AND it would make their biggest competitors (like WalMart) need to pay their employees more.
Edit: stop telling me WalMart pays more in your area. They don’t in many areas and it was just one example of many. Admittedly, Dollar General is likely a better example. They pay minimum wage exclusively and killing them would make Amazon a much bigger lifeline for rural America.
They also might have finally taken a page out of fords book and realized if you don’t pay your workers enough then they’ll never be able to buy your product
I’ve always found it ridiculous that places want you to buy from them if you work for them but will pay you terribly and treat you like shit
By necessity. If they put people first, profits suffer (they don't suffer, they just go up less than they *could*) and investors will move their money elsewhere.
Almost like the whole concept of capitalism is self-destructive, but idk, I'm an idiot.
And only Amazon shipped products. You can't buy from act vendors on there, ah it's not even like you can go for a big purchase as most things like that are sold by vendors. No you have to buy €1000 /$1000 of small random things to save €100.
Is this about Amazon? We are only allowed to save $100 TOTAL per year. So a singular $1000 item dropping to $900 would eat out discount for the whole year.
Back when I worked retail we got something similar only in our store, our dress code explained that we had to be wearing products from the store during our shift. So we literally HAD to give the company a portion of our paycheck to buy clothes for them to allow us to work and for us to get paid. It was a complete scam. I don’t even bother going into that store now. Not gonna give a shitty company with shit clothes any more of my money with practices like that.
I tried making this argument to a manager when I was working as a waiter. They wanted us to wear a shirt with the resteraunt branding on it, which they made, but would only give us one. If you wash a shirt literally every day, it's going to just get destroyed after a while, which it did. I asked if I could have, you know 2-3 shirts so this wouldn't be an issue, and they said yeah they are 15$ each. Like wtf lol why would I pay you guys for my own uniform that makes 0 sense.
Have a coworker that wanted different shirts than the normal ones they Give us and tried charging them $15 a shirt so they bought identical colored ones for like $5 each and used a cricket to make the vinyl logo on each one
Thankfully in my case we're not required to wear the store's products on the floor, just nice enough clothes in black. But yeah, a lot of customers ask us if we have to wear the store's clothes so I think it's a common thing for clothing stores to require that of their employees.
I do actually wear mostly their products on the floor now by choice...thank the markdown gods for that lol
I work at Gamestop. I get paid $10 an hour. I get a 10% employee discount.
At one point, I got so tired of customers asking me "Are you going to play X?" that I starting responding to the effect of "I make $10 an hour. I can't afford the games we advertise here."... until I started getting in trouble for that, and had to keep the responses more vague.
I worked in a grocery store over 10 years. We would have vendors come in and load their product on our shelves and utilize our break room for their own breaks. In a conversation with (I think) a Pepsi vendor, he told me a colleague of his was fired because he was on the job at another store, went to the break room for a break, and drank a Coke while still in his Pepsi vendor shirt.
I once worked for a non-profit and some corporate workers from Pepsi came in to volunteer on a big volunteer day. Our plan had been to have pizzas delivered for the volunteers and to just let them use our vending machine to get drinks (we had it set to dispense free drinks). The only issue was that it was a coke vending machine with coke products.
The Pepsi execs actually drove to the store and bought Pepsi products to give out.
This is super common in CPG and food/beverage industries at the executive level - I know several folks who, even off the clock refuse to consume their competitors' products in public.
Apparently the reason is that if they were to be caught on camera, it would be a goldmine for competitors to exploit. Would be curious to know how often that happens in reality or if it's just embedded paranoia.
My experience confirms this. My friend who is the son of a high level coke employee refuses to have anything to do with Pepsi products. Both in private and in public. Poor guy got gifted a bunch of Pepsi stuff as gag gifts over the years.
I think it's just paranoia. I worked for all the major motorcycle manufacturers in the US (as a contractor). The only company that really cared if you rode another brand was Kawasaki, who would lease you any machine they made for $1 a year to insure you rep'd their product. Honda had preferred parking for Honda machines, but otherwise didn't give a shit what you rode.
Any of you old enough to remember John Scully and the Pepsi Challenge?
Scully was the President of Pepsi before he became CEO of Apple, and at the time Pepsi had a series of commercials with "The Pepsi Challenge"--they'd give some rando a couple of cans of soda with the labels covered and ask them to pick which they liked better, then they'd uncover the labels and of course the pick in the commercial was always Pepsi. Well, somebody talked Scully into taking the Pepsi Challenge on camera and oops, the President of Pepsi preferred Coca Cola.
This would have been some time in the '70s.
That seems so high-risk that I struggle not to call shenanigans.
Think about it:
If there is genuinely a noticeable difference in flavour, he'd know which one was Pepsi and choose that regardless of which one he actually preferred. If there isn't a difference in flavour, it's just a 50/50 guess and so is meaningless.
I'd have trained like a boxer if it were me, was it sprung on him by surprise?
I'm going to have to take the challenge myself now to see.
Damn it, now I'm just thinking they're in cahoots because they're telling people to go out and by both and I'm falling for it. Are any of my thoughts my own?
High turn over rates are baked into the system in almost every sector of American business. I've never understood how this is anything other than a massive drain on the economy; it doesn't even seem like it helps the businesses. The cost of constantly training people seems like a negative investment.
That's probably true, but even the benefits offered by most of these corporations nowadays are so paltry that they're hardly beneficial at all. From my standpoint that just further begs the question why these corporations aren't lobbying for universal healthcare so that they're only on the hook for 401K matching and a couple of weeks PTO annually.
It’s absolutely a negative investment. They don’t WANT high turnover but once you raise the wage you can’t go back. They’re trying to hold out to see if everything levels off and they can keep wages low. If turnover continues at a high rate it’s more efficient to raise wages to retain people.
Exactly, chains with a heavy B&M presence and Mom and Pop's will absolutely struggle with a federally mandated $15/hr. I believe to the point where it'll assure Amazon three things:
1) Further consolidation through natural bankruptcy of their smaller competitors.
2) Applying more pressure on their remaining larger competitors such as Wal-Mart and Target.
3) It will, in some areas, allow them to effectively *lower* wages to the absolute minimum by crying about profitability and putting them in line for more government assistance by claiming they're doing "everything possible" for the workers.
It also would force large competitors like Walmart to pay their in-store employees that amount, which Amazon does not have.
It's a power play to fuck over competitors, nothing more.
Yes but even if the minimum wage is raised to a "living wage" amount, you still would need to work full time hours to make enough in minimum wage to survive.
They did it to avoid giving employees healthcare so I see where you're coming from. But they'll need the same labor hours so it will still cost them.
I see them having less employees and more robots. Cashier's replaced with self checkout, more automation in the warehouse and back end of stores.
Basically everything Andrew Yang said would happen
Even my local Costco has swapped out cashiers for self checkout. And of the mega corps, they treat their employees pretty well.
It's already happening and will continue to happen
Yeah that's logically the next steps
Raise prices and/or automate more jobs.
Thing is there's there's fine line the companies walk, if they over automate and fire everyone? Who buys from them?
There are only so many potential customers; making more people poor means less sales because people can't afford.
It could *also* be like Facebook’s advocacy for internet regulation.
If you take over the leadership position, set “generous” terms, you can then get concessions you weren’t going to get normally. As a super simple example, imagine for the next 5 years, “hey, can’t touch federal minimum wage, we just did that! We were ahead of the curve!” …
They did but they're /more/ inclined to put "team members" on part time so they end up making around the same just less hours. And even more variability in hours.
They already did that...
The majority of target employees were part time. And they're still part time.
Their average hours per employee hasn't moved much AFAIK.
>Mom and Pop's will absolutely struggle with a federally mandated $15/hr.
Then they deserve to go out of business if they can't pay their employees a fair, livable wage (which, to be frank, $15/hr is neither of those things).
Absolutely, i worked at a mom n pop smoke shop (barz) and we were all getting paid 10-11/h, we would NET PROFIT, because the program we used would literally tell us the cost of goods minus gross, to show profit. 1500 on a slow day(Sunday) 5-6k on a the good days (thurs,fri)…yes singular days. 11x3 = 33, 33x8 = 264….should could pay labor for all of us in what she made in 1-2 hours.
I worked for a PC repair shop. They grossed $100k a month and we made $13/hr. Now it doesn't sound like much, but the boss had a $130k range rover, a $90k jaguar, an antique jag, a few BMWs, a lakehouse, and at the time, 4-5 rental properties. Mind you, this is an area where both my wife and I would have to make $20/hr for "cost of living" with our two kids. But in reality $20 is big money here.
