't available when you're a startup.

Hell, Walmart pioneered the "How'd you like to sell in our stores?" + "You need to reduce prices, or it'd be a shame if we, your biggest customer, had to drop you" two step. And Amazon pioneered hyperscale logistics efficiencies. Both of which only work if you're giant.

If we want a return to competition of yore, I think it's only going to happen if we (a) prevent "extra-large" companies from having in-house logistics & (b) prevent predatory contracts and pricing when a size disparity exists (e.g. Walmart/supplier).

And given both of these are pretty fundamental to the way many companies work, I'm not even sure they'd be feasible.

Actually, I believe that was Walmart as well: >TIMMER: I used to ask my class, I’m talking 1985, “Where is the world’s largest supercomputer?” And the correct answer was, “It’s at the Pentagon.” Okay. “Where is the world’s second largest supercomputer?” Bentonville, Ark. Home of Walmart. They used that computer to track every single item on every single Walmart shelf. That information technology is what revolutionized food marketing. And it was pretty much invented by Walmart.

Source: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/farms-race/#:%7E:text=where...

At first I placed online orders with them, but once moving to online shopping at all, it was clear that Amazon had even better selection, prices, shipping, etc.

But I still enjoy a good physical bookstore. I might still shop there in person today if their stock was more interesting, even if the prices were a little higher.

Yeah this annoyed me to no end, however after a few shops I realized the only reason these are even open right now is because of the high margin gift section. Check the prices on their plushies when you are there. $35 for a small rabbit! and people buy them.

Yes, you should allocate a larger share of scarce resources (in this case, floor space) to high-margin product...

... but not at the expense of the central thesis of why customers actually come to your store.

B&N was able to sell high margin gift shop items because traffic was already there as a bookstore... and there as a bookstore because they had reading areas and a coffee shop.

Imagine a virtualized army of engineers that the AI or brain upload future may bring. Maybe that won't happen in our lifetimes, but it will happen at some point if we don't manage to nuke ourselves.

There are probably a handful of other trends that will cause instability and salients to develop in the fitness gradient.

They're still in business. I browsed one last month. I was amused that one entire rack, 6 shelves, was filled with "Trump is Evil" books. Somebody at that store doesn't like Trump :-)

Plus, I'm sure some have their own niches (satire, exposés like "Frankly we won this election" that have new reporting, etc) and many have their own historical value. I saw an ant-Tom DeLay book in the wild a few years ago well after his fall from grace and considered buying it just as a keepsake of the era.

What's sad is that there probably is some interesting IT story behind Walmart scaling, but not using supercomputers and using PCs or somethign instead.

My first job out of college in 1989 was to go to work in the basement of The Pentagon for the Defense Communications Agency, as an Analyst/Terminal Operator for those old pre-Multics Honeywell WWMCCS mainframes. One of my first jobs there was to help modernized the classified Airfields database from COBOL 66 to COBOL 77.

At the beginning, we used glass tty terminals that were wrapped in faraday cages, and all local printing was done via a screen print function to local thermal paper printers. We could use the line printers, but those were not directly accessible to us, and we had to go up to the Operator window to ask for our output.

They later upgraded the terminals to EMF-hardened IBM PC XT computers with removable 5GB hard drives, known as WIS-CUC terminals. That was like 1991. Note that this was PC XT technology from like 1984, not PC AT.

The unclassified PC AT type computers we used outside of the classified environments probably had more RAM, larger hard drives, and more I/O capacity than those ancient Honeywell mainframes.

So, no, there weren’t any supercomputers at the Pentagon in 1985.

Now, if you want to talk about NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, then that’s a different story.

/s

Amazon has only recently pioneered last mile logistics. It still isnt that great. I’m in a large metro area and 25-50% of my packages do not meet the prime delivery dates. I’d argue Walmart is still the king of logistics, for now.

Losers for me were Home Depot and Canadian Tire. They iterated slowly and when they did, made things worse it seemed.

Home Depot on the other end was great. When there was a shortage of disinfectant (and government mandated clean hands before allowing people into stores) they just added actual washing basins with regular soap and paper towels and I could go get stuff to do projects. I have never been to HD as often as during 2020.

I used online ordering literally once at HD and CT each during that time. HD made me call/text a number with my order# when I arrived and they brought the items out for me but I really only used that because something was low stock in the one of many HD stores I could go to that had any of the item at all and I wanted to "reserve" it. No app needed which is a big big plus for me. I abhor all these apps for everything.

CD wasn't bad either. Same deal, reserving an item with low stock until I could go get it. I just picked it all up at the online order desk where it had already been put in a cart.

I don't like ordering food online. Had to do it once while waiting for a negative covid test result. You don't get to pick the actual items you want (fruits/veggies). Not great. I already don't like how cashiers throw your sensitive veggies around all the time. Never mind how they're being handled in the rest of the chain. Before anyone asks, yes I do choose which line I choose by who is the cashier/packer over length of line.

Walmart doesn't "try" where they have to compete with upscale options because even if they do good the rich people will still shop there.because of the Walmart stigma. And the poor people only care about price so they won't be turned off if Walmart doesn't try hard.

Also, there are some really crappy Home Depots out there. In my experience they're the ones without appreciable competition.

If anything more people touch your items in this system or its on par. Sure there's no cashier/packer touching your items at checkout. But the equivalent has to happen internally. I have no idea how it actually works but I gather since most stuff goes directly into the store and not the warehouse someone walks through the store and picks the order like you would exposing themselves to the Covid risks and then potentially someone else packs it all up and yet another person delivers it to your car as this happens asynchronously and there might even be a shift change in between.

