I’ve gone to Books-a-Million, which replaced Borders here, exactly twice. Both times they tried to sell me something or collect my information with at least three questions at the register. If I go back I will have to say something as I approach the counter – I just want to buy these items; please do not ask me anything beyond what is necessary for me to buy these items.
Isn’t fun what the make making those comments are the customers in the stores shopping on said holidays. :smack: My first ever job was a supermarket and one of the regulars was an older women who’d constantly be bemoaning the fact that we were open on Sundays. She did a lot of shopping on Sunday’s after church.
I only realized in retrospect how odd it was that first call center I worked at had such large break rooms, complete with satellite TV and assorted games. Also there were “quit rooms”. And a Cadillac health plan for ordinary employees.
I forget what it’s for, but there’s a commercial on TV where a woman is trying to sleep, but her manager appears sitting on the foot of her bed drinking coffee and channeling Bill Lumbergh, telling her she needs to respond to the email she just sent before she wakes up.
They shut up pretty quickly if you tell them that’s why you stopped shopping at Borders. 
Good point!
It’s a little ironic that Trump would bitch about Amazon’s contract with USPS given that Trump’s whole construction shtick was to beat people up on their bids, have them sign a contract, offer to pay them 80% of the agreed value after the job was done and then say “So sue me and get nothing” if the contractor didn’t accept the reduced payment.
Amazon stock’s price/earning ratio on the last 12 months’ earning is around 230 (4th Q 2017 was far above any previous quarter). The whole S&P’s is around 25. Walmart’s is around 20. So while OP’s statement ‘Amazon doesn’t make a profit’ is incorrect if taken literally the general thrust of the post which said that and article which it linked from CNBC “Retailers be warned: Amazon isn’t worried about making money right now” is not completely wrong.
For Amazon it’s not ‘can’t make a profit’, as might be applied to USPS barring major structural changes. It’s ‘chooses not to’, by continually plowing back a pretty big operating cash flow into more expansion, resulting in relatively small profit relative to sales or the market’s valuation of the company.
There’s nothing illegal about that, but it is a real factor in the competitive threat Amazon poses to traditional retailers, and that would be misunderstood if the big absolute $ profit one quarter were misinterpreted as ‘see, Amazon is highly profitable’. Anti-trust policy in recent times has been for the govt to only get involved when companies achieve the market power to charge monopoly prices, not in a phase where they might be building the market share to do it in the future by sacrificing profit, which Amazon arguably is. But the other side of the coin is difficulty now predicting what business model will win. Somebody else might revolutionize retail some other way than Amazon and prevent Amazon from every being highly profitable. Or other companies might simply challenge Amazon seriously enough, doing things similarly to Amazon, that Amazon never becomes ‘excessively’ profitable from an anti-trust POV.
Interesting details. But on a broader level there is an Anna Karenina Principle about sick companies, truly private sector or state owned/hybrids like USPS. Each has its own idiosyncratic reasons why it can’t match better run, lower cost competitors. But they all tend to have in common the tactical choice to win positive cash flow business by undercutting better run/lower cost companies, or not win and do without that cash flow.
Which is back to a basic question or distinction about the USPS/Amazon deal: is it a loss on a variable cost basis, or on an all-in basis, or at a profit all-in despite claims to the contrary? The first would be illegal per the USPS’s mandate and I doubt it’s true. Could be things were screwed up or mis-estimated. More likely revenue from the deal was estimated to, and does, exceed the marginal cost of handling those extra packages on some quasi-reasonable basis of calculating variable cost. But a whole bunch of contracts like that would not cover all USPS’s costs fixed and variable. Because USPS’s costs are too high given its structure and Congressional mandates as a quasi ‘state owned enterprise’ for it to make an all-in profit given the business UPS etc can take away from it at an all-in profit to those companies. That doesn’t mean USPS should turn down business at prices that exceed variable cost, just because UPS etc could do the same business at the same price at an all-in profit. It doesn’t even mean it’s a problem necessarily if USPS can’t make money, if the public decides the mandates (six day delivery to every US address, civil service work force, etc) which prevent it making money are worth the social benefit.
Not really understanding this part. In California, and assume most other places, meal and rest breaks are law. As is overtime pay, which many (if not most) workers want.
This seems…far-fetched.
This, if true, seems like the basis for a lawsuit.
I’d have to go state by state to determine whether it is most or some, but this is not the case in ALL states. Ohio, for instance has no laws requiring employers to give breaks to adults. And, while you get overtime pay for excess of 40 hours in a week, there is no OT if you work say, three 12 hour days.