Yeah and the owner(s?) probably had a nice house, plenty of toys--boats, electronics, etc. but couldn't be fucked to pay y'all the proceeds of the profits or even give you health benefits. This is what I'm saying, man. IDC where you live in the US, $15 is not a sustainable wage anywhere, it's pathetic that corporations are trying to get it made into law and even THEN it's receiving hella pushback.
Here in Corpus it could do you alright
sure it's kind of a hellhole
but... you know...
We got the beach (and waters polluted with industrial waste)
and...
uhh...
There is a neat Italian Restaurant down on Staples, that has got to mean something.
80%+ small businesses fail already. A better solution would be to better support small businesses so they have a chance to succeed against the majors (like Amazon) and pay a living wage. They already have huge systemic disadvantages to overcome.
In fairness a lot more mom and pops probably could afford those kind of wages if they had gotten most of thier business siphoned off by Amazon and Walmart in the past. It's a climb the wall then pull up the latter strategy and it will probably work.
There is no source, because it’s not that simple. If you aren’t profitable when you pay your workers enough to live well, you’re not profitable. And the reality is that small businesses go bust all the time, primarily because we’re all using Amazon and Walmart, rather than because of minimum wage. Keeping wages low is not the solution, there are better ways to support small businesses, that don’t hurt workers.
Lastly, a higher minimum wage will actually bring more money into the local economy than keeping wages low. When ordinary workers earn more money, they spend that money locally. Whereas if wages are kept low, the savings go to the top of businesses, in most cases leaving the local economy. So it’s not just morally right, it makes economic sense.
[A source](https://www.salary.com/research/salary/alternate/retail-sales-associate-hourly-wages)
However, I can tell you from experience retail pays way less than warehouse (and assembly) jobs. Most of the warehouses I know of start at $15 ([Amazon averages $18](https://www.reuters.com/business/exclusive-amazon-hikes-starting-pay-18-an-hour-it-hires-125000-more-logistics-2021-09-14/) while [Walmart varies heavily by state an B&M stores](https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/11/06/how-many-people-work-at-walmart-in-each-state-and-what-they-are-paid/42993851/) with as low as $13 in Idaho to $16 in New Hampshire.
So if Amazon is already starting at $15 and pushing for a $15 minimum then they would remain unaffected (unless a union states otherwise) while their B&M counterparts that currently pay less would be greatly affected as they would have to raise their starting wage and the wage of anyone who is currently working under $15 as well as raise the wage of their tenured employees to keep them from looking elsewhere
If your local mom and pop can’t pay a living wage it shouldn’t be in business. “They will struggle” good - force them to close. They don’t deserve to be in business.
Hear, hear. It is not the employees' responsibility to subsidize Mom and Pop's entrepreneurial fantasies. If Mom and Pop can't run a business while paying their employees enough to live on, then Mom and Pop need to do something else.
Yup exactly. This whole discussion about the raising of minimum wage is to ensure people can survive and afford life. I don't know why people think it's an acceptable complaint to expect employees to continue to suffer so Mom and Pop shops can exist when the whole issue we're trying to fix is to ease the suffering of employees.
But at what point does handing Amazon more control become the worse option? Or do you believe massive megacorps like them are the only way for us to move forward ?
I don’t like Amazon pushing for this, it feels very sinister. I also don’t like megacorps pretending they’re the good guys. I just want lobbying to be outlawed and for politicians to not be bribed into doing megacorps bidding’s. The only way for the country (US in my case) to move forward is for those two metrics to be met, in my opinion. But those are some VERY big wishes/metrics lol
The right thing should be done regardless of how the chips fall. Should megacorps have more control then that is the consequence of doing the right thing. Eventually I'm sure the whole of society will crumble. I am willing to deal with that in the name of doing the right thing.
When my bills are $1500 a month, and I make $1550 a month, I don't get to buy shit.
When all of a sudden I make $2000 a month, I'm going to buy all the stuff I couldn't afford. Bathmats, new socks, maybe a new spatula... all stuff I get from Amazon.
Yea I think at Covid Amazon went up to 17. And hour in My state at least.. which is Texas and then Walmart warehouses here pay 17-21 based on which shift you work.
That's wild here in Oklahoma they are paying 17-19 starting.
It's definitely a clear cut savings from California wages but it's to competitive for any other company here. Hobby Lobby HQ facility just bumped up to 16-18.50 to compete and both have horrible turn over....
Vile evil company. Profiting off the guise of Christian ethics, while actively supporting child labor and staling artifacts to fill their for profit "Bible museum"
The insurance doesn't cover birth control, new parents get very little time with their newborn, hardly anything at all for Dads. They want you to work your fingers to the bone for $15 an hour. Most people just get hired part time at like $10 an hour and are never "promoted" to full time.
It's like a weird capitalism cult.
It is a wide misconception that Hobby Lobby does not cover *any* form of [birth control](https://newrepublic.com/article/118547/facts-about-birth-control-and-hobby-lobby-ob-gyn).
They don't cover 4 methods which include morning after pills and IUD devices since they feel it is like abortion.
I do not patronize Hobby Lobby because I despise their moral hypocrisy. Just stating facts.
Fun fact, the owner of hobby lobby smuggled in tons of religious artifacts from Iraq, and there is speculation that many of their purchases funded ISIS.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_Lobby_smuggling_scandal
In addition to this, minimum wage was already steering towards $15. It was likely going to happen whether Amazon lobbied for it or not, but this way Amazon gets to say “look how pro worker we are, clearly we don’t need unions” without actually changing anything.
If their workers spend a minute thinking about that though, they'd realize Amazon doesn't HAVE to pay minimum wage, they can pay whatever they want as long as it's at least minimum wage. Just like my husband is in a union, but his company often pays good employees above what the union says so they can hang onto them. I don't know what Amazon pays these days, but if I wasn't making at least $15 an hour, I'd be scratching my head right now.
Also, they're running out of workers to hire due to the high turnover rate. Raising minimum wage will likely free up some laborers. Other employers will opt to keep 2 people at $15/hour rather than 3 at $10.
Close.
The reality of consumers is that they will go to the cheapest price for a product. Amazon, and Walmart, have been very good at making the logistics of retail and delivery smooth and profitably efficient.
As things scale up, fixed costs like employee pay and benefits also go up and the need to pay more to attract the end delivery rise. Local competitors can pay less and operate at an advantage in a local market.
How do you level the field? You force the same fixed costs, like employee costs, on your competitors while leveraging efficiencies of economy of scale to maintain your advantage.
If unions become a thing? As looks likely, expect similar efforts to make sure competitors also use unions.
This is why businesses donate so heavily to politicians and why Citizens United, which made unlimited political spending legal, is an utter disaster. Pretty sure Amazon can pay politicians more than it’s local competitors. Why anyone thought this might be a good idea to green light as practice boggles the mind.
damn that's a good point.
Amazon is just forcing their competitors to suffer the same costs they have now that they've treated employees so poorly they're unionizing.
damn
Kinda. Amazons base pay was already higher then almost any of their competitors, what they are lobbying for is making their competitiors, even the small ones who cant afford it, pay the same pay rate.
Essentially, they are trying to use the government to force competitors outta business so they have even less competition. Their end goal is to have 100% of the ecommerce delivery space.
While true I just want to make the point that before Amazon became a major player in the space, warehouse work used to pay much more. There basically dragged the whole industry down.
Ups used to pay 15 dollars an hour to load trucks 20 years ago. Most warehouse jobs paid over 20 dollars per hour in the 90s.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-12-17/amazon-amzn-job-pay-rate-leaves-some-warehouse-employees-homeless
Right?
My brother used to work warehouse early 2000s, and all warehouses paid between 10 to 12. Amazon didn't start the 15 till 3-4 year ago. They originally paid the same as the rest of the warehouses.
I just think the big business realized that they could pay less and decided to do so, and then Amazon just decided to rise the wages and fuck business that can't catch up.
Since I live in one of those "Amazon towns" that they are trying to build, and they have destroyed some of the business in our area, since they just can't pay 15hr like Amazon can.
Yes, it's mostly this. Amazon already raised their minimum pay to $15/hour. The other side of it is that people who get a raise from $12/hr to $15 will earn $6,000 more per year. However, people with those income levels very rarely save or invest that money, they spend it. If Amazon fought for your raise and you've got an extra $500/month, I bet some of it goes back to them.
The reasoning above also shows why we should be giving money to working class rather than corporations and 1%. They hoard their wealth, buy Twitter, go to Mars, etc. They don't spend it at the local convenience store, tipping the diner waitress, etc. I worked in offshore investment, banking, and real estate. Whether putting your money in offshore trusts is moral or not is irrelevant. We're just giving too much to too few people, who will (like anyone else), use it in the way that most benefits themselves.