FWIW my Costco didn't pretend the pandemic didn't happen. I still sometimes have to wait to get into the fruit/veggie or dairy coolers, with someone making sure that not too many people are in there at the same time. They applied the limits intelligently (only allowing one person per membership into the warehouse at all at a time when the government limits were very low) so as to allow more people to shop without having to wait outside for ages (which happened in the first 'panic buying stage' of the pandemic). They have less produce in the cooler too to allow more space for passing (even to the detriment of the produce. I just don't buy some stuff any longer as its no longer cooled and there are quality issues). They also rearranged some other stuff to make it easier to access without bumping into each other. None of the other stores I have been to have done this at all.

I think we're beyond that now. I really do.

We thought we were going to get Weyland-Yutani, but I think we're going to end up with Bezos-Walton instead.

The only government responses we need here are better labor laws and maybe a few tax code changes.

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-15-minimum-wage-lobby...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/09/amazon-...

And I’m not at all expecting corporations to welcome unions, I’m saying unions need to fight for it. But that requires people believing in unions again.

I can agree that unions concentrate power in imperfect ways, but personally I still think they are an overall improvement on the non-union status quo.

Employees are really good at complaining (at least in the US). Management that is interested in knowing what bothers employees definitely knows without a union.

> This could attract more talent to the company, improve retention

Paying more money works even better. People choose better paying jobs pretty consistently even if it means dropping the union.

Sure, but unions are good at motivating management to care.

After that entrepreneurs learned that you need to be ruthless to win in capitalism. Don't get me wrong, I support fair wages for all employees, no matter what they do. But in real life capitalism, only the most ruthless companies win (FB, AMZN), unless they have an amazing product (e.g. GOOGL)

I know it's slightly off topic, but in some areas of Europe it is considered essential for any big employer to have a healthy union. The employer encourages unionization, and there are certain benefits for them too.

You can't make this stuff up. But it drives home the reality that anti-union sentiment is strong in the U.S.; and deep. Most non-skilled workers in this country are very skeptical of unions, if not outright cynical. And it's always been this way, going back to the 19th century.

IIRC, there was a second vote at that same plant a little later. That time VW HQ just kept their mouth shut. And they loosened the leash on their American managers, who mostly opposed unionization. Obviously it failed again.

“If the only punishment is a fine then it’s legal for the rich” or however the saying goes.

You could alternatively compare to McDonald's?

Pepsi?

Facebook?

I frequently encounter armchair economists on the Internet making sweeping claims about various, but it is frustrating. It takes basically no effort to think up something plausible. But to take even the first step towards empirically verifying a given hypothesis is an enormous amount of work. Without even a rough empirical foundation, how valuable are these armchair theories?

A little dated now but the Economist had a little mini-article about Amazon and wages. Really highlights how difficult it is to draw any definitive causal links, as well as trade offs (like benefits and unemployment): https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/01/20/what-amaz...

Amazon's argument is that they aren't driving wages down, they are raising them up because their employees are not from traditional logistics, but most retail and service jobs, again, on its own, probably more right than not.

That's the thing I think is hard to separate, and I want to know more about. These industries feel threatened by amazon, so where is that coming from? Is it all just business muscle and monopsony, or is there genuine disruption (even in something that relies on amazon's scale)? Sort of a competitively 'legitimate' advantage. And I would say that you can definitely discuss if they are externalizing societal costs with how they treat employees.

It's not a direct comparison, but I think about the crafts that were overtaken by factories. I think it can't be that simple, but amazon clearly changed the labor dynamics, so what did it do and how did it do it?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-12-17/amazon-am...

I just think it is misleading to call that wage suppression as that is not how the term is traditionally used. Operating a loom probably does take less skill than knitting fabric by hand, but that's not wage suppression; that's just creative destruction.

With that definition of wage suppression, pretty much every app, piece of software, or other innovation is suppressing wages.

I get where you're coming from (there are other logistics-related specialty jobs), but i've heard that Amazon designs their warehouses around not needing forklifts (except in very few areas0 since they're incredibly dangerous in general.

A couple of quotes from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/business/economy/amazon-w...

In making the case against a union at its warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., Amazon has touted its compensation package. The company notes that base pay at the facility, around $15.50 an hour for most rank-and-file workers, is more than twice the local minimum wage, and that it offers comprehensive health insurance and retirement benefits.

But to many of Amazon’s Bessemer employees, who are voting this month on whether to unionize, the claims to generosity can ring hollow alongside the demands of the job and local wage rates. The most recent figure for the median wage in greater Birmingham, a metropolitan area of roughly one million people that includes Bessemer, was nearly $3 above Amazon’s pay there, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But other workers emphasize that pay at Amazon isn’t particularly high for the Birmingham area, even if the pandemic has reduced their job options.

The retail workers’ union said it represented employees at nearby warehouses where pay is $18 to $21 an hour, including an ice cream facility and a grocery warehouse not far from Amazon.

For example, it is not surprising that amazon warehouse workers, an unskilled job with minimal required training, make less than a median wage. For example, the average salary of a warehouse worker in Los Angeles (where I live) is $38k/year. The average salary of a paralegal is $45k/year. This is unsurprising. I am not saying that warehouse work is easier than paralegal work, but I am saying that this phenomenon has nothing to do with Amazon.

