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[–] 49 points 3 days ago (11 children)

What about the fact that it's ok if deliveries are slower? How many of the things that people buy online, whether from Amazon or not, actually need to be same day or next day? If there were options for "just sometime in the next month", I'd chose that.

Of course, I understand that be a logistics nightmare to schedule, I'm only making the argument that delivery speed is a more a luxury than necessity. As is Amazon itself.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 days ago (3 children)

    Not to mention that theres almost always enough order volume for a bulk same-day delivery. Id imagine theres enough orders for 30+ deliveries in a 4 block radius on any given day

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  • [–] 12 points 3 days ago (2 children)

    I avoid Amazon but when I do make the mistake of ordering from them, they literally hold my order until the delivery date. It’s effectively same day every time, to encourage me to buy Prime.

    They also deliver 24 hours a day here. Multiple vans daily. It’s all a farce to avoid paying their fair share.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 days ago (4 children)

    Amazon actually does have that option for deliveries. It's typically labeled either "Amazon Day" (where they try to group orders into fewer deliveries / boxes, though it's pretty mixed on that), or No Rush (where it might be a week out and they give you a dollar credit for something as an incentive).

    Though that's usually more "in the next week or so" than "next month"

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    [–] 38 points 3 days ago (4 children)

    One of the best arguments against this type of propaganda is to look at what actually happened in places where they treat their workers more fairly.

    Like, you hear people say that fast food would become prohibitively expensive if we raise the minimum wage, but when you look at countries where they have decent minimum wages, the fast food there is basically the same price. Maybe pennies more.

    The best way to combat this propaganda is simply to experiment or call their bluff. You know, try it out and see what actually happens. When NYC does this and nothing bad happens, maybe that will be a clue to other cities.

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  • [–] 22 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

    Fast food is a crazy example they point to. You'll spend 12-15 dollars a person easily at fast food places these days, and they serve hundreds of customer an hour. Giving the entire staff a $15/hr raise would be an extra 2-4% to the cost of a meal.

    If you have 5 employees working the shop and average 100 meals an hour, you're looking at an extra $0.75 per meal to give each employee and additional $15/hour - which is a life-changing raise at a cost customers wouldn't even notice.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    FOX News is the billionaire propaganda mouthpiece. It's all it does.

    Well, MAGA ideology propaganda, but same thing.

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  • [–] 69 points 3 days ago (16 children)

    I genuinely see the point and I think the argumentation that he can afford it is also sound. But the flaw is that Bezos will just hand off the cost to consumers. This won't affect his income or wealth at all. We need measures that target anti competitive behaviors and monopoly building as well as taxing people that have way too much.

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  • [–] 37 points 3 days ago (6 children)

    Too big to fail just also happens to be too big to care.

    Competition is good for the consumer and keeps prices low automatically.

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    [–] 52 points 3 days ago (3 children)

    What he's actually saying is, "I won't spend the money to provide the level of service we have been up to this point." Because there's nothing Mamdani has done here that will cost jobs or slow delivery times - Jeff is the one cutting jobs and slowing delivery times. Maybe New Yorkers will just stop shopping Amazon when they downgrade their services, that wouldn't be a bad thing.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 days ago

    NYC is so dense and populous, there would instantly be space in the market for someone else to offer same/next day delivery for most common items if Amazon decides to start killing off its golden geese like that (being America's #1 source of shit ordered online is just one of them).

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    [–] 29 points 3 days ago (8 children)

    $600 a year... on extra delivery costs on the average household?

    ... How much are americans ordering online?

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    [–] 22 points 3 days ago

    Fox News is the very definition of billionaie propaganda.

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  • [–] 17 points 3 days ago

    he wasn't this concerned with tariffs increasing prices. probably was convinced to remove the tariffs warning after someone told him he would get double paid eventually.

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  • [–] 12 points 3 days ago* (1 child)

    In their mind, all costs should be born by the consumer (and employees, of course), and none taken from their profits.

    Forever.

    They demand higher profits every quarter. It has to come from somewhere, and it won't be from their pile of gold.

    This is why our government shouldn't base policy on what they want. They want everything, it's a given. We know

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  • [–] 2 points 2 days ago

    They shouldn't but they do, because the billionaires and corporations have bought the government. That is to say they've bribed the officials in the government, though for a while now there are no laws or enforcement mechanisms in place to prevent this kind of corruption.

    Lobbying the government is very profitable, far more so than any kind of positive innovation that capitalism is allegedly supposed to promote. It's why governments criminalize this kind of influence from business interests or wealth. Usually companies just pass laws so that smaller rival businesses cannot compete, but they can also pass laws to give companies huge subsidies, no-bid contracts and tax cuts.

    Financialization, it turns out, is even more profitable, which is using financial shenanigans like private equity to turn a reputable business into a giant ponzi scheme. The financial bros are long gone when the massive loan burden of the company is due. It leaves huge sinkholes in the economy, including Toys R Us, which is now a bunch of abandoned warehouses and unused giant outlets.

    Currently, our ultra-wealthy, most of whom got rich through financialization, are trying to do the same thing with the US, itself, getting elected officials to pass huge budgets giving them no-bid contracts where they can charge grossly inflated prices. In the meantime, all this is incurs a huge amount of national debt.

    Since Trump is doing everything in his power to isolate the US from the rest of the world (he wanted to do this since the beginning of his first term), when the bond market collapses, there won't be anyone in the world willing to help us out, and the US will be reduced, like Toys R Us to husks of storefronts.