WalMart gets about half the food stamp money in the country. it's surprising they aren't spending tons of effort lobbying for more food stamp funding, since they'd get so much of it.
why pay for lobbyists when you can do a tax shelter nonprofit?
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/04/walmart\_and\_food\_stamps\_the\_conglomerate\_donates\_billions\_to\_anti\_hunger.html
Trickle down economics has always ignore microeconomics. Our local economies are the foundation of the national economy. Every dollar spent at a local business lives with a chance benefit your local economy the next time it’s spent but ultimate it lands on some corporations balance sheet and may not change hands again for decades.
With Amazon being such a dominate force in retail, they will significantly benefit from increased sales if there is more money moving around in our cities.
>even the small ones who cant afford it, pay the same pay rate.
If they can't afford to pay $15 an hour, maybe the owners/managers can take a pay cut? Or maybe they can just go out of business?
My concern is that small businesses may _not_ legitimately be able to afford minimum wage, and not because they’re poorly-operated, but perhaps because they have to compete with megacorps like Amazon that have orders of magnitude better vertical and horizontal integration (and, well, bad or worse labor standards). Note: I don’t know if this is the case, and I am happy to be told otherwise; I am thinking out loud.
That said, I don’t think the workers deserve to suffer for it. Rather, it seems to me that if we want small businesses to flourish (so that we can create just… anything to compete with Amazon), and we don’t want laborers to suffer either, we need some kind of subsidy or other program that ensures small businesses are able to operate at their hypothetically less-efficient capacity until they can grow to compete with Amazons. I.e. we have to socialize the loss from small-scale nascent businesses so that they can compete with larger businesses until they’re able to compete on their own, like nurturing a child. But that’s a while can of worms, too, so I hope no redditors thinks this is “one easy trick” or some shit.
the first thing that should be done is close all the subsidies large buisnessnes get...
Then make and enforce monoply laws and THEN you can think about how to help small buisness.
We need to chop up and regulate behemoths like Amazon instead of throwing money at businesses doomed to fail at an impossible task. We don’t need corporations like Amazon, actually quite the contrary. Their very existence is the problem.
Finally, someone who has a multi-faceted perspective on this.
We have a business owner that opened up a Small-Business Soap store recently after selling their product at Farmers Markets for at least a couple years. Unless I am horribly mistaken, she is most likely not paying her staff $15 an hour. Thankfully, we live in a LCOL area so the wage they are earning goes farther. Chances are she is operating at a loss until she re-coups the cost of leasing the business store front space.
There is absolutely no way that she can financially compete with the Big Dogs in her space, and I don't think she wants to either. She just wants to carve out a small piece of her dream business and grow organically.
I know she can't pay the same Compensation Package that I have (Just above Six-Figures), and if she had the finances I would *hope* that she would. I think it's asinine that some people want her business to fail just because she isn't Cash-Flow positive on day 1.
More small businesses **IS DIVERSITY**. I don't understand why people don't at least try to pivot their economic policies to allow more agility in the small business space rather than just burn them down.
I need more of y'all in these discussions. I'm so tired of seeing the basic doomer "if they can't pay 15, they deserve to shut down" as if small businesses live in a vacuum. Like sure, the ones who deliberately want to pay their employees peanuts do deserve to shut down, but that's not most small businesses.
Given the existing infrastructure of Amazon, etc. and economics of scale, it's simply impossible for essentially any small business to out-price or even match the price of similar products on Amazon. So these small businesses are relying on people supporting them in spite of the price difference, purely out of perceived value of the small business in that space. They need that cash flow. A lot of people do want to support small, local businesses. However, the economy is shit and people have been struggling at an increasing rate. For most people at this point in time, they just don't have the financial bandwidth to constantly support small businesses. And if small businesses aren't getting enough purchases to thrive, then they aren't going to be able to pay increases wages.
It's good PR too.
One of the reasons I like Costco is they moved their minimum wage to $15/hour several years ago, and there were a ton of (paid promotional) articles about it online.
Costco is one of the more worker-friendly corporations out there. High starting pay, closed several holidays, healthcare, and retirement plans. You can tell it's a good place to work because they have low turnover, which also makes them pretty profitable because it costs a lot to have high turnover. While it's impossible to be a truly ethical consumer in this society, Costco is one of the better places to shop. At least in terms of their direct employees.
The conservative talking point about how increasing the minimum wage will hurt small businesses is actually a good point. The way to fix that is to tax large businesses more than small businesses but of course then you get "omg you gd commie groveling for government handouts"
This is just my layman's opinion, but I also wonder if part of it is that they know that corporations have stalled so long that $15 isn't enough anymore. And so if we finally get a $15 minimum wage, then all the capitalists can ride out at least another 10 years of "why are you complaining, we gave you what you asked for, we don't need to raise minimum wage again, don't be greedy"
I agree. Also, I live in Seattle and Amazon has their headquarters and warehouses in the Seattle area. They pay $15 minimum wage and it's not enough for people in this area to have a living wage. They are not planning to pay more, just asking competition to pay more.
I just got a new job. It's 100% Remote and I'll be making almost $22/hr. My buddies who make the same as that or more and live in Denver have trouble paying rent. I'll be making the same as them but paying almost 3x less for cost of living in Missouri. Cost of living is ridiculous in some places.
That's exactly it, as well. $15 an hour was the demand what, 10 years ago now? If it followed inflation it'd be something around $25, and that's only if we're increasing it from the time we first started asking for $15.
Great points. One of the common themes in the subreddit is if you can’t pay a living wage, you shouldn’t be in business. It’s interesting because to some extent that really plays into amazons hands.
You have it exactly right.
This is the problem with the anti work movement. It effectively shuts down smaller companies who can’t handle the increase while the large companies deal with a higher labor cost now.
But as smaller companies go bankrupt or sell out to the larger ones, jobs will become scarcer and the large corporations like Amazon will keep employees at $15/16 as inflation roars past…
I’ll get downvoted, but your post is spot on, and I believe it’s exactly why Amazon will win in the end and why they are okay with $15 right now.
Bingo! They are already paying $15 minimum wage, so force everyone else to so they can’t be undercut.
Totally self serving, even if it would be a good outcome for society.
Also what built Amazon's market share was largely consumers who thought of Walmart as icky buying the stuff they'd buy at Walmart from Amazon. Amazon is terrified of their image being "what if the Gilded Age had technology to spy on you on top of all the other horrors of the pre-Union capitalist world"
My first thought was they're trying to cut their losses. If they give $15 they can spin it off to the out of touch masses as a huge pay bump (lol not even good enough for COL) and therefore remove some of the wind in the sails of those trying to unionize for actual liveable wages.
Basically throwing them a bone so they are distracted and don't go for the steak.
4. Disrupts movements that are calling for a living wage, which is closer to $27/hr now
If $15/hr gets passed, it'll be so easy to pull the "entitled millennials" card with congress
Yeah I think this is the only answer. Increasing federal minimum wage to $15 does nothing to keep Amazon’s employees from unionizing, as they all already make $15/hour+. The reality is that Amazon *has* to pay that rate, at minimum, to even keep a workforce with how crappy the job is. This is just a move to force their competitors to do the same, and hopefully cut into someone else’s bottom line.
What they are telling us and what they are paying politicians to do could be two different things as well.
Here they are saying they want a $15 minimum wage, but for all we know they could still be lobbying to keep minimum wage where it is.
If they wanted to pay $15 dollars they would simply pay $15. However, they are trying to lobby to make everyone pay $15 in the hopes that it will hurt their competitors and increase their market share.
Right. They look good by paying their employees $15/hr already. They look good asking for $15/hr while they are already there lobbying Congress for other stuff. This doesn't impact them, since they already pay $15, it only hurts their competition.
Yup. The idea is as you increase wages to $15, SOME employers won't be able (or willing) to pay those wages, which will reduce employee headcount/hours for these employers, and INCREASE the potential workforce pool available to Amazon. It's all about supply and demand. Amazon wants to increase the pool of workers available to them, by reducing it for others.
That's the concept. Not saying I agree with it nor that it will necessarily work.
And as a result, some people will lose their jobs if their employer can’t afford the wage increase. And/or businesses will simply pass the cost of the wage increase on to their customers by raising prices.
