[HN Gopher] The brutal business practices of Amazon
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The brutal business practices of Amazon
Author : makerdiety
Score : 110 points
Date : 2024-04-26 16:49 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vanityfair.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vanityfair.com)
| mehulashah wrote:
| I was Amazon for quite some time, and also outside of Amazon
| trying to compete against them. The company is both decentralized
| and has a culture of delivering. While that sometimes has
| unintended consequences, the people there are quite aware that
| they can sometimes be an elephant in a china shop. There are
| practices in place to rein that in. Nonetheless, investigations
| like this book hardly ever give a balanced view.
| mangamadaiyan wrote:
| What sort of investigations provide a balanced view, then?
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The ones that don't give him moral injury for working at
| Amazon, presumably?
| karaterobot wrote:
| That's not exactly the most generous interpretation of that
| comment.
| StressedDev wrote:
| Please do assuming that the original poster is acting in
| bad faith. I have seen a lot of reporting about disfavored
| organizations, and it is often unfair. I do not know if
| this reporter has done a good job or not but I have seen a
| fair number of anti-Amazon articles which basically attack
| Amazon for being successful.
|
| The other problem with the article is it does not point out
| some obvious problems Amazon has. First, Amazon is
| expensive, and people can and do go else ware. Second,
| Amazon's retail side is mediocre. Amazon's retail web page
| is basically a product search engine. Outside of search,
| Amazon does very little work to help people find products
| they are interested in. Amazon also does almost no
| curation. This is why it is often hard to distinguish
| between good non-fiction books and books which spread
| disinformation. Third, a lot of Amazon initiatives have
| failed. Examples include Alexa (a giant money pit), the
| Fire Phone, Amazon's video game division (over a billion
| and basically only produced 1 moderate hit), Prime Video (a
| mediocre streaming competitor), etc. I have also heard
| Amazon has been destroying Twitch.
|
| My main point is, the article paints Amazon as an
| unstoppable machine when in fact it is very fallible. It
| does some great things (AWS), some good things (Kindle),
| some OK things, and sometimes some very bad things.
| NathanKP wrote:
| Amazon employee here, seven years at the company so far. This
| is my personal opinion only:
|
| I don't know that there are many articles I've read about
| Amazon that have a balanced view. I will say that many people
| who are anti-Amazon have this picture of Amazon as being more
| ruthless (and smarter) than it actually is.
|
| For example, an Amazon seller can make the claim that Amazon
| used it's access to marketplace data to research info about
| their product sales and then compete with them. But as an
| insider I believe the reality is probably far more stupid: a
| seller who had their product "copied" by Amazon was likely
| just a middleman who was using a factory in China to make
| their product. The middleman is basically just extracting
| value from being a middleman. But most Chinese factories
| produce extra product on the side. Once they setup the
| toolchain and processes for building your product why not
| keep the assembly lines running a bit longer and produce a
| few thousand more copies of your product? Or maybe the
| factory keeps a big stockpile of the rejected product that
| was slightly bad quality, so they couldn't send it to the
| original middleman. And if you are this Chinese factory then
| why not sell this extra product (mixing in the lower quality
| rejects) directly to Amazon for Amazon to list as an Amazon
| Basic? The factory can make more money by cutting out the
| middleman, and some ignorant Amazon product acquisition
| worker will buy that stuff, not even realizing it is what it
| is. No "sensitive business information" needed. So "Amazon
| copied my product as an Amazon Basic" is probably way more
| dumb than it sounds.
|
| Or the "Amazon copied my product idea or roadmap" claim from
| the article. Do you realize how many ideas there are floating
| around in Amazon when you have >1 million employees? Any idea
| you can come up with has already been suggested dozens of
| times by Amazon employees and was probably also requested by
| Amazon's own customers via support a couple thousand times.
| The only question is whether that idea is worth building now
| versus worth building later. And as it turns out when there
| is real demand for an idea there tends to be multiple people
| who start building that idea at the same time. In fact
| sometimes there are multiple teams within Amazon who start
| trying to build the same thing at the same time, and they
| didn't even know about each other. Often one team fails to
| build it while another team succeeds. The duplicated effort
| eventually gets sorted out, but it happens a lot.
|
| This is the type of scenario that happens time and time
| again. It's fun to write a click attracting story about
| Amazon as this big brutal force when the reality is most
| likely much dumber than it seems.
| eks391 wrote:
| As a former employee of a 100K+ person company, I've had
| these exact thoughts several times. I worked in
| acquisitions, and constantly was finding out that we were
| reinventing (or rebuying) the wheel internally in
| independent departments.
| brevitea wrote:
| By "balanced view," do you mean the one where Amazon lawyers
| attempt to erode the ever-growing list of credible reports
| outlining Amazon engaging in and encouraging the tactics
| outlined in the article/book?
|
| From what I can tell, the article is remarkably spot on.