    And then, our ultrawealthy can buy up US land for a song, and turn it into quarries, oilfields and data centers as far as the eye can see, though they seem completely oblivious about how they're going to keep the workforce alive to run them.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    You don’t get rich without exploiting. No wait, I mean you don’t keep your shareholders rich without exploiting.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 days ago

    This is why regulation is necessary. The moonshots returned $14 for every $1 spent thanks to science and innovation we benefited from it. Lobbying government returns $120 for every $1 spent.

    Financialization returns exponentially more. In fact, most of the billionaires that exist are finance bros that got rich from private equity and market manipulation. Stock buybacks are a recent number-go-up tactic. These things, like rent-seeking, don't actually produce value but make profit.

    So when we say the ultra-wealthy got rich by exploiting, we are totally underestimating the amount of wrongdoing they are committing.

    But then Marx notes in Das Kapital that the capitalist will always seek to capture government and regulatory bodies in order to game the system, thereby destabilizing it until it collapses. The process feeds on itself and gets worse at an accellerating rate.

    Unless something very radical is done, civilization worldwide is going to fall.

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  • [–] 24 points 3 days ago* (4 children)

    If Amazon can't operate a delivery business without blatantly exploiting workers and "subcontractors" (between brackets because the subcontractors don't operate independent at all), then they shouldn't operate a delivery business. Leave it to the companies that do respect worker's rights.

    The exploitative system that Amazon wants to maintain:
    *As the mayor’s office said Monday, at least 11 last-mile facilities have opened across New York City since 2020, with subcontractors running the warehouses as Amazon directs the hiring of delivery drivers, the routes they use, and requires them to use Amazon-branded vehicles and uniforms.

    But while exerting control over the deliveries, Amazon pushes responsibility for the vehicles used onto the subcontractors, as delivery workers explained in a video released on social media by Mamdani on Monday.

    “When injuries and worker accidents skyrocket, Amazon says they have nothing to do with it. They can’t have it both ways,” said the workers.*
    https://www.commondreams.org/news/delivery-protection-act-nyc

    We had a similar situation in my country (Belgium) a few years back, where the most exploitative delivery company was PostNL. The government raided and seized their warehouses for a good while, locked up a few executives for a shorter while, and then unfortunately failed to get convictions, so only administrative fines were handed out. Even though there were no significant fines, it did scare the sector and working conditions have improved since then, which anecdotally had the following consequences: shops offer choices when it comes to delivery (fake next day delivery is no longer standard, but requires a premium), cost per order went up a tiny bit (no more free delivery for small orders + next day delivery is more expensive), and deliveries became more reliable again (delivery time tables are easier to accomplish for the workers if they're not mathematically impossible).

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    [–] 14 points 3 days ago

    Nit. We seriously need to divorce benefits from employment. Especially healthcare. I still hear people say the company pays $X for my healthcare. No fuck they do not. You have a total compensation package that includes the cash part of your salary as well as how much of what could have been your cash part was diverted to pay for healthcare. Have you ever been handed a piece of paper where they itemize your pay? You get $40k and then there’s another line where it says $10k for healthcare etc so they really pay you $50k? Well on the one hand that’s true. The company pays you. You pay for everything else. You just don’t see all of it. They usually give you that paper during raise time to justify lower raises.

    We need a mental shift in this country. People need to stop believing companies give you stuff.

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  • [–] 12 points 3 days ago*

    Translation: FOX News is promoting threats of econonomic terrorism against the general public on behalf of Jeff Bezos

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  • [–] 16 points 3 days ago

    fox news was always billionaire propaganda, culture war is thier side business to reinforced the billionaire propaganda.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 days ago (7 children)

    Scaling that down by a factor of 50,000, it's like having a net worth of $5.52 million, and a boat worth $10,000. You spent $1,100 on your wedding and bought your wife a ring worth $100.

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    [–] 5 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    Mamdani creates delivery network for NY, uses delivery revenue to pay livable salaries for drivers instead of buying himself a mega-yacht.

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    [–] 3 points 2 days ago

    The thing is, if Bezos wants the deliveries to take longer, they will. And he can easily lie about it and tell people it's not his fault.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 days ago (2 children)

    What he is really saying is that he can't offer the same level of service at the same cost - and still maintain his OBSCENE profit margin.

    I'm tired of these Sociopathic Oligarchs acting like they are entitled to those ridiculous levels of profit, and any "solutions" we suggest need to preserve their profits FIRST, then somehow solve our problems after that.

    No, those outrageous profits are the EXACT problem. Those profits should have been shared by the workers who earned them, instead of going 100% to the guy at the top who did literally nothing to earn it.

    So he will maintain the same level of service, at the same costs, and he will just have to buy one less yacht, or private jet, or Italian Palazzo this year.

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    [–] 3 points 2 days ago

    fox news is sharing billionaire propaganda? shocker.

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  • Those amazon workers don't even work for amazon, they work for contractors who pay way under the typical wage of UPS and FedEx.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 days ago

    Wait, he only gave her a $5M ring? Was he only applying taxable income to the two-month rule? /s

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  • [–] 7 points 3 days ago

    They really have an attitude to shift shit like this on the people instead of taking good Business strategies up

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  • [–] 4 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    Andy Jassy is the luckyest Billionaire CEO alive, since leftists have literally never heard of him and throw all their criticisms of Amazon at his predecessor...

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    [–] 3 points 3 days ago

    mainstream media is all propaganda anyway

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  • [–] 3 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    Ever notice that these propagandizing assholes never even bother to cite their lies anymore?

    Dude just writes "FOX said, trust me" and they eat it up.

    Same shit happens on the left. Someone just says something, attributes it without a link, and the comments section eats it up, true or not.

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    [–] 2 points 2 days ago

    It's a bluff to scare voters. No way in hell Amazon would exit or reduce their footprint a market as lucrative as NYC because of an increase in the cost of doing business.

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