Not only is it legal, but it’s something governments usually encourage. We want businesses to grow more, hire more, and spend more.
Of course the Republicans are doing the opposite - lower business tax means less incentive to re-invest their revenue.
Wisconsin too, employers are not legally required to give employees breaks. There may be an exception for certain groups of people (ie minors), but in general it’s not the case.
On the first, not necessarily. A more intrusive view of anti-trust would not penalize anyone for ‘investing to grow’. But it would look askance at an apparent strategy of gaining the market share to eventually enable monopoly pricing. For example it would have looked at the practices Standard Oil used to undercut competitors to gain overwhelming market share, not have waited until the company did gain overwhelming market share.
That said, even if people on the left are only defending Amazon because Trump is complaining about them, I guess at least they are. Maybe it would actually carry over to a case where Democrats wanted to more tightly bind the economy in regulation. Though probably not.
The second point is a complete non sequitur besides being highly debatable.
Then the rules default to Federal law.
So? If you work 3 days at 12 hours each and have 4 days off I’m not sure where there is a problem.
There are different perspectives on overtime. Some people (some states, heck, some countries) think you deserve overtime for working more than 8 hours in a day, regardless of how many hours you log per week.
Here in KY, Amazon does four 10-hour days, and a relative of mine loves it. Their constant staff shortage means he usually works 5 days/week for extra cash while he still has the same off-days as his wife, but he can take get a 3-day weekend whenever he wants by skipping that extra day.
That said, damn near everyone I know has worked for Amazon at some point and he’s the only one to last more than a few months.
It’s a publicly traded company. You’re free to look up the quarterly financial statement yourself and let us know what you find.
I work at an Amazon warehouse fulltime as a second job. There are a lot of things I don’t like about it. If I wanted to find something to complain about I would. Overall it’s much better and easier work than anything I’ve ever heard or read about it, and a lot of the “bugs” are actually “features” for labor. For example, as an hourly worker, I don’t want fewer hours. That means less pay. if you work a salaried position and earn the same whether you work 35 or 60 hours, I get it. But I want to get in my 40 hours in the shortest amount of time. Some of the articles cited are about the more corporate/professional jobs, and of course that is a different environment I can’t talk about how that works.
When it comes to the warehouse environment some things that stand out to me, good and bad: My starting pay was close to $7/hr higher than my local minimum wage and about $5 higher than Walmart. I can assure you all the stories that claim Amazon adds to the SNAP enrollment are “fake news” or deliberately using the wrong data. My starting wage disqualified me from SNAP and Medicaid. 401(k), health, dental, vision were all available day 1 and seem like decent deals. When I was a kid I had it made because my mom had $0 copay insurance with $0 payroll deduction through a strong union. As an adult I’ve spent much of my working life self-employed or in jobs with No or very bad deals on “benefits.” Warehouse workers get Restricted Stock Units, but I doubt 5% (just a wild guess) ever get them. They also offer something called Career Choice that pays 95% of tuition and books for an in-demand technical or 2year degree, including jobs in fields Amazon does not even offer (until they buy every remaining company in the world). You have to be there a year though. I have several degrees but I’m considering using them to get something and then get a job with another tech company in a non-warehouse job.
Amazon hires everyone who has a high school diploma and can pass a background check. And availability, which should be a given. The “interview” is that you show up and accept the job, watch some videos, and take a drug test. The weeding out happens after you are hired. In my warehouse they over-hire and definitely overstaff. The overstaffing is to the point that they offer “voluntary time off” almost every shift. Some people take it all the time and apparently don’t need money. You even get a monthly bonus for just showing up for every shift or using your vacation/paid time off to cover it. Some people voluntarily lose that bonus every month, and I think Amazon counts on it. As an example, if I didn’t want to go to work tomorrow, I could use 10 hours of unpaid time off no questions asked (and still have 70 hours left, plus vacation and paid time off I’ve banked), but I would lost around $300 in pay and bonuses. Also, it’s a short week. Make it through 4 days and you’ve made it, 3 if you do “reduced time” (3x12).