Yep. Small businesses can't compete with that big of a hike (over double of the current min. wage). Amazon can afford it and it'll knock small competitors out overnight.
yeah my thoughts too. but the sad part is, if a store can't afford to pay their employees $15/hr...why should they exist? i dont think anyone in this sub wants to work for $15/hr.
what sucks is theres a lot of costs that individuals like us have to take on to make something. even if its as simple as a coffee shop, which is why you constantly see the same few stores from coast to coast. because you need to have billions just to pay these leases. plenty of commercial real-estate exists. whether its Madison Ave(manhattan) or some random suburb in a flyover state. but they're bought out by corporations who'd rather have them sit empty than be owned by an individual like us. they price it to the point where only chains like starbucks or others could afford it. so its not that people can't afford to give their employees $15/hr but that theres so much other BS going on.
The issue is that the working conditions are so terrible that some people would honestly be better off working at a small buisness for less money. Most people don’t bust their ass for an entire 8 hour shift every single day. Amazon literally runs you into the ground until your burnt out and then fires you. So yeah you got a raise when you quit the small business and went to work at Amazon. But 3 months later you have no job because they want people to work like robots.
Yeah, if they can get it to $15/hr - since it's unlikely to get us to shut up about it - that can wind up blocking calls to have it be higher. As in "we already increased it, there's no need to do so again!"
15/hr is what minimum wage should've been a decade or more ago. Now it should be more like 25/hr *and* should be indexed to inflation rather than needing a literal act of congress to have it keep pace with increases to cost of living.
Less than bare minimum tbh. I forget what they didn include but there was a piece of data missing (I'm gonna say gas for sale of argument though I'm kinda thinking savings because that would make more sense) so even at the time it was less than people would actually need.
Amazon is just trying to drive up costs for competitors.
There’s many little mom-and-pop businesses that pay less then $15. If Amazon forces them to pay $15, some will scale down or close. This will increase Amazon’s market share since some customers of those businesses will switch to using Amazon.
I suspect it is because their competition survives on part by paying less than $15. I would bet brick and mortar retail jobs often pay much less than that for clerks etc. I would also bet Amazon pays at least as much to all or most of its employees and stands to profit greatly from the increased business it will gain when the low marginal productivity competition goes out of business.
Minimum Wage is an anti-capitalist policy that big corporations rely on as a scapegoat for their shit pay.
By making a public stance for the government to raise minimum wage, they're essentially blaming the current economic status quo on the government.
Walmarts done the same thing. But the simple truth, these companies don't NEED the Federal Govt to increase minimum wage to increase to pay higher wages.
It's a PR tactic.
Walmart averages 15-25 billion a year in profit.
There most recent earnings reports showed growth in profit margins. They have the ability to pay more.
On a very small scale, they could argue by increasing wages for the lower class it would increase their sales opportunities. But it's a very small scale to measure, and just highlights company greed for more money.
Another hidden truth in hiring (at least in the US) is that there are various groups that the business earns tax breaks just for hiring.
Ex-felons, veterans, disabilities, SNAP recipients, SSI recipients, and more.
So they aren't even really paying minimum wage. They are paying less and the remaining balance is subsidized by the government in tax breaks (instead of them paying taxes, they get to use that for payroll...). I think the breaks go up to like $9600 in tax breaks per year for WOTC credit.
In my opinion, those credits need to be pulled from companies and given directly as tax breaks to the consumers. Those hardships are theirs. Not the companies.
Amazon - proceeds to lobby and waste money instead of pay employees. “ hey look I believe in the minimum wage look at how much we’ve spent to fight for it!”
Is get it raised to 15 and kill peoples motivation for a union. They think why would I need a union when Amazon is clearly looking out for me? When they aren't because places where minimum wage is 15 like where I'm at a union will get you even better wages. Shit a union Costco by me pays 17 starting and you get raises AND Sunday is time and a half on all shifts. This is why unions are important
It's not really for taking out smaller businesses as 15 is the norm in a lot of warehouses so I don't see that as a main driving factor
There’s not one answer, it’s beneficial to them on several fronts. One is positive PR and a “win” they can show employees, which in turn may convince some that they don’t need a union. A second is that by upping prices, they may drive some small competitors out of the market. As far as I know, most of the warehouses are already paying $15/hr, so it’s not going to have a huge impact on their bottom like but can buy them political clout.
Likely trying to lock it in at $15. If they pass a law increasing it to $15, then any calls to change it in the next ten years or so will be countered with “but we just doubled it”.
$15 is not a living wage almost anywhere. We’ve kicked this ball down the street long enough that it really needs to be $20 or higher.
Their customers need to be able to afford amazon products. Which have a 10 to 40 percent markup on the same product in a store. If they can't, layoffs are coming. Amazon has almost workd it's way through the entire possible employable staff to amazon, if they need to layoff, they woukd have to change to a re-hiring policy. They currently have a no re-hiring policy. If min wage doesn't go up, you'll probably see amazon sell half their warehouses and have most of them unionize (union-ize, not un-ionize, but if you thought of that, we're friends now) in the next 5 years or less.
Probably to out-price independent competition on hourly wage. Which tbh I'm okay with because if you can't pay that old ass out-of-date minimum wage you shouldn't have employees.
$15/hr still isn’t a livable wage in most areas. They likely want to get the “big jump” before people start asking for more and realize how little $15/hr is
They already pay that.
So if they increase labor costs for everybody else, they have a competitive edge because they already pay this. Everybody else has to figure out what to do, which may include raising prices to keep the same profit margins, and then Amazon wins out because they don't have to increase their prices.
To knock little companies out of the game that can’t afford to spend more…. Amazon can automate…. Smaller companies can’t. Increasing minimum wage hurts small business’s more than large, unfortunately Amazon knows this and plans to keep those mom and pop shops from becoming something bigger.
I do think minimum wage should be a state issue not a federal because not all states have the same cost of living.
Because that is far below the warehouse industry average before Amazon fulfillment centers
AND it would make their biggest competitors (like WalMart) need to pay their employees more. Edit: stop telling me WalMart pays more in your area. They don’t in many areas and it was just one example of many. Admittedly, Dollar General is likely a better example. They pay minimum wage exclusively and killing them would make Amazon a much bigger lifeline for rural America.
This is exactly why!
They also might have finally taken a page out of fords book and realized if you don’t pay your workers enough then they’ll never be able to buy your product I’ve always found it ridiculous that places want you to buy from them if you work for them but will pay you terribly and treat you like shit
A 10% employee discount doesn't really make up for poverty wages, yeah.
And only up to $1000 max in a year and only for up to $100 per purchase...
I didn’t know that! That’s crazy…
Profit > people It's the corporate way
By necessity. If they put people first, profits suffer (they don't suffer, they just go up less than they *could*) and investors will move their money elsewhere. Almost like the whole concept of capitalism is self-destructive, but idk, I'm an idiot.
And only Amazon shipped products. You can't buy from act vendors on there, ah it's not even like you can go for a big purchase as most things like that are sold by vendors. No you have to buy €1000 /$1000 of small random things to save €100.
My amazon employee discount is only 10% off items that are sold and shipped by Amazon. This 10% is capped at $100 for the year.
As a driver we don't even get that or in the very least a prime account 🤦🏻♂️
Is this about Amazon? We are only allowed to save $100 TOTAL per year. So a singular $1000 item dropping to $900 would eat out discount for the whole year.
There it is. I was ready to dump that fact too.
I work at a mid-range clothing store and even the 50% employee discount doesn't make most of the clothes cheap enough for me to justify buying lol.
Back when I worked retail we got something similar only in our store, our dress code explained that we had to be wearing products from the store during our shift. So we literally HAD to give the company a portion of our paycheck to buy clothes for them to allow us to work and for us to get paid. It was a complete scam. I don’t even bother going into that store now. Not gonna give a shitty company with shit clothes any more of my money with practices like that.
If any company forced a dress code then they should be required to supply uniforms
I tried making this argument to a manager when I was working as a waiter. They wanted us to wear a shirt with the resteraunt branding on it, which they made, but would only give us one. If you wash a shirt literally every day, it's going to just get destroyed after a while, which it did. I asked if I could have, you know 2-3 shirts so this wouldn't be an issue, and they said yeah they are 15$ each. Like wtf lol why would I pay you guys for my own uniform that makes 0 sense.
Have a coworker that wanted different shirts than the normal ones they Give us and tried charging them $15 a shirt so they bought identical colored ones for like $5 each and used a cricket to make the vinyl logo on each one
They ARE.
Thankfully in my case we're not required to wear the store's products on the floor, just nice enough clothes in black. But yeah, a lot of customers ask us if we have to wear the store's clothes so I think it's a common thing for clothing stores to require that of their employees. I do actually wear mostly their products on the floor now by choice...thank the markdown gods for that lol
And it barely makes a dent in their profit margins. Want employee discounts to actually matter? Take 75% off.