|
| It begs the question, without government contracts[1], where
| would Amazon actually be? Would Amazon be out of business?
| Hmm... Makes you wonder.
|
| [1]
| https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/20...
| woooooo wrote:
| They file all sorts of forms for where their revenue comes
| from, they're very profitable without government help, it's
| an easily checkable fact.
| brevitea wrote:
| That's actually a point of contention. Aside from AWS, how
| successful is Amazon actually?
| flerchin wrote:
| Whatever happened with the "false or perjurious" testimony at the
| beginning of the article? Nothing?
| cxr wrote:
| The writer Rob K. Henderson has covered the hypocrisy of the
| upper and upper-middle classes in several of his pieces on what
| he calls "luxury beliefs". The case of Amazon def. fits into a
| similar theme.
|
| You can broach the topic with uppercrust folks (without even
| really trying) of whether supporting Walmart by shopping there is
| conscionable or not, and you'll get one set of
| responses/reactions. Meanwhile, it's nowhere near socially
| unacceptable to talk about all the stuff you order from Amazon,
| despite Amazon appearing to be by and large worse in its
| compensation/treatment of its employees and its effect on the
| economy and the environment--all things that aspiring bougie
| types ostensibly profess to rank highly in their meditations when
| it comes to Walmart.
| boredinstapanda wrote:
| That seems to reason. Unless you buy all your stuff at Walmart
| online, you have to go in and see the people working and their
| working conditions.
|
| Amazon, you only see the checkout page. It makes it much easier
| to ignore the problems.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Shopping in Whole Foods is shopping at Amazon, where you also
| have to go in and see the people working and their working
| conditions.
| silverquiet wrote:
| I think Amazon is actually among the best compensated of the
| "shit jobs" out there, but it is about the shittiest (certainly
| it's the pissiest; I've seen the bottle bombs their drivers
| like to leave since they don't really accommodate bathroom
| breaks).
|
| I don't even really find much hypocrisy amongst the upper class
| here; they'll outright say that these are shit jobs not
| intended to provide a living wage; certainly not something you
| can raise a family on. Probably said as, "those people should
| have gone to school".
| cxr wrote:
| The Walmart distribution center built around where I grew up
| was not known as a hub of shit jobs. It was a source of envy.
| Amazon warehouse worker pay, in contrast, lags behind Walmart
| by several dollars per hour and offset several years. And
| that's assuming you're actually hired by the company
| directly, rather indirectly as a second class worker brought
| in through the timeless scam involving contractors employed
| by staffing agencies.
| StressedDev wrote:
| I work for staffing agencies at I like it. Please do not
| assume everyone wants a traditional 9-5 job.
| ghaff wrote:
| Total anecdote but had the opportunity to chat at length
| with an Amazon warehouse worker (in the UK) over the
| holidays. They said it's hard work but they got various
| perks, decent pay, they didn't even want to be a
| supervisor which they had been offered, and liked it.
|
| Would I want the job? Hell no. But this is an intelligent
| person who is doing this because they have no other
| option.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The UK has social safety nets that Americans don't get
| when they have a job. Amazon isn't allowed to play the
| same game in countries with worker protections.
| ghaff wrote:
| I can certainly believe there are issues for Amazon
| workers in the US that don't apply in the UK to the same
| degree. Although Amazon does seem to have various heath
| insurance plans for US workers. I assume workers have to
| pay some amount in as is the case with most jobs,
| including white collar ones, in the US.
| tootie wrote:
| Didn't Walmart get caught locking people inside their
| facilities?
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna4146540
| jakjak123 wrote:
| Amazon does not have a physical whip yet, but they do have a
| mental whip of tracking every minute of every day you do at
| work, and ranking you among all the others working there.
| keiferski wrote:
| Those kinds of people don't shop at Walmart because they
| perceive themselves as being in a higher social class than the
| "people of Walmart." I don't think they care much about the
| compensation of the employees.
| cxr wrote:
| Right. The key word in my comment was "ostensibly".
| skhunted wrote:
| I care about worker's rights but there is only so much I can
| do. The Clinton administration refused to include a requirement
| on standards of employment in order to benefit from free trade
| with the U.S. Walmart did a lot of harm while it grew to its
| current size. That memory is still fresh. The damage caused by
| Amazon is more opaque but it is a loathsome company.
|
| What is needed are standards of employment that all companies
| should be forced to adhere to.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| The notion of luxury beliefs isn't just about plain old
| hypocrisy (though of course there's plenty of that) -- I think
| it's more about beliefs one can _only_ hold because of one's
| position of privilege.
|
| The usual example given is 'defund the police'. If you're rich
| enough to hire your own security or otherwise live safely in a
| world without police, you can advocate for this and win social
| points for doing so. Meanwhile, the actual consequences of such
| an idea, were it to be implemented, would be catastrophic.