Further, it is worth noting that Amazon Warehouse jobs are unlike most many other warehouse jobs. Being able to use a pallet jack or forklift is a skill and that workers with those skills can command higher wages than workers without those skills is again unsurprising.

I think it is hard to objectively analyze the situation by taking talking points from a union in a confrontation with Amazon. $18-$21 with what kind of benefits? For what kind of labor?

What I'm getting at is, small towns and the like tend to be dominated by petty landlords and what have you. Or someone wealthier elsewhere that can fund endeavors there because they can't where they live. The unfortunate aspect is like the events George Orwell stated. Lots of rundown or lesser paying places.

The notion that consolidation of markets is somehow bad because it drives down people's autonomy has been around for ages and all we've seen time and time again that it actually benefits people more often than it doesn't. You don't have to worry about crop yields, you worry about a boring office job. You don't have to worry about house maintenance, just who to call to fix these complex things. It allows for people to specialize in fields instead of making a population of "Jack of All Trades." The latter make for a better system when you're predominantly agrarian. The former is better when you've got a system so complex that you need people to hyper specialize in something specific so they don't have to worry about other minutia work.

Specialization is great. Economies of scale make certain things possible. Awesome. That doesn't mean you have to consolidate power for each of these things with just one big overlord.

I don't agree with the house maintenance for example. Many many renters have a really hard time to get their landlords big and small to fix things. Or make them nice. And you can't do stuff on your own. Want a mini split AC/heat exchanger? Gotta ask the landlord. A large corporation that doesn't want to do this or even listen to you. They'd have to install this for the entire apartment block if they do. A large expense. Now you gotta get all the 50 neighbors to petition as well to get anything moving. And the corp knows they gotta increase the rent if they do this for you but then you will complain about the rent increase later. The same can apply to individual petty landlords abviously.

As a homeowner I already can make use of the benefits of specialization by calling on someone that specializes in HVAC to help me choose whether a mini split makes sense, which models are out there, install it properly etc. Or I can do parts of this, like the research myself or even the installation if I have the expertise.

Any evidence for this? Especially in COVID times when there's massive unemployment checks programs, if that were remotely true nobody would be working for Amazon right now.

0: https://ehs.stanford.edu/subtopic/microbreaks

1: https://savingtoinvest.com/maximum-weekly-unemployment-benef...

What is the turnover rate? Because if you hate your job every single day no amount of money will make you stay.

> Even before the pandemic, previously unreported data shows, Amazon lost about 3 percent of its hourly associates each week, meaning the turnover among its work force was roughly 150 percent a year. That rate, almost double that of the retail and logistics industries, has made some executives worry about running out of workers across America.

2. Even if we assume it's true, "better" does not mean acceptable. Imagine a town with no amazon that only has terrible jobs available. Amazon moves in, some people try working there, the job is so awful that they quit and go back to the other jobs. Those jobs are still terrible. There's very much an issue.

https://www.ridester.com/how-much-do-amazon-drivers-make/#:~.... https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Amazon-Flex/salaries/Independent-...

There are many things Amazon could improve but unfortunately this is the most blatantly incorrect argument that is repeated the most.

I never saw the definitive source on this, but around the time when the unionization vote was happening, people claiming experience in the logistics industry described Amazon as a place with low starting wages, but aggressive bonus structure for high performers. They also offered health benefits on day 1, which is unheard of in logistics.

Other warehouses in the area might have different compensation schemes, and people would generally gravitate to the one that suited their work style better.

The unionization vote seemed like it corroborated this thesis - it wasn’t even 52/48, but something definitive, like 70/30 against the union.

Perhaps someone is aware of the data that incorporates take-home compensation with benefits and all, not the base rates advertised in job ads.

It could be random and it will still work. You want to pay a few people fairly so the others fight with them for that positions. Workers fighting workers is the goal of this incentives, it had nothing too do with performance.

I don't think Amazon "underpays" per say - but the working conditions described seem quite poor.

In your example of sneakers, Adidas/Footlocker/Dicks are not the places to go for me. Here in California there is a store called Big5 Sporting Goods that consistently has incredible prices (on sale or not). In the past decade I've pretty much never bought shoes anywhere else; most sneakers or hiking shoes I've bought are under $35 and they are the most comfortable shoes I've tried anywhere. There may be a similar store in whatever state you're in.

For clothes and some home goods items, similarly I wouldn't go to brand name stores at the malls; Ross and Marshall always have the best deals. For random home goods, Daiso (an Asian/Japanese brand store) which, fortunately for myself, has a lot of stores in California, has tons of super affordable options, as it's basically a Japanese dollar store. Then there are random things that Target has the best deals for; and other random things that Walmart has the best deals for (I know, buying from Walmart is not much better than buying on Amazon).

My main point is, you don't always have to resort to Amazon for budget, you just have to do enough research work to find out where else to go.

One thing I have noticed and don't really understand: Sellers who's products are more expensive on their own site than on their Amazon page. I could understand parity, but I don't understand it being more expensive to purchase from them directly.

First, I'd like to separate AWS from Amazon the Bazaar. It's just too much control over _both_ the Internet (including all other e-commerce) and retail merchandise commerce.

It's like they own the railroads, the ports, the trucks, and the stores -- we've seen the Robber Baron movie already.

But both AMZN "bazaar" and AWS are novel concepts invented by AMZN, and they have worked really hard to make them reality on such unbelievable scales.

Nobody thought of AWS for decades, until AMZN faced the systems problem and came up with cloud computing via AWS.