The number one way people are terminated is just not showing up. There are horror stories online about “points” systems (obsolete, at least where I work) and losing your job for being sick, etc, but they mostly fail to mention that you get 3 types of time off (in addition to the unreliable “voluntary time off.”) and the time off accumulates. There is unpaid time, paid time, and vacation. You start with some and then add some every pay period and quarter. They offer paid bereavement, paid parental leave for all genders, unpaid personal leaves, and of course FMLA. They stress that you should only use the unpaid time for emergencies (I have never used it), but every time there is a “time drop” you notice a bunch of people using their time. People lose their jobs not because they get sick 1 time or have an emergency but because they use all their paid time off and unpaid time off because it’s a nice day or something, then don’t have any when they need it.
A lot of my co-workers come from jobs that are much worse when it comes to wages and benefits. Like Walmart or Kroger or Speedway or other stores and fast food, gas stations and such. Some have college degrees like I do, but most are high school graduates who just expect to work hourly labor jobs indefinitely. So a lot of them are excited to make more money and work fewer days but at the same time I think a lot are used to working at a slow pace or having more relaxed expectations. I know people who’ve been fired from Wendy’s or Jiffy Lube or wherever and then just show up for their next shift like nothing happened and go back to work. I shop at Walmart and Kroger and see people stocking shelves at a snail’s pace. I’m not putting them down; obviously they are doing what is expected by their employers. But that isn’t going to fly at Amazon. Yeah, the work is fast-paced and you are expected to work while on the clock. My shift is 10 hours, but I’m only working for 9.5, as we get two 30-minute breaks, one paid and one unpaid. With the way the breaks are set up, you are never actually working more than 3 hours at a time. Anyone who has worked in a restaurant or retail or similar should be able to handle that. There’s also a huge population of “different” people who are welcomed and accepted. A lot of interesting hair colors, tattoos, flamboyant LGBTQ, weird costumes, etc. Maybe Trump hates Amazon because we have a huge immigrant and Muslim workforce, too.
One of the biggest criticisms I read on Indeed and online job ratings before I applied was the huge “mandatory” overtime. I actually work in the busiest facility for what I do and we never really had it, even at Peak. I was disappointed. I wanted 60 hours during the holidays, but we were never scheduled for more than 48 and many of them got cancelled. I ended up working voluntary extra time the week after Christmas to keep my paycheck up.
As far as the longer shifts and OT go, the guys who work the 12 hours for 3 days don’t get OT if they stay under 40 for the week. But they do get paid a shift differential of $2-3/hr more. If I transferred from the 4x10 to 3x12 I would actually make a little more money in my base pay. I could be wrong but I think they start over $17/hr in my location. And yeah, that’s not a lot of money, BUT the “jobs” being replaced are things like getting paid $9/hr to pack clothes for the Limited and people leaving their $8.10/hr shifts at Wendy’s or Kroger (a union job that pays minimum wage), or the $9.25 Walmart gigs.
Right, but there are no rules about giving breaks for adults in federal law. All rules about adults and breaks are state laws. (There are federal laws as to what constitutes a paid vs unpaid break, but nothing saying you have to give either.)
The question I was responding to was the question about “long hours”. 12 hours is a long day, even if you only work 3 of them a week.
This is false. Amazon has always charged me (a Seattle resident) sales tax. Looking at a receipt from 2011 I see that I was charged 9.5% in sales tax, including local taxes.
They didn’t always do the work of collecting taxes from other places, but they’ve always followed the law here in Seattle.
This was a shock to me. While I was there, a manager mentioned during a meeting that 99.5% of terminations were for attendance, in response to a poll where people indicated they felt unfairly at risk of being fired. The kicker was THAT is what many people felt was unfair - the idea they should show up for work consistently or be fired. WTH?! That’s everywhere! At least, so I thought. Many of my younger relatives working “McJobs” get away with such antics, or if they’re fired get re-hired soon after. That Amazon won’t re-hire someone they’ve fired is seen as draconian.
Yes, my workplace has the same problem - the vast majority of terminations are for attendance problems.
And you get people whining they were fired for getting sick, or caring for a sick relative. Frankly, when my husband was dying I thought they were extremely understanding and generous in regards to my “skipping” work. On the other hand, I was also very honest about what was happening and filled out the proper leave paperwork. Gee, following the standard procedures has benefits.
That said - I do have some sympathy for people who simply can’t, physically, do a particular job. But… if you can’t physically do it I’m sorry. You don’t meet the job requirements. Which raises a whole other issue about people who aren’t disabled enough to be officially disabled yet are able bodied enough to do the work that’s available…
I wonder if this is an optimal staffing policy. Pay people 30% more than the average wage and get 50% more work out of them.