| Unlimited immigration/open borders is another one: if you're
| relatively poor, your ability to make a living (among other
| things) is potentially threatened by this. If you're rich, you
| needn't worry. You can live in your fancy neighbourhood far
| detached from the consequences of such policies, so you can
| freely hold such positions and even frown upon those who don't.
|
| Luxury beliefs are just like tangible luxuries [*] -- you have
| them not because you want them or really believe in them, but
| because they signal to others that you're of a certain class.
| Poor people can't have them, so they're desirable as status
| indicators.
|
| [*] OK -- some 'luxuries' are worth it and aren't just for
| showing off. But I'm talking about the ones that are.
| ScoobleDoodle wrote:
| "Defund the police" doesn't mean what you think it means
| here.
|
| It doesn't mean removing all funds from the police as the
| name implies. It actually means reallocating funds from the
| police to trained professionals for appropriate situations.
| Like having a government division that hires psychologist /
| mental health workers to respond to mental wellness checks.
| Having mental health / homelessness services workers respond
| to calls about vagrants. So instead of getting a boot to the
| teeth or death as seen in the news, those at risk groups and
| people get the directed help and support they need.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defund_the_police
| rpjt wrote:
| I'm not sure this distinction matters much to most people,
| though. People hear "defund the police" and draw their own
| conclusions as to what that means, and it's not a far leap
| to go from "defund the police" to "welp, guess they want to
| tie the hands of cops and take away all of their funding so
| they can't do their jobs"
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| I think what your saying is that people are drawing the
| wrong conclusion when they hear 'defund the police'. But,
| if they knew what was really meant they may actually
| support it. So the distinction actually matters a lot.
|
| Like if they heard that it meant sending trained mental
| health professionals to deal with a mental health crisis
| called into 911 instead of just sending some cops who may
| very well just shoot them, that might change their minds
| about it.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| Fair enough. I've heard 'abolish the police' and 'all cops
| are bastards' (whatever that means) too, so such a
| sentiment definitely exists. Either way, those usually
| espousing such things don't seem to have much of a concrete
| plan in mind (and don't have to, because offering concrete
| solutions isn't the purpose of such rhetoric).
|
| > According to the New York Times, the slogan and movement
| failed to result in any meaningful policy change. This was
| attributed to the slogan having no clear definition of its
| goals.
|
| (from the Wikipedia page you linked to)
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| This is certainly not the case for the NPO BLM groups that
| clarified they want to _abolish the police_.
| eszed wrote:
| That's a thoroughly sensible proposition. However, right
| there in the Wikipedia article you post:
|
| > some ["Defund the Police" advocates] seek modest
| reductions, while others argue for full divestment as a
| step toward the abolition of contemporary police services.
|
| "Defund the Police" is my nomination for the worst
| political slogan of the 21st century (so far). It contains
| such multitudes that it's become a Rorschach test for both
| users and hearers. I wish the reformers (like yourself -
| whom I fully support) and the abolitionists (I think
| they're _wack jobs_ ) would decide to march under different
| banners.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| What a surprise! I always thought that mega-corps like amazon,
| Apple, Walmart or Microsoft got to their level because they were
| gentle and friendly towards employees, customers and suppliers.
| Maybe soon we will find out that most billionaires aren't nice
| when you have to deal with them.
| euroderf wrote:
| Maybe "nothing new under the sun" and/or "nothing to see here"
| are not sensible reactions to the article.
| acl777 wrote:
| https://archive.ph/vTO3D
| Nevermark wrote:
| Traditional business value comes from some innovation, and a lot
| of execution/logistics delivering the innovation. Logistics for
| product companies being manufacturing, and sales/delivery.
|
| But now most small product companies have outsourced production
| on the "input" side, and outsourced logistics on the "output"
| side.
|
| Which leaves harsher more direct competition for their innovation
| core, since that is a fraction of the original business and more
| easily copied.
|
| High componentization of any economy ratches up competitive
| pressure exponentially, whether it was Amazon, or a collection of
| service companies offloading the downstream logistics.
|
| But since Amazon is protecting itself by doing the opposite, by
| de-componentizing, i.e. preferencing and tying different sales
| and delivery logistics services to each other, that centralized
| leverage is going to squeeze small product companies even more.
|
| Especially those that don't have a unique manufacturing process,
| unique branding, or some other differentiating moat.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Dana Mattioli reveals how the company systematically stifles
| criticism, squeezes out competitors, and even pits its own
| employees against one another. "People tend not to last," she
| says, "because it's very aggressive and it can be bruising."
|
| Wow! Wait till she does an investigation of professional sports!
| aidenn0 wrote:
| > Wow! Wait till she does an investigation of professional
| sports!
|
| At least those are union jobs.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| How does Amazon operate in countries outside the US. Does Amazon
| apply the same anti-competitive business practices? Is the
| workplace equally cut-throat? Just curious.
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