I understand taking action on AMZN acquisitions since they are reducing competition illegally. But AWS is an absolutely novel idea by them, and in my opinion, we have no right to take any action there. Also there is a LOT of competition in cloud computing by AZURE and GCP

There are other problems: 1) Search is just terrible. Often I have to search in Google to find the product I'm looking for at Amazon. The "other people bought/looked at these items" functionality which partially made up for bad search has been pushed out in favor of sponsored products (i.e. ads).

2) Shipping is only fast and cheap if you get Prime, which basically means paying for your shipping in advance and buying constantly at Amazon to amortize your initial investment.

3) Because Amazon no longer actually controls its own catalog, duplicate listings, misleading listings, merged listings that amalgamate multiple different editions of the same book, etc. abound. e.g. search for "Norton Anthology of English Literature". Instead of a neatly sorted list by volume/edition/condition, you get a whole mess of duplicate/overlapping listings, and also misleading garbage like this (shows 3 books but you only get 1 of them): https://www.amazon.com/Norton-Anthology-English-Literature-P....

I'm shifting towards just using Amazon as a 'wishlist' shopping cart and then finding the actual thing to buy elsewhere.

That's your one job. Ship me the thing in new condition, and you can't even do that. How much is that even saving them on packaging? A nickel? It's disrespectful and greedy, and it's a sign of how awful they really are. You can sell things cheap and be efficient without being trashy.

They don't seem to be damaged in transit, usually it looks like they have been dropped or badly stored.

I always price check Amazon too, quite often it is not the cheapest, and you can get caught out on shipping costs as you say.

How do you lose a page from inside of a box/envelope?

Often, in any case, the damage is more than cosmetic. A paperback book that has been badly creased is more difficult to read than one that's in good condition.

Caring about the condition of books is not a strange idiosyncrasy. There's a clear stratification in the price of the book market as you descend from new to very good to acceptable condition - because buyers generally care.

I'll never forget lending one of the few books I bothered to keep physically to my wife who immediately trying to crack the spine on it to have it open the way she was used to.

The majority of the books I read are digital, though, and have been since PDAs were invented.

Amazon is still one of few companies that has a completely seamless, no-BS return policy, for example.

The "sensible" alternative is to shop direct from small businesses, which I do sometimes, but see [2] from above.

also no fee - the fact i can buy worry free knowing if its not as described/trash/broken i can just send it back at no cost is why i use them. don't know any other online store like that

I also regularly didn't get things on time. And I don't mean a day late, I mean "hasn't even shipped yet by the time it should arrive" late, and without even a notice.

What really sold me on Amazon was game sales, though. I'd pre-order something at Walmart or Gamestop and show up on release day to find out they didn't get it. This happened enough that I finally just ordered it on Amazon instead and hoped it'd work out. It not only worked out, but it had great tracking so I always knew what was going on. I had maybe 2 games be late from Amazon in all the time I ordered from them, and at least one of those was weather that stopped the planes and would absolutely have affected GS and WM, too.

From there they introduced the 2-day shipping and the rest was history.

I recently had an AWS issue. Emailed our rep. Next day I was on the phone with like 8 Amazon people, high up enough to make things happen and low enough to make things happen.

It was pretty wild and yes, for all their faults, the are the most customer focused company I’ve ever worked with.

Amazon is famous for their fake returns that get put back into inventory without being inspected.

Amazon is famous for their fly-by-night third party operators who do all sorts of crazy shit to the customer, but then Amazon claims it’s not their fault. And then Amazon also refuses to tell you who the actual third party was that did the crime.

Amazon is famous for not giving you an adequate solution to a problem that they caused.

Amazon could solve a lot of problems just by never co-mingling inventory from one seller with that from another seller — or with FBA inventory.

Let each seller sink or swim on their own, and let their information be fully exposed to the customer.

Order a three pack of cat litter and get only two packs in the box because one never got included in the first place or the box was opened during transit and the re-taped closed with obviously non-Amazon tape? Gotta ship that box back with two bags of cat litter in it, before you can get a replacement box of three bags of cat litter.

Guess how many times that kind of crap has already happened to me?

Why can’t I just send the pictures of the box and then they send me the third bag of cat litter that got stolen?

I’m tempted to ship them back the bags of cat litter after they’ve been used, so that they can inspect other outputs too….

Sometimes that recourse is stupid (“ship back an entire desktop CNC because it’s missing a spring”), but it’s Amazon’s dime not mine. Other times (alternator mounting flange machined incorrectly by 1/16”; “we can send you another one that’ll get there in 6 days”) I had to make do and modify the part to fit because I can’t be without a car for a week (and the local parts stores were 2 days out at 2-5x the Amazon price).

Order another 3-pack, ship back the 2-pack. If you need to use one bag now, use it, and when the new one comes in, ship 2 of those back. Amazon’s giving you something workable and fair-to-you, but appears stupidly inefficient. So what? It’s their money, their choice; not my job to protect them from themselves. (I do suspect a 2-minute chat with A2Z and asking for a 1/3 refund and ship nothing back would also be granted.)

Amazon's scale brings welcome visibility to the problem, and offers employees the chance to unionize, but I'm puzzled by upper-class culture's seemingly new discovery that commodity retail is a shitty job.

As you say, it’s a matter of scale. Shitty jobs have always existed, they will continue to do so. Is a job in home removals - a gruelling, backbreaking task - truly better than that of an Amazon courier, engineer, or warehouse employee? If we want to be particularly extreme, we can swap removals for mining, farm work, or heavy manufacturing.