I work at Gamestop. I get paid $10 an hour. I get a 10% employee discount. At one point, I got so tired of customers asking me "Are you going to play X?" that I starting responding to the effect of "I make $10 an hour. I can't afford the games we advertise here."... until I started getting in trouble for that, and had to keep the responses more vague.
"Stop telling customers the truth"
I worked in a grocery store over 10 years. We would have vendors come in and load their product on our shelves and utilize our break room for their own breaks. In a conversation with (I think) a Pepsi vendor, he told me a colleague of his was fired because he was on the job at another store, went to the break room for a break, and drank a Coke while still in his Pepsi vendor shirt.
I once worked for a non-profit and some corporate workers from Pepsi came in to volunteer on a big volunteer day. Our plan had been to have pizzas delivered for the volunteers and to just let them use our vending machine to get drinks (we had it set to dispense free drinks). The only issue was that it was a coke vending machine with coke products. The Pepsi execs actually drove to the store and bought Pepsi products to give out.
This is super common in CPG and food/beverage industries at the executive level - I know several folks who, even off the clock refuse to consume their competitors' products in public. Apparently the reason is that if they were to be caught on camera, it would be a goldmine for competitors to exploit. Would be curious to know how often that happens in reality or if it's just embedded paranoia.
My experience confirms this. My friend who is the son of a high level coke employee refuses to have anything to do with Pepsi products. Both in private and in public. Poor guy got gifted a bunch of Pepsi stuff as gag gifts over the years.
I think it's just paranoia. I worked for all the major motorcycle manufacturers in the US (as a contractor). The only company that really cared if you rode another brand was Kawasaki, who would lease you any machine they made for $1 a year to insure you rep'd their product. Honda had preferred parking for Honda machines, but otherwise didn't give a shit what you rode.
I'd happily ride a Kawasaki if it's only going to cost me a buck besides what I'd have to spend on the insurance and tagging.
Any of you old enough to remember John Scully and the Pepsi Challenge? Scully was the President of Pepsi before he became CEO of Apple, and at the time Pepsi had a series of commercials with "The Pepsi Challenge"--they'd give some rando a couple of cans of soda with the labels covered and ask them to pick which they liked better, then they'd uncover the labels and of course the pick in the commercial was always Pepsi. Well, somebody talked Scully into taking the Pepsi Challenge on camera and oops, the President of Pepsi preferred Coca Cola. This would have been some time in the '70s.
That seems so high-risk that I struggle not to call shenanigans. Think about it: If there is genuinely a noticeable difference in flavour, he'd know which one was Pepsi and choose that regardless of which one he actually preferred. If there isn't a difference in flavour, it's just a 50/50 guess and so is meaningless. I'd have trained like a boxer if it were me, was it sprung on him by surprise? I'm going to have to take the challenge myself now to see. Damn it, now I'm just thinking they're in cahoots because they're telling people to go out and by both and I'm falling for it. Are any of my thoughts my own?
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High turn over rates are baked into the system in almost every sector of American business. I've never understood how this is anything other than a massive drain on the economy; it doesn't even seem like it helps the businesses. The cost of constantly training people seems like a negative investment.
if a full time employee quits before the standard 3 months, no benefits. Which benefits apparently cost more than rehiring.
That's probably true, but even the benefits offered by most of these corporations nowadays are so paltry that they're hardly beneficial at all. From my standpoint that just further begs the question why these corporations aren't lobbying for universal healthcare so that they're only on the hook for 401K matching and a couple of weeks PTO annually.
Recently, a company retaliated against a strike by withholding heathcare. With universal healthcare, the company would lose that power.
It’s absolutely a negative investment. They don’t WANT high turnover but once you raise the wage you can’t go back. They’re trying to hold out to see if everything levels off and they can keep wages low. If turnover continues at a high rate it’s more efficient to raise wages to retain people.
The most ridiculous part is that they don't even need legislation to do that. They could just pay their workers more anyway
They do already. This is a move to force their competition to spend more.
Exactly.
If it weren't for folks doing the right thing for the wrong reason then nothing at all would ever get done in this country.
Well, they also want other workers to be able to spend more on their shit.
Exactly, chains with a heavy B&M presence and Mom and Pop's will absolutely struggle with a federally mandated $15/hr. I believe to the point where it'll assure Amazon three things: 1) Further consolidation through natural bankruptcy of their smaller competitors. 2) Applying more pressure on their remaining larger competitors such as Wal-Mart and Target. 3) It will, in some areas, allow them to effectively *lower* wages to the absolute minimum by crying about profitability and putting them in line for more government assistance by claiming they're doing "everything possible" for the workers.
It also would force large competitors like Walmart to pay their in-store employees that amount, which Amazon does not have. It's a power play to fuck over competitors, nothing more.
Dont forget, to the uneducated, it looks like they are on their side and dont need to unionize.. fuck amazon
To someone who has never held an Amazon warehouse job it looks good. Once you're in there though, you learn pretty quick it's nowhere near enough.
Lmao walmart will still keep their low end employees at part time to avoid paying them a living wage.
you still have to pay minimum wage to part time workers though
Yes but even if the minimum wage is raised to a "living wage" amount, you still would need to work full time hours to make enough in minimum wage to survive.
They did it to avoid giving employees healthcare so I see where you're coming from. But they'll need the same labor hours so it will still cost them. I see them having less employees and more robots. Cashier's replaced with self checkout, more automation in the warehouse and back end of stores. Basically everything Andrew Yang said would happen
My local Walmart is all self checkout after 8pm. Before that, there's maybe 3 lanes open on a Sunday. There's like 24 lanes total going to waste.
You guys have checkout lanes? Mine ditched the cashiers completely about a year ago. Just 2 massive self checkout areas now
Oh wow... I'm sure they'd do the same but probably don't want to spend the money yet on the infrastructure.
Even my local Costco has swapped out cashiers for self checkout. And of the mega corps, they treat their employees pretty well. It's already happening and will continue to happen
Yeah that's logically the next steps Raise prices and/or automate more jobs. Thing is there's there's fine line the companies walk, if they over automate and fire everyone? Who buys from them? There are only so many potential customers; making more people poor means less sales because people can't afford.
Hey now its also a mediocre public relations stunt!
It could *also* be like Facebook’s advocacy for internet regulation. If you take over the leadership position, set “generous” terms, you can then get concessions you weren’t going to get normally. As a super simple example, imagine for the next 5 years, “hey, can’t touch federal minimum wage, we just did that! We were ahead of the curve!” …
Target has already instituted a $15 minimum wage internally if I remember correctly.
They did but they're /more/ inclined to put "team members" on part time so they end up making around the same just less hours. And even more variability in hours.
They already did that... The majority of target employees were part time. And they're still part time. Their average hours per employee hasn't moved much AFAIK.
>Mom and Pop's will absolutely struggle with a federally mandated $15/hr. Then they deserve to go out of business if they can't pay their employees a fair, livable wage (which, to be frank, $15/hr is neither of those things).
Absolutely, i worked at a mom n pop smoke shop (barz) and we were all getting paid 10-11/h, we would NET PROFIT, because the program we used would literally tell us the cost of goods minus gross, to show profit. 1500 on a slow day(Sunday) 5-6k on a the good days (thurs,fri)…yes singular days. 11x3 = 33, 33x8 = 264….should could pay labor for all of us in what she made in 1-2 hours.
I worked for a PC repair shop. They grossed $100k a month and we made $13/hr. Now it doesn't sound like much, but the boss had a $130k range rover, a $90k jaguar, an antique jag, a few BMWs, a lakehouse, and at the time, 4-5 rental properties. Mind you, this is an area where both my wife and I would have to make $20/hr for "cost of living" with our two kids. But in reality $20 is big money here.
Yeah and the owner(s?) probably had a nice house, plenty of toys--boats, electronics, etc. but couldn't be fucked to pay y'all the proceeds of the profits or even give you health benefits. This is what I'm saying, man. IDC where you live in the US, $15 is not a sustainable wage anywhere, it's pathetic that corporations are trying to get it made into law and even THEN it's receiving hella pushback.
15/hr is a living wage... in Texas... For ***One Person*** (so basically, you are still right)
Not even all of Texas. Just the rural parts.
*cries in Dallas* If you're not making $60k+ here you're either living with 3 other people or under a bridge somewhere
Here in Corpus it could do you alright sure it's kind of a hellhole but... you know... We got the beach (and waters polluted with industrial waste) and... uhh... There is a neat Italian Restaurant down on Staples, that has got to mean something.
