And, of course, some folks may have a good experience even while others do not.

Not at this time of the year. If something doesn't have a pre Christmas delivery, it won't be bought in many cases. Or even if it does, people may hear about the strike and not risk it.

Amazon is amazingly well run.

The only real solution is to become skilled workers. Which, almost ironically, is to do the thing the company threatens to do -- find a way to automate work like this, so the people working at the warehouse are robotics technicians etc.

Have you been to a fast food joint lately? Even at peak traffic they have maybe three people working when they used to have 7-10. Now you walk in and you have to order from the kiosk, which is literally the iPhone app on a vertical touch screen. You don't even talk to a human until they hand you the food.

Lots of Amazon's stock would be easier, but Amazon also has a greater range of sizes.

The problem is, our society isn't ready for that shift, not even close. Employment opportunities for the low skilled have all but gone down the drain - there is a reason why Walmart, Amazon and the other usual suspects love to set up shop in devastated communities: they have a captive audience that has no other realistic opportunities for gainful employment and thus is much, much less likely to resist when faced with exploitative and/or abusive conditions.

Warehouse work and logistics in general is the last employment opportunity many of these people have, and while it being replaced by robots may be better for society as a whole (if one follows the belief that all work should be done by machines so that humans can follow their individual interests), just standing by idling around while the markets enforce the shift is going to be a political disaster.

There are very few jobs that actually pay well in America nowadays, and the ones that do tend to be congregated in few geographical areas and require extensive schooling.

The vast majority of Americans deserve more money.

Also check your priors, there are many musicians that do not complain about piracy and even partake in it (see Trent Reznor being part of oink/what, or Dead Kennedys encouraging people to record music on their tapes). I know many musicians that would upload their music on private trackers, regardless of what their label wanted or said.

$20/hr is about $40k/yr. Using 30% towards housing, that means they can only denote $12/yr to housing, or $1k/month. At current interest rates, that translates to a $150,000 house.

What can you get for $150? There's nothing in any area I've looked that was actually habitable ever since the government's COVID debacle.

I don't think it's worth considering the comparison.

But sure, maybe working at a distribution center pays well enough where you're located. Likely that's not the case where these strikes are happening. It's expensive out there.

Also, what you wrote gives the impression of "I've got mine already so I don't care what happens to you."

These people are just doing what they have to do to survive. If anything, going on strike a truly desparate move. Insinuating that they are childishing in doing so (as if they feel they "deserve a pony") on the other hand, seems simply -- snide.

You're going to have a bad time if you plan your strike at the most opportune time for your company.

Whether or not striking is good for society is a separate discussion, but striking when you have the most leverage over your company makes the most sense for those striking to get what they want.

Because they don't have the same unlimited inventory capacity, local stores have to put at least some effort into selling products with some base level of quality and focusing on the products most likely to sell in each category. Local stores are by no means perfect here, but they're vastly better than Amazon in this regard. And it's especially important because finding good independent product reviews on the internet these days is also a challenge, and even where they exist they're not reviewing whatever no-name Chinese brand Amazon is selling anyways.

If a global business decides to just toss all the plastic it uses it in its backyard you'll never notice because it's 2000 miles away. If Amazon decides to treat their workers unfairly, you'll never notice. But you'll notice if a local business does it because you'll be walking in there every day. There's a level of accountability.

When you buy from a non local business, that money leaves your towns microeconomy.

It’s part of why dollar stores destroy low income areas.

A few reasons:

- market diversity matters, and we have a more functional market with many smaller actors

- similarly, a smaller local actor is more accountable for their behavior

- efficiency comes mostly from cutting things, some of which mattered (eg, individual buyers at companies do more due diligence on the product than Amazon)

- it’s better that every community have a local moderately rich person than one super rich person nationally, eg, in terms of charity to your community

- politics remains local and hence tractable

- smaller organizations have less of a “frozen middle”, which creates numerous problems with national scale organizations

There’s probably more reasons if I really stopped to think about it.