In the long run, damaged joints n’all, I expect that the average ‘shitty job’ of today - in developed nations - is still an improvement on what came before.

Yes, a lot of this comes down to outsourcing risk and danger (e.g. from manufacturing). I’m interested in hearing opinions on this - it’s a working idea.

The notion of a baseline of satisfaction required for consentual opting-in to monopolies seems to have produced this perpetual equilibrium where even if people don't like a service they still throw up their hands and use it because everyone else happens to use it since it is the one and only place that this one crucial discussion about X or Y is taking place in the entire world, and the subject matter has nothing to do with the platform itself, but that platform was the one that happened to win out, because it was superior.

It's caused me to think that just because you are fixing bugs or legitimately making improvements to a product, or have big dreams and an idea that actually does change the world, it doesn't mean that you are necessarily mean that you are doing the world a favor overall. The people in control or the incentives could rule what actually happens.

And the scariest thing is, people don't want to outlaw or regulate innovation or growth. People are fine with Amazon improving its marketplace to the point where there are no other marketplaces left offering a comparable set of products. A lot of people seem to be fine with letting social media grow to dominate our lives if it's reframed as "making it easier to keep in touch with your distant relatives."

Now it really is easier to keep in touch with your relatives than ever. And now, social media is also starting to dominate our lives.

Recently I wanted to buy 10-ish dead tree books in English and get them shipped to an eastern EU country. Going through the first 20~ DDG results of online stores exactly zero would ship them here. Also, the local bookstores would have only few books in English, mostly the 'bestseller'-type stuff.

Amazon was the only place that would have them available and would ship them here..

So basically I would try going to target first, then Amazon. Or Newegg or B&H first, then Amazon. There are other retailers of course but those tend to have operational competence, which is hard because Amazon raised the bar.

I also like Target's pickup option - it's even better than Amazon sometimes because it'll often be ready for me in like 15-30m and driving/biking over there is like a 10m exercise.

Shouldn't you wait to see what kind of cheapo $35 shoe arrives tomorrow, one you never got to try on, before you celebrate?

Bought winter boots from them. So not sure on what size to get, because you should buy those larger. I also have wide feet too but they only offer them in M not E or wider. I don't know the brand yet, so no knowledge on how they fit vs size listed. Finally ordered after research online.

Instead of the size I ordered, a 10 M, I get a 10 AA. It doesn't fit obviously as it's too narrow. Contact support and ask them what to do. They assure me I should get them exchanged and they will add a note to the warehouse to make extra sure I get the 10 M and not accidentally a 10 AA again. Days later I get 10 AAs again... Same chat with support who probably laugh to themselves at the stupid customer 'note to the warehouse haha' (do they actually do this? Would any overworked/underpaid warehouse worker even look at that?). I have to cancel the order and order a new pair in 11 M, which if I actually get that means they're gonna be too large. Luckily an 11 AA arrived. Go figure.

Taxes might help. If you tax a company for their immoral behavior, the cost of their goods go up and consumers might make different decisions. But in a democratic society the people who create taxes are elected by voters who want their lives to be easy.

Maybe the best thing would be to throw out democracy and be ruled by philosopher kings who can make these decisions for us. I only say that half-jokingly.

Cigarettes are terrible addicting too and people quit them all the time.

As far as I can see, the low cost of the American lifestyle is largely subsidized by shifting the price onto others. Whether that's Amazon keeping prices low by exploiting labor in the west or Chinese manufacturers keeping prices low by exploiting labor in China or meat manufacturers keeping prices low by running factory farms, at the end of the day, the ethical choice is always going to have a higher price attached because you're eating the cost so others don't have to. The only solution is to put your money where your mouth is.

Others say legislation, but that's a transient solution at best. If the lobbyists don't get to twist the legislation in the first place, they'll just keep lobbying until they get their way. They have the money and organization to make it happen.

Lower the barriers to entry for business. It is not easy to comply with regulations and reporting.

A scrappy startup can replace Amazon if they can focus on things that are not burdensome and arbitrary, like rent + insurance + tax reporting + legal.

Amazon in the 90s wasn't about "getting a book" but "getting a book via a computer, from a place with "all the books" and I don't have to drive".

B&N could have competed with that if they had understand what was happening, but I don't think they did.

bookshop.org appears to do so, but may be 20 years too late.

Amazon didn’t disrupt B&N by spending less time on tax paperwork. They disrupted them by changing essentially every fundamental piece of how they conducted their business.

If "rent + insurance" are unnecessary overheads, you might as well say employee protections are completely useless regulations too.

In fairness, the do pay more than the legal minimum wage in many places.

Lobby your congressperson to break up Amazon and all the other big tech companies. Prevent them from bundling, vertically integrating, and using loss leading products to make all competitors not competitive.

Make their delivery network its own company who takes orders from other suppliers. Make their storefront and warehouses its own entity. Make their media organization stand on its own. People smarter than me can figure this out.

Make policy that punishes national and international companies and favors local businesses, and keeps the taxbase local rather than in Delaware.

Ultimately there's little that one can do with this hyper concentrated economy other than push for and join the political wave against concentration.

Also, apple isn't allowed to both make phones and software for phones?

I have found Amazon to be not the best with clothing/shoes unless you're buying the same shoes over and over - the pricing in that case is often not competitive either.

It's very convenient to buy from Amazon, but it's hardly a hardship to not do so.