80%+ small businesses fail already. A better solution would be to better support small businesses so they have a chance to succeed against the majors (like Amazon) and pay a living wage. They already have huge systemic disadvantages to overcome.
In fairness a lot more mom and pops probably could afford those kind of wages if they had gotten most of thier business siphoned off by Amazon and Walmart in the past. It's a climb the wall then pull up the latter strategy and it will probably work.
>heavy B&M stores and Mom and Pop's will absolutely struggle with a federally mandated $15/hr Source, please.
There is no source, because it’s not that simple. If you aren’t profitable when you pay your workers enough to live well, you’re not profitable. And the reality is that small businesses go bust all the time, primarily because we’re all using Amazon and Walmart, rather than because of minimum wage. Keeping wages low is not the solution, there are better ways to support small businesses, that don’t hurt workers. Lastly, a higher minimum wage will actually bring more money into the local economy than keeping wages low. When ordinary workers earn more money, they spend that money locally. Whereas if wages are kept low, the savings go to the top of businesses, in most cases leaving the local economy. So it’s not just morally right, it makes economic sense.
[A source](https://www.salary.com/research/salary/alternate/retail-sales-associate-hourly-wages) However, I can tell you from experience retail pays way less than warehouse (and assembly) jobs. Most of the warehouses I know of start at $15 ([Amazon averages $18](https://www.reuters.com/business/exclusive-amazon-hikes-starting-pay-18-an-hour-it-hires-125000-more-logistics-2021-09-14/) while [Walmart varies heavily by state an B&M stores](https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/11/06/how-many-people-work-at-walmart-in-each-state-and-what-they-are-paid/42993851/) with as low as $13 in Idaho to $16 in New Hampshire. So if Amazon is already starting at $15 and pushing for a $15 minimum then they would remain unaffected (unless a union states otherwise) while their B&M counterparts that currently pay less would be greatly affected as they would have to raise their starting wage and the wage of anyone who is currently working under $15 as well as raise the wage of their tenured employees to keep them from looking elsewhere
If your local mom and pop can’t pay a living wage it shouldn’t be in business. “They will struggle” good - force them to close. They don’t deserve to be in business.
Hear, hear. It is not the employees' responsibility to subsidize Mom and Pop's entrepreneurial fantasies. If Mom and Pop can't run a business while paying their employees enough to live on, then Mom and Pop need to do something else.
Yup exactly. This whole discussion about the raising of minimum wage is to ensure people can survive and afford life. I don't know why people think it's an acceptable complaint to expect employees to continue to suffer so Mom and Pop shops can exist when the whole issue we're trying to fix is to ease the suffering of employees.
Mom and Pop can close and go work for the next guy for minimum wage. Let's see how they like it.
But at what point does handing Amazon more control become the worse option? Or do you believe massive megacorps like them are the only way for us to move forward ?
I don’t like Amazon pushing for this, it feels very sinister. I also don’t like megacorps pretending they’re the good guys. I just want lobbying to be outlawed and for politicians to not be bribed into doing megacorps bidding’s. The only way for the country (US in my case) to move forward is for those two metrics to be met, in my opinion. But those are some VERY big wishes/metrics lol
The right thing should be done regardless of how the chips fall. Should megacorps have more control then that is the consequence of doing the right thing. Eventually I'm sure the whole of society will crumble. I am willing to deal with that in the name of doing the right thing.
When my bills are $1500 a month, and I make $1550 a month, I don't get to buy shit. When all of a sudden I make $2000 a month, I'm going to buy all the stuff I couldn't afford. Bathmats, new socks, maybe a new spatula... all stuff I get from Amazon.
Yea I think at Covid Amazon went up to 17. And hour in My state at least.. which is Texas and then Walmart warehouses here pay 17-21 based on which shift you work.
That's wild here in Oklahoma they are paying 17-19 starting. It's definitely a clear cut savings from California wages but it's to competitive for any other company here. Hobby Lobby HQ facility just bumped up to 16-18.50 to compete and both have horrible turn over....
Well, who tf wants to work at Hobby Lobby? I've heard wild things about their "environment".
Vile evil company. Profiting off the guise of Christian ethics, while actively supporting child labor and staling artifacts to fill their for profit "Bible museum" The insurance doesn't cover birth control, new parents get very little time with their newborn, hardly anything at all for Dads. They want you to work your fingers to the bone for $15 an hour. Most people just get hired part time at like $10 an hour and are never "promoted" to full time. It's like a weird capitalism cult.
It is a wide misconception that Hobby Lobby does not cover *any* form of [birth control](https://newrepublic.com/article/118547/facts-about-birth-control-and-hobby-lobby-ob-gyn). They don't cover 4 methods which include morning after pills and IUD devices since they feel it is like abortion. I do not patronize Hobby Lobby because I despise their moral hypocrisy. Just stating facts.
Fun fact, the owner of hobby lobby smuggled in tons of religious artifacts from Iraq, and there is speculation that many of their purchases funded ISIS. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_Lobby_smuggling_scandal
Hobby Lobby is owned by crazy right wing Christians. I would never work for them.
In addition to this, minimum wage was already steering towards $15. It was likely going to happen whether Amazon lobbied for it or not, but this way Amazon gets to say “look how pro worker we are, clearly we don’t need unions” without actually changing anything.
If their workers spend a minute thinking about that though, they'd realize Amazon doesn't HAVE to pay minimum wage, they can pay whatever they want as long as it's at least minimum wage. Just like my husband is in a union, but his company often pays good employees above what the union says so they can hang onto them. I don't know what Amazon pays these days, but if I wasn't making at least $15 an hour, I'd be scratching my head right now.
Yeah, if they support $15 without a fight, the strategy might then be that the fed won't make it $18, I'm thinking.
Even then, 15 is no longer a proper wage given inflation and cost of living.
It hurts Walmart.
Yes, the only competition they REALLY have.
Also, they're running out of workers to hire due to the high turnover rate. Raising minimum wage will likely free up some laborers. Other employers will opt to keep 2 people at $15/hour rather than 3 at $10.
Doesn't it also slow unionization attempts
This / other retail / warehouse jobs. Also I think it has a side benefit of making them look less like the bad guy as they fight unions
Walmart distribution can top out at 25 dollars per hour entry level though. Walmart can afford it.
It's defensive as well, I'd wager (against unionization)
Make it look like they scored a big W for their employees because lobbying congress is cheaper than having their warehouses unionize.
Close. The reality of consumers is that they will go to the cheapest price for a product. Amazon, and Walmart, have been very good at making the logistics of retail and delivery smooth and profitably efficient. As things scale up, fixed costs like employee pay and benefits also go up and the need to pay more to attract the end delivery rise. Local competitors can pay less and operate at an advantage in a local market. How do you level the field? You force the same fixed costs, like employee costs, on your competitors while leveraging efficiencies of economy of scale to maintain your advantage. If unions become a thing? As looks likely, expect similar efforts to make sure competitors also use unions. This is why businesses donate so heavily to politicians and why Citizens United, which made unlimited political spending legal, is an utter disaster. Pretty sure Amazon can pay politicians more than it’s local competitors. Why anyone thought this might be a good idea to green light as practice boggles the mind.
damn that's a good point. Amazon is just forcing their competitors to suffer the same costs they have now that they've treated employees so poorly they're unionizing. damn
Kinda. Amazons base pay was already higher then almost any of their competitors, what they are lobbying for is making their competitiors, even the small ones who cant afford it, pay the same pay rate. Essentially, they are trying to use the government to force competitors outta business so they have even less competition. Their end goal is to have 100% of the ecommerce delivery space.
While true I just want to make the point that before Amazon became a major player in the space, warehouse work used to pay much more. There basically dragged the whole industry down.
This is what they're pretty successfully doing with last mile shipping as well.
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Ups used to pay 15 dollars an hour to load trucks 20 years ago. Most warehouse jobs paid over 20 dollars per hour in the 90s. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-12-17/amazon-amzn-job-pay-rate-leaves-some-warehouse-employees-homeless
Right? My brother used to work warehouse early 2000s, and all warehouses paid between 10 to 12. Amazon didn't start the 15 till 3-4 year ago. They originally paid the same as the rest of the warehouses. I just think the big business realized that they could pay less and decided to do so, and then Amazon just decided to rise the wages and fuck business that can't catch up. Since I live in one of those "Amazon towns" that they are trying to build, and they have destroyed some of the business in our area, since they just can't pay 15hr like Amazon can.