For some value of "more efficiently". I mean if the most efficient way to work is to have delivery drivers pee in a bottle and warehouse workers develop RSIs, who am I to complain? Someone else's dignity is a small price to pay in order to get a 3% rebate on some commodity.

This is more important for businesses that produce and capture a larger amount of value, like locally owned restaurants vs corporate owned chains, but any little bit helps at least a little.

(Of course if you're a rootless corporate mercenary who goes wherever work takes you, with no long-term stake in the place you live, then it doesn't matter at all.)

* Inefficiency

* Lack of options

* Stupid business practices uncritically continued

See https://asteriskmag.com/issues/07/want-growth-kill-small-bus...

On the globalist/efficient extreme in the USA, for example, you have the problems of:

* Economic dependence on large, national players that can leave at any time

* Business proprietors feel no social responsibility to your community because they do not live there and interact with locals

* Little power in deciding what products businesses offer

* Profits enriching another place rather than your own place

I don't want either of these.

Yes. That generates sales taxes. That generates property taxes. That pays for insurance. That pays for upkeep which is hopefully provided by a local contractor. Where this cycle repeats.

> and getting "too" rich? ie dislike of big corporations?

Yes. The money actually doesn't bother me, it's the access to unrestrained political influence it buys you, and big corporations monopolize labor pools and result in worse outcomes for working conditions and wages. Where this story starts.

What you want to support are:

- local retailers offer better jobs, and often better benefits. The work you do stocking at Menards is much better than sorting boxes at Amazon

- support local repair vs repurchasing. This cuts down on the upstream demand and does wonders for local small-business economies. And again, provides better jobs than sorting boxes.

- Efficiency is great! But what is Amazon efficient at? They have maximized the speed and convenience of delivery. Once stated that way it's obvious there must be tradeoffs. One of those tradeoffs is the shit work. In one dist center, a guys entire job was to wheel odd shaped boxes from one side of a warehouse to another. Whenever you order a big or weirdly shaped box, that guy moved it. Even he hates that job. It's meaningless, non social, provides no transferrable skills.

- ultimately what your parents were talking about is how one chooses to shape their local economy and jobs market. I want to buy from companies that I would want my friends and family to work for.

But yeah, I buy from Amazon all the time too.

The local store pays their taxes — local and national taxes. Amazon is big enough to evade these, or where possible, pay small amounts only in Luxembourg, Delaware etc.

I have to say though I have evolved a bit in this perspective as I've come to realize that these small business owners can be every bit as greedy or even more. Especially there are a lot who are just fundamentally incompetent at business and try to make up the difference by extracting it from their employees, willfully ignoring labor laws in ways a large company would not dare. A large company is a big target surrounded by people who want a piece of the action and often must tread carefully as a result.

I've personally never worked in such a position, but I have heard absolutely crazy stories from people who have, things like demanding that commission only sales people come in hours early to do unpaid work like cleaning unrelated to their job title, "fining" people $75 for checking their phone while "on the clock" (again in a commission only job), constantly helping themselves to their employees paycheck finding things to "charge" them for, and just generally being a menace and treating employees like they personally owned them. Their ego and sense of entitlement go completely wild. The owners I have known personally will brag about cheating on their taxes while railing against the government, running an atrociously inefficient business that they talk about as if it's some sort of charity. In many cities there's a whole good old boy network type system in place that's no less corrupt and ugly than whatever you want to say about companies like Amazon.

That’s such an odd way to paint it.

When people live in a system with millions of quettallionaires and the bilion left are mere millionaires where 1 unit of currency is enough to buy the best meal in town with all towns in the world equally provided in services, the system won’t see much strikes happening soon.

When people live in a system where a small cake is growing at a slow rate and a few hundreds people are cornering always more of it at an accelerating rate, all the more when the extraction rate of the cake is known to exceed the cake regeneration rate, the system is well on its road for repeated strikes or even bloody social movements.

Ok, these allegories are two possible points in a spectrum. Which scenario is most likely to be closest to the world as its perceived by most people out there?