Everlane shoe on sale for $35, with the actual cost breakdown at the bottom for info. $7.02 materials, $2.16 hardware, $6.35 labor, $3.11 duties, $3.00 transport. (true cost, $21.64)

They even give you a description of the factory. https://www.everlane.com/factories/forever-sneaker

I think a KEY benefit of amazon is that you know it has everything.

Sure, you might get better Foo at another store, but that's not the same store that sells you the better Bar. So you just default to amzn

There are two issues here: One is that you want to boycott a company that treats its employees bad, and two is that you buying local makes money circulate in the local economy.

Make sure to decouple those.

I like to play a game of "how is this retail employee going to lie to me today" when I walk in any brick and mortar establishment. Its entertainment.

That’s easy. Just ask them how their day is going.

14 and 15 are sometimes available.

Anything larger is a specialty store... except New Balance will always have up to 18 in some styles.

Now, width is another matter entirely.

(Well except for the MEA Carriers)

They're terrible because they're only there to fill a public good

The issue, as you imply, isn't only that Amazon is very good but the experience at many physical retailers is very poor. It is difficult to simplify this down to one thing imo.

Managers in physical retail are unusually bad. Retail used to be ludicrously profitable, so most companies have a dense layer of MBAs who have no real idea how to adapt or innovate.

I recently read The Secret Life of Groceries (not great tbh, but did cover some useful themes) and towards the end of the book (paraphrasing), it is framed as grocers all "compete" to be the best version of the same thing. They strip all the difference out of their product, usually compete solely on price, and (ofc) someone eventually comes in and undercuts them. That is a failure of incentives and management.

This varies by industry, and is not limited to incentives/management. One reason for the lack of innovation in sports apparel is that there are basically two suppliers, and one of them is moving heavily into DTC. Every sportswear shop is just a Nike distributor, so there is no real differentiation there (the only innovation in the sector has been distributors moving up the chain like Sports Direct and Decathlon in Europe). So the reason why you can't find shoes cheaper is actually because of Nike, not distributors (and those distributors lack any capacity to innovate, management is mostly composed of MBAs who likely have worked at Nike or Adidas at some point).

But the solution is counter-intuitive: keep buying from Amazon. There is nothing structural or inevitable about Amazon's success (compare them with the large Chinese retailers, they actually look quite blundering and incompetent, they have made mistakes in distribution already that are going to choke them). Physical retail needs more innovation which can only come through firms dying, and entrepreneurs thinking about what consumers want (this happened with WMT, there was consolidation then competition as WMT got overrun by MBAs and they lost their edge...Tesco in the UK is a very extreme example of this too).

I wouldn't be pessimistic either: the distinction between online and offline retail really doesn't exist. Look at restaurants like CMG, they are taking most of their orders online...but that doesn't change the product. It is the same with retail: taking an order online doesn't change the fact that the retailer is holding some product somewhere, and is distributing that to you (this is the mistake that Nike is making, they are going into DTC thinking they just can just cut everyone out, and jam up prices...it is MBA, day one strategy, and idiotically wrong). The real difference with offline retail is actually the cost of property, which is going to narrow over time. Ofc, this isn't universal...some verticals like hardware stores are ready-to-go already, others like clothing probably aren't (there isn't much value-add at consumer contact, and they pay v high rents)...but the innovation will come. I don't think physical retail is dead at all though. If anything the weakness of physical retail is that MBAs stripped all the life out of it which left them open to competition from online. Online is just delivering the message that consumers have had enough.

EDIT: I will add that personally I think a lot of the stuff on Amazon is terrible. A lot of retailers in the 2000s were just innovating by going deeper into China, and closer to factories. Amazon just took that to it's logical conclusion. It works for some products, not for everything. Branded stuff also tends to be fake.

Could you elaborate?

What mistakes did they do in distribution?

I am just seeing them out-compete everyone. With their own dedicated shipping they can grab that essential percentage point of margins that makes them either rich or gives them the ability to be the best price in town.

This was done for rational reasons (partly US population density, zoning issues) but, I think, the mistake was motivated largely by going into third-party in the way they did, which necessitated tall and narrow distribution. And I think it is going to be difficult to make that space economic if third-party softens (imo, inevitable because they went for a free-for-all, which can only devalue your brand over enough time).

Maybe, the position in the US is defensible. Outside the US, particularly in Europe, I think it is unrecoverable (this is partly my biased experience, AMZN has one of their largest warehouses globally near me, and the economics make zero sense given population density). So I think you will see companies that already have very tall and narrow distribution in some verticals compete within third-party (I am seeing this locally, apparel retailers suddenly becoming platforms), and then the short and wide distributors will cut them to pieces with less SKUs/faster delivery/more control over products (if you look WMT, their failure online is unbelievable...they probably had better infrastructure than AMZN until very recently, and maybe still have an advantage because of their locations).

EDIT: I will add, this is measurable in terms of a rather standard retail metric: sales per sqft of warehouse space (inc. system/third-party sales). Right now, I think they are in a self-reinforcing cycle but if this softens, all the strengths become weaknesses (again, quite like standard retail). But if you see sales per sqft keep trending up for the next five years then I am wrong.

The weakness of retail is that it has a low barrier to entry and does not provide much more utility compared to competitors. Quality control and branding and the internet make obtaining information about good products and being able to trust them much easier than in decades long ago.

Some retail companies with upper middle class clientele can afford a little bit of extra margin, but it is a small portion of the population with that kind of disposable income. You put a Target/Costco/Nordstrom/Home Depot/Best Buy/IKEA/Apple/Trader Joes somewhere, and a handful of other stores and you basically have it all covered.