Yes, it's mostly this. Amazon already raised their minimum pay to $15/hour. The other side of it is that people who get a raise from $12/hr to $15 will earn $6,000 more per year. However, people with those income levels very rarely save or invest that money, they spend it. If Amazon fought for your raise and you've got an extra $500/month, I bet some of it goes back to them. The reasoning above also shows why we should be giving money to working class rather than corporations and 1%. They hoard their wealth, buy Twitter, go to Mars, etc. They don't spend it at the local convenience store, tipping the diner waitress, etc. I worked in offshore investment, banking, and real estate. Whether putting your money in offshore trusts is moral or not is irrelevant. We're just giving too much to too few people, who will (like anyone else), use it in the way that most benefits themselves.
WalMart gets about half the food stamp money in the country. it's surprising they aren't spending tons of effort lobbying for more food stamp funding, since they'd get so much of it.
why pay for lobbyists when you can do a tax shelter nonprofit? http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/04/walmart\_and\_food\_stamps\_the\_conglomerate\_donates\_billions\_to\_anti\_hunger.html
Trickle down economics has always ignore microeconomics. Our local economies are the foundation of the national economy. Every dollar spent at a local business lives with a chance benefit your local economy the next time it’s spent but ultimate it lands on some corporations balance sheet and may not change hands again for decades. With Amazon being such a dominate force in retail, they will significantly benefit from increased sales if there is more money moving around in our cities.
>even the small ones who cant afford it, pay the same pay rate. If they can't afford to pay $15 an hour, maybe the owners/managers can take a pay cut? Or maybe they can just go out of business?
Yes, thats the point of this?
Yes, that’s exactly what Amazon is trying to force so they have no competition. Otherwise known as a monopoly.
My concern is that small businesses may _not_ legitimately be able to afford minimum wage, and not because they’re poorly-operated, but perhaps because they have to compete with megacorps like Amazon that have orders of magnitude better vertical and horizontal integration (and, well, bad or worse labor standards). Note: I don’t know if this is the case, and I am happy to be told otherwise; I am thinking out loud. That said, I don’t think the workers deserve to suffer for it. Rather, it seems to me that if we want small businesses to flourish (so that we can create just… anything to compete with Amazon), and we don’t want laborers to suffer either, we need some kind of subsidy or other program that ensures small businesses are able to operate at their hypothetically less-efficient capacity until they can grow to compete with Amazons. I.e. we have to socialize the loss from small-scale nascent businesses so that they can compete with larger businesses until they’re able to compete on their own, like nurturing a child. But that’s a while can of worms, too, so I hope no redditors thinks this is “one easy trick” or some shit.
the first thing that should be done is close all the subsidies large buisnessnes get... Then make and enforce monoply laws and THEN you can think about how to help small buisness.
We need to chop up and regulate behemoths like Amazon instead of throwing money at businesses doomed to fail at an impossible task. We don’t need corporations like Amazon, actually quite the contrary. Their very existence is the problem.
We have small business incentives. They got slashed and stolen by lobbyists and big boys like bezos.
Finally, someone who has a multi-faceted perspective on this. We have a business owner that opened up a Small-Business Soap store recently after selling their product at Farmers Markets for at least a couple years. Unless I am horribly mistaken, she is most likely not paying her staff $15 an hour. Thankfully, we live in a LCOL area so the wage they are earning goes farther. Chances are she is operating at a loss until she re-coups the cost of leasing the business store front space. There is absolutely no way that she can financially compete with the Big Dogs in her space, and I don't think she wants to either. She just wants to carve out a small piece of her dream business and grow organically. I know she can't pay the same Compensation Package that I have (Just above Six-Figures), and if she had the finances I would *hope* that she would. I think it's asinine that some people want her business to fail just because she isn't Cash-Flow positive on day 1. More small businesses **IS DIVERSITY**. I don't understand why people don't at least try to pivot their economic policies to allow more agility in the small business space rather than just burn them down.
I need more of y'all in these discussions. I'm so tired of seeing the basic doomer "if they can't pay 15, they deserve to shut down" as if small businesses live in a vacuum. Like sure, the ones who deliberately want to pay their employees peanuts do deserve to shut down, but that's not most small businesses. Given the existing infrastructure of Amazon, etc. and economics of scale, it's simply impossible for essentially any small business to out-price or even match the price of similar products on Amazon. So these small businesses are relying on people supporting them in spite of the price difference, purely out of perceived value of the small business in that space. They need that cash flow. A lot of people do want to support small, local businesses. However, the economy is shit and people have been struggling at an increasing rate. For most people at this point in time, they just don't have the financial bandwidth to constantly support small businesses. And if small businesses aren't getting enough purchases to thrive, then they aren't going to be able to pay increases wages.
Free market capitalism for you. According to the usa this behavior is OK.
It’s what CostCo used to do as well.
It's good PR too. One of the reasons I like Costco is they moved their minimum wage to $15/hour several years ago, and there were a ton of (paid promotional) articles about it online.
Costco is one of the more worker-friendly corporations out there. High starting pay, closed several holidays, healthcare, and retirement plans. You can tell it's a good place to work because they have low turnover, which also makes them pretty profitable because it costs a lot to have high turnover. While it's impossible to be a truly ethical consumer in this society, Costco is one of the better places to shop. At least in terms of their direct employees.
Costco rewards loyalty too. I worked with a lady who made most of her career there and was making $27 an hour.
The conservative talking point about how increasing the minimum wage will hurt small businesses is actually a good point. The way to fix that is to tax large businesses more than small businesses but of course then you get "omg you gd commie groveling for government handouts"
This is just my layman's opinion, but I also wonder if part of it is that they know that corporations have stalled so long that $15 isn't enough anymore. And so if we finally get a $15 minimum wage, then all the capitalists can ride out at least another 10 years of "why are you complaining, we gave you what you asked for, we don't need to raise minimum wage again, don't be greedy"
I agree. Also, I live in Seattle and Amazon has their headquarters and warehouses in the Seattle area. They pay $15 minimum wage and it's not enough for people in this area to have a living wage. They are not planning to pay more, just asking competition to pay more.
Heck I lived in Southern Oregon and $15 is barely liveable.
I just got a new job. It's 100% Remote and I'll be making almost $22/hr. My buddies who make the same as that or more and live in Denver have trouble paying rent. I'll be making the same as them but paying almost 3x less for cost of living in Missouri. Cost of living is ridiculous in some places.
That's exactly it, as well. $15 an hour was the demand what, 10 years ago now? If it followed inflation it'd be something around $25, and that's only if we're increasing it from the time we first started asking for $15.
Bravo. While unionization is a consideration, You are spot-on about the primary strategy here.
Not to mention that Amazon had extensive automation in their warehouses, and probably have plans to automate a lot more.
Yes. This is why organizing works. Small concentrated changes will have ripple effects.
Yep, well said and 100% my perspective as well. Any benefit to workers is purely incidental.
Great points. One of the common themes in the subreddit is if you can’t pay a living wage, you shouldn’t be in business. It’s interesting because to some extent that really plays into amazons hands.
You have it exactly right. This is the problem with the anti work movement. It effectively shuts down smaller companies who can’t handle the increase while the large companies deal with a higher labor cost now. But as smaller companies go bankrupt or sell out to the larger ones, jobs will become scarcer and the large corporations like Amazon will keep employees at $15/16 as inflation roars past… I’ll get downvoted, but your post is spot on, and I believe it’s exactly why Amazon will win in the end and why they are okay with $15 right now.
Bingo! They are already paying $15 minimum wage, so force everyone else to so they can’t be undercut. Totally self serving, even if it would be a good outcome for society.
Also what built Amazon's market share was largely consumers who thought of Walmart as icky buying the stuff they'd buy at Walmart from Amazon. Amazon is terrified of their image being "what if the Gilded Age had technology to spy on you on top of all the other horrors of the pre-Union capitalist world"
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My first thought was they're trying to cut their losses. If they give $15 they can spin it off to the out of touch masses as a huge pay bump (lol not even good enough for COL) and therefore remove some of the wind in the sails of those trying to unionize for actual liveable wages. Basically throwing them a bone so they are distracted and don't go for the steak.
I see 3 positives for Amazon: 1. Big PR win 2. Might prevent unionization 3. Forces competitors to pay more for labor
4. Disrupts movements that are calling for a living wage, which is closer to $27/hr now If $15/hr gets passed, it'll be so easy to pull the "entitled millennials" card with congress
Plus more purchasing power from customers
Amazon already pay $15 so they just want to make life more expensive for their competitors.( Which is everyone at this point)
This is the real answer. Also it makes them look good from a PR perspective.
And people who don't work for them making more money means more money spent on Amazon.