For example, I know a retailer that earns a 1% margin...terrible? No. They turn over their inventory every week (roughly), so they earn that 1% 56x times a year...that is a very profitable business. Similarly, I can earn a 90% margin but if I can only turn my assets over every ten years (some business are like this) then that business isn't very profitable.

Retail provides massive utility. Retail is the link between producers and consumers. Most producers do not have the interest or the ability to sell direct to consumers, it is a totally different (and very expensive) business. And barriers to entry are significant: retail is complex, there are huge fixed costs, and you own the link to consumers (that is why distribution is where all the profit is within most value chains). The internet does make information easier but retailers also do that job, Amazon doesn't but product selection a competitive advantage (most consumers trust retailers more than they trust brands...Amazon's return policy is a prime example, retailers need trust). And there is a difference between providing information and distribution: if that wasn't true Consumer Reports would be the biggest retailer in the world (I actually agree with this a huge amount though, this has never made sense to me...but trust is complex, humans aren't totally logical, and the system we have is pretty good).

I am not clear what your point is. But one, small proportions are fine, Ferrari doesn't sell to everyone and they do okay. Restoration Hardware is a more modern example. Two, your point about those stores is my point about why distribution is profitable. Three, and the point I made earlier is that most of those stores (but not all) have essentially become derivative of each other...and that is why physical retail isn't competitive. Most physical retailers essentially threw up their hands, and decided to compete on price alone which suited online retailers very well (as I said though, this happened when retailers took more control over supply chains and started sourcing directly from factories in China, and this largely started before Amazon existed but accelerated hugely in the 2000s).

I can consolidate these points by mentioning Restoration Hardware again: no-one knew they needed Restoration Hardware before Restoration Hardware existed, their model is ludicrous, it makes no sense...but it is also very successful and gives consumers something they cannot get online. If you asked consumers what they want before cars were invented, they will tell you they want a better horse (btw, Trader Joe's is also the perfect example of this...they did almost everything you shouldn't do in retail, that is how they succeeded).

>For example, I know a retailer that earns a 1% margin...terrible? No. They turn over their inventory every week (roughly), so they earn that 1% 56x times a year...that is a very profitable business. Similarly, I can earn a 90% margin but if I can only turn my assets over every ten years (some business are like this) then that business isn't very profitable.

I do not know what most of this is supposed to mean, but that is not what profit margins indicate on a company's 10-K. A 1% profit margin indicates little room for error, and given that most retailers pay bottom tier wages, it means they have intense competition and little pricing power. Very few at the very top might get rich in retail.

>Retail provides massive utility.

I specified that retail does not provide much utility compared to other retailers.

>I am not clear what your point is.

My point was that I disagree with your original comment

>They strip all the difference out of their product, usually compete solely on price, and (ofc) someone eventually comes in and undercuts them. That is a failure of incentives and management.

There is no failure of management or incentives. There is customers willing to shop somewhere else for 5 cents less. A few retailers, that I mentioned, will succeed catering the the top 1 or 2 quintiles who can afford to pay a little extra, but most retailers will be competing on mostly price alone.

Also, your points about margin are all wrong...supermarkets control both the price they charge and the price they pay. To give a simpler example (you are confusing lots of things like having low-paid staff) is HFT a profitable business? Margins are the lowest of possibly any business known to man, these firms are usually making significantly under 1% or even 0.01% on each trade...that ignores two things: they don't take an opportunity unless it is profitable (gas stations are another example, margins are low but essentially fixed), and they turn their portfolio over thousands of times per day. If you earn 0.01% that isn't a lot, if you earn 100 000x per day then that is very profitable.

And I explained why retail does. If retailers aren't necessary, why is Amazon so large? Are Chinese factories just choosing to set fire to money? You explaining it does not make it true.

Again, Trader Joe's is a perfect example. Because people care about price does not mean they don't care about anything else. This is the mistake that MBAs at retailers made, they chose to compete at a game they would lose. Again, the reason why consumers perceive their choices in that way is because that is how retailers have chosen to compete. There are lots of other models (you named one, Trader Joe's grew by competing on price AND also choosing to narrow their range significantly...the same model was actually used by dollar stores, they actively chose to run against competitors who tried to carry everything...competing on price does not mean that you have to compete on price alone).

My point about profit margins is that they are low profit margins per employee (which I should have made explicit). Retail companies do not have room to hire better managers and workers.

The low margins show that customers are only willing pay so much and that it is a basically all optimizations have been wrung out. At least until a game changer comes along like the internet, which provides even further optimizations, but those are about lowering costs, generally including payroll.

> And I explained why retail does. If retailers aren't necessary, why is Amazon so large? Are Chinese factories just choosing to set fire to money? You explaining it does not make it true.

I never wrote retailers are not necessary. I explained why most retailers cannot be differentiated from one another. And the answer is because for most things, the customer does not care for much other than low prices.

Trader Joe’s is a good example of there being a little bit of opportunity serving the richer households. Trader Joe’s are always only in the richer parts of town, like Costco. But Trader Joe’s is certainly not cheaper than a mainstream grocery store like Kroger or Winco or Aldi, and won’t be able to compete with them in neighborhoods with poorer demographics.

Maybe someone can make an Amazon competitor that is just a decent shopping app. I don't care if your store only has shoes, if I see it and think "oh, this is another one of those non-shitty-web-app stores" I'm likely to come back.

Ordering from Amazon.com has been a pain for me for a long time, from the prompting to join Prime on every checkout, the reqd. selection of non-prime free shipping on every checkout, the content-free order emails, and etc. I contacted them specifically about the email issue but they pretty much replied with 'thanks for the info.'

Most of my orders are now local, Target, or Walmart. If the latter 3 don't have it, then I reluctantly fire up Amazon and hate my life a little bit for it.

Regulation can only go so far, it can help build and stabilize a healthy ecosystem but it can't help with a fully consolidated business like with a decade of experience in killing competition.

There's a good case to be made that they should get the standard oil treatment.

There are also discount/used clothing stores like TJ Maxx which have cheaper clothes.

Relatively speaking, it's not difficult to buy things not from Amazon.

https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=mens+shoes+target

a) break Amazon into many independent companies based on these already-established groups and

b) bar forever (or for some time) these groups from merging with each other.

The initial conditions (terms of the break-up: e.g., how much cash each entity would get) would determine whether, when cast out onto the street, each might survive.

Product Makers will at some point realize they can sell direct and do it without AMZN. e.g. Nike, Apple

Competitors- Dick's, Best Buy will give product makers ultimatums- if we get undercut by AMZn, we're not going to sell your stuff- so you decide. Its nice to be able to buy and pickup curbside same day

Customers- I already find Amzn beating prices on eBay about 25% of the time. eBay shipping times are improving too

It's a comedy of uncreative errors that leads us to zero in store competition with Amazon. Target isn't bad!

eBay is even worse!

Zeroth, lots of eBay resellers drop-ship from or resell directly from Amazon. There are plenty of bots looking for arbitrage opportunities between Amazon, brick-and-mortar, and OEM.

First, there's absolutely zero guarantee that you'll get what you bought. The chances of you getting a box of rocks is significantly greater on eBay than on Amazon (unless you use Amazon Marketplace, in which the chances of this happening are _still_ lower).

Second, returns and disputes are generally settled C2C (consumer-to-consumer). Which means you're completely at the mercy of the seller (or the buyer, if you're selling). PayPal acts as a mediator, but they are really easy to game.

Ever heard of the US Postal Investigations Service? Or the FBI IC3? Well, you'll get to know those departments _real_ well once you start using eBay enough.

Third, PayPal has a Buyer Protection guarantee, but it only applies in a handful of specific situations and is, again, very easy to game. Hard contrast to Amazon's return policy, which is, basically, "if you still have it, and it's in the return window, you can return it, unless you abuse it."

eBay is great and when I have an issue I can pick up the phone and call someone local in Australia who seems to be able to solve everything in one phone call.

Also picked up a few nice brand new bargains like A$99 AirPods, or A$329 for a ultrawide 3440x1440 144hz monitor.

On top of all the stuff I buy used to reduce my environmental footprint while saving money.

I have also sold about 30 items on ebay and again no issues from buyers.

Have you used eBay significantly or so you avoid it because of the reasons you just posted?

I’ve replaced Amazon completely with eBay and have been using eBay for the past 4 years. I have never received a product I didn’t order using eBay. I wish I could say the same for Amazon.

Example.

Several years ago, I purchased a pair of Lucky Brand jeans. Same cut as what I already had, in the same size. Seller provided dimensions; I thought they would fit because I already had those pants.

They arrived three days later. They did not fit.

Seller would not honor a return. PayPal sided with the seller. I was out $35. I’m actually still pissed that that happened, five years ago, and it was only over $35!

On Amazon, I would’ve returned them in three taps and a drive to Whole Foods.

Should I have looked at the item more carefully? Sure. But the point here is that this transaction would have been significantly easier on Amazon _and_ I would have just bought a different pair of pants right after that.

No one wants to be the bad guy in their own story. That's why excuses exist.

Good luck. I understand where you're coming from.

Motivate other retailers to not be such lazy louts about technology?

I can see which aisle things are in the store, what can be picked up today, what can be ordered to the store, etc.

They need warehouse space though.

And they build them out in the middle of nowhere where land is cheap to buy.

We need to make those things illegal and we need to make sure those laws are enforced. This is the greatest downfall of capitalism, morals cannot be enforced by consumers because business operations are completely opaque to them. No company should be able to outcompete another by using such terrible, exploitative practices.

If you are “torn” over this, if it’s so bad that you’re “torn”, how is this a difficult decision? Convenience trumps being “torn”. I mean, really.

Goes for employees and customers.

As far as I can see, there are only two forces potentially big enough to fight a big corporation today:

1. Another equally big corporation.

2. The federal government.

The fact that US anti-trust enforcement has been essentially non-existent means that #1 is almost gone these days. Citizens United allowed corporations to buy politicians, so it seems that #2 is dead too.

It sucks.

When Amazon Prime was real 2-day shipping and they'd send something via overnight air just to get it to you in time, it was nice. And would have been hard to give up.

Now that it just means free shipping, and you might get it tomorrow and you might get it in a week, it's much easier just to buy somewhere else. Walmart. Target. BH Photo. Adorama. Best Buy. Tons of options.

IMHO, the system is [china builds things] -> [middle man sells it on amazon] -> [consumer buys it on amazon]. Amazon needs these middle man people and has starting cutting them out by producing their own lines to create even more profit. The only way Amazon will die is if the graph turns into: [china builds things] -> [consumer buys it]. I know, I know, i hear everyone saying: that is impossible. But I don't think it is and I think that is coming.