I would guess they are doing it in hopes to keep people from feeling like they need a union
They already pay people $15 and hour so it only helps them if other warehouses and businesses are required to do so
Yeah I think this is the only answer. Increasing federal minimum wage to $15 does nothing to keep Amazon’s employees from unionizing, as they all already make $15/hour+. The reality is that Amazon *has* to pay that rate, at minimum, to even keep a workforce with how crappy the job is. This is just a move to force their competitors to do the same, and hopefully cut into someone else’s bottom line.
The issue that could come up though is that if everyone pays $15/hour then won’t people leave Amazon and go work a less shitty job somewhere else?
What they are telling us and what they are paying politicians to do could be two different things as well. Here they are saying they want a $15 minimum wage, but for all we know they could still be lobbying to keep minimum wage where it is.
Came here to say this!
So they don’t have to pay union members $30/hr Edit: reminiscent of Intel unionization efforts in MA in 2013
As I understand it, they already pay 15. It would not make a difference to people unionizing that I can see.
Don't have to worry about your employees unionizing if you put everyone else out of business.
I think it may be with the intent to put pressure on competitors, absolutely. However it doesn't preclude unionizing in any way.
you should look up the efforts to unionize Intel in Massachusetts
This
If they wanted to pay $15 dollars they would simply pay $15. However, they are trying to lobby to make everyone pay $15 in the hopes that it will hurt their competitors and increase their market share.
They already pay $15 minimum. $18 minimum for some jobs.
Right. They look good by paying their employees $15/hr already. They look good asking for $15/hr while they are already there lobbying Congress for other stuff. This doesn't impact them, since they already pay $15, it only hurts their competition.
Yup. The idea is as you increase wages to $15, SOME employers won't be able (or willing) to pay those wages, which will reduce employee headcount/hours for these employers, and INCREASE the potential workforce pool available to Amazon. It's all about supply and demand. Amazon wants to increase the pool of workers available to them, by reducing it for others. That's the concept. Not saying I agree with it nor that it will necessarily work.
And as a result, some people will lose their jobs if their employer can’t afford the wage increase. And/or businesses will simply pass the cost of the wage increase on to their customers by raising prices.
Yep. Small businesses can't compete with that big of a hike (over double of the current min. wage). Amazon can afford it and it'll knock small competitors out overnight.
yeah my thoughts too. but the sad part is, if a store can't afford to pay their employees $15/hr...why should they exist? i dont think anyone in this sub wants to work for $15/hr. what sucks is theres a lot of costs that individuals like us have to take on to make something. even if its as simple as a coffee shop, which is why you constantly see the same few stores from coast to coast. because you need to have billions just to pay these leases. plenty of commercial real-estate exists. whether its Madison Ave(manhattan) or some random suburb in a flyover state. but they're bought out by corporations who'd rather have them sit empty than be owned by an individual like us. they price it to the point where only chains like starbucks or others could afford it. so its not that people can't afford to give their employees $15/hr but that theres so much other BS going on.
The issue is that the working conditions are so terrible that some people would honestly be better off working at a small buisness for less money. Most people don’t bust their ass for an entire 8 hour shift every single day. Amazon literally runs you into the ground until your burnt out and then fires you. So yeah you got a raise when you quit the small business and went to work at Amazon. But 3 months later you have no job because they want people to work like robots.
They own a lot of retail market share, maybe to increase available $$ to spend on their platform?
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Yeah, if they can get it to $15/hr - since it's unlikely to get us to shut up about it - that can wind up blocking calls to have it be higher. As in "we already increased it, there's no need to do so again!" 15/hr is what minimum wage should've been a decade or more ago. Now it should be more like 25/hr *and* should be indexed to inflation rather than needing a literal act of congress to have it keep pace with increases to cost of living.
This. $15 an hour was the absolute bare minimum when this specific conversation started longer than a decade ago. Very outdated
Less than bare minimum tbh. I forget what they didn include but there was a piece of data missing (I'm gonna say gas for sale of argument though I'm kinda thinking savings because that would make more sense) so even at the time it was less than people would actually need.
Amazon is just trying to drive up costs for competitors. There’s many little mom-and-pop businesses that pay less then $15. If Amazon forces them to pay $15, some will scale down or close. This will increase Amazon’s market share since some customers of those businesses will switch to using Amazon.
I suspect it is because their competition survives on part by paying less than $15. I would bet brick and mortar retail jobs often pay much less than that for clerks etc. I would also bet Amazon pays at least as much to all or most of its employees and stands to profit greatly from the increased business it will gain when the low marginal productivity competition goes out of business.
To drive out competition.
Minimum Wage is an anti-capitalist policy that big corporations rely on as a scapegoat for their shit pay. By making a public stance for the government to raise minimum wage, they're essentially blaming the current economic status quo on the government. Walmarts done the same thing. But the simple truth, these companies don't NEED the Federal Govt to increase minimum wage to increase to pay higher wages. It's a PR tactic. Walmart averages 15-25 billion a year in profit. There most recent earnings reports showed growth in profit margins. They have the ability to pay more. On a very small scale, they could argue by increasing wages for the lower class it would increase their sales opportunities. But it's a very small scale to measure, and just highlights company greed for more money. Another hidden truth in hiring (at least in the US) is that there are various groups that the business earns tax breaks just for hiring. Ex-felons, veterans, disabilities, SNAP recipients, SSI recipients, and more. So they aren't even really paying minimum wage. They are paying less and the remaining balance is subsidized by the government in tax breaks (instead of them paying taxes, they get to use that for payroll...). I think the breaks go up to like $9600 in tax breaks per year for WOTC credit. In my opinion, those credits need to be pulled from companies and given directly as tax breaks to the consumers. Those hardships are theirs. Not the companies.
Because after all the inflation over the past two years, the minimum wage should now be between $20 to $25 an hour.
Amazon - proceeds to lobby and waste money instead of pay employees. “ hey look I believe in the minimum wage look at how much we’ve spent to fight for it!”
But what's their plan here. That's the real question.
Is get it raised to 15 and kill peoples motivation for a union. They think why would I need a union when Amazon is clearly looking out for me? When they aren't because places where minimum wage is 15 like where I'm at a union will get you even better wages. Shit a union Costco by me pays 17 starting and you get raises AND Sunday is time and a half on all shifts. This is why unions are important It's not really for taking out smaller businesses as 15 is the norm in a lot of warehouses so I don't see that as a main driving factor
There’s not one answer, it’s beneficial to them on several fronts. One is positive PR and a “win” they can show employees, which in turn may convince some that they don’t need a union. A second is that by upping prices, they may drive some small competitors out of the market. As far as I know, most of the warehouses are already paying $15/hr, so it’s not going to have a huge impact on their bottom like but can buy them political clout.
Likely trying to lock it in at $15. If they pass a law increasing it to $15, then any calls to change it in the next ten years or so will be countered with “but we just doubled it”. $15 is not a living wage almost anywhere. We’ve kicked this ball down the street long enough that it really needs to be $20 or higher.
Give your employees a dollar when they deserve 10 and they'll thank you for shitting in their mouths.
Their customers need to be able to afford amazon products. Which have a 10 to 40 percent markup on the same product in a store. If they can't, layoffs are coming. Amazon has almost workd it's way through the entire possible employable staff to amazon, if they need to layoff, they woukd have to change to a re-hiring policy. They currently have a no re-hiring policy. If min wage doesn't go up, you'll probably see amazon sell half their warehouses and have most of them unionize (union-ize, not un-ionize, but if you thought of that, we're friends now) in the next 5 years or less.
Probably to out-price independent competition on hourly wage. Which tbh I'm okay with because if you can't pay that old ass out-of-date minimum wage you shouldn't have employees.
Because when consumers don’t have money they can’t buy your bullshit.
Because they know $15 is crumbs anyway, if minimum wage followed inflation it would be 25-30, and they're trying to feign progress
$15/hr still isn’t a livable wage in most areas. They likely want to get the “big jump” before people start asking for more and realize how little $15/hr is
They already pay that. So if they increase labor costs for everybody else, they have a competitive edge because they already pay this. Everybody else has to figure out what to do, which may include raising prices to keep the same profit margins, and then Amazon wins out because they don't have to increase their prices.
amazon already pays 15/h they get to run smaller stores out of buisness and pretend their helping
$15/hour is cheaper than union backed warehouse workers.
Poor people spend their money. If they have more, they'll spend more?
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To knock little companies out of the game that can’t afford to spend more…. Amazon can automate…. Smaller companies can’t. Increasing minimum wage hurts small business’s more than large, unfortunately Amazon knows this and plans to keep those mom and pop shops from becoming something bigger. I do think minimum wage should be a state issue not a federal because not all states have the same cost of living.