People don’t love or hate big corporations and riches out of the blue. If there are given room out of the vivid feeling that their life is a day to day struggle to survive, most people can perfectly demonstrate nuances in their judgment.

Xyltech is also in Houston, and they don't have a typical retail operation, but you can place an order and pick it up.

Polymaker has a Houston warehouse, and while you can't pick it up, a number of SKUs actually ship from there.

Often I buy bulk purchases of Sunlu from Aliexpress. Usually takes about 8 days to get to me, but at around $11/KG for PLA+, it's a great price.

I do not patronize Amazon. But f I did, I would pick a margin - let's say 20% - and resolve to buy locally when the price is at least that close to the online price.

As a purely-theoretical thought experiment, this may be true.

As a blanket statement about prices in the real world, this is not correct.

There are many stores around me here in San Francisco who absolutely do have prices that are close to (and sometimes lower than) "e-tailer" prices. If stores in SF can meet or beat "e-tailer" prices, I find it hard to believe that stores in Bum-fuck Nowhere, USA can't ever do the same.

Every local business should be a "local online business" as you suggest. But most business owners don't give a fuck and are happy to see Amazon crush them. Why?

I used to try to support local business, but frankly it's such a waste of time to go looking for products that they never have in stock, ward off annoying salesmen who never have a clue if you actually need help, and dealing with bad return policies. The price difference is but icing on the cake.

You have a a large fleet of 18 wheelers, delivery vans and forklifts. Then the warehouses that go into making the supply chain work.

The US suburbs don't really have what I would call "local stores," just big, well known corporate stores. So, when making the choice of where to buy Product X, my options are giving my money to Best Buy, Walmart, Ikea, Kroger, etc...or Jeff Bezos, whose online empire offers slightly more convenience than the others because I don't have to drive if I can wait a day or two.

There's no family-owned businesses to hurt here because they were all chased out by the Big Box stores years ago. Heck, I remember when they filled in the pond I learned to fish in as a kid just to put up that Walmart. Sure, Amazon can be held up as contributing toward the death of the small business, but those wheels were spinning long before Bezos was selling books out of a garage or whatever mythology we want to accept.

I don't like Amazon. I don't like the idea of one entity having that much influence and control over my consumer habits. I don't like that the business model is just drop-shipping in a trenchcoat of digital services. I don't like that their workers are basically treated as third-world labor.

But I do have to admit that they have won the game and as a result, I have to use them. I wish it were otherwise, but we're past the point of no return, on that. We all gave them permission for this to happen by patronizing it for years, even down to the mistreated workers who keep applying for those jobs knowing full well Amazon's employment reputation. Amazon did not kill small business. Consumers did, ever suckered by savings and convenience.

You are correct, but I don't like this idiom. Your point would come across better if it wasn't delivered in a patronisation sandwich.

You buy it cheaper but you are generating a debt, it's like buying on credit: somewhere someone is being exploited or a natural resource is being overexploited, and you will pay for it in the future, with a poorer environment socially, economically and naturally.

Everything comes back. I once read that I don't know which tribe made decisions that were good for the next 7 generations, well, buying on amazon is a decision that is not good even for the current generation, you will probably see the consequences in your own or your children's life.

It has made life worse in small but tangible, concrete ways. I don't need it that fast, probably neither do you. You can blame enforcement or the individual drivers or whatever but I think that's a cop out. Amazon demands efficiency of its drivers, this is what efficiency looks like.

I was even able to get another 30% off an already sale price for a Kindle because my old one (>5 years) died, and they couldn't fix it.

Not justifying any particular actions on their part, but their customer service has been above and beyond and other major retailer I've interacted with.

But that's increasingly offset by an inability to find quality products.

Makes dumping what would otherwise be useful goods into landfills 10x easier*

This is probably by design, but I don’t return a whole lot.

What's ironic is we still make purchases on Amazon that don't require their fast shipping. We're just conditioned to expect it. I'm thinking TVs, books, project supplies, art, etc.

My Prime membership ended 3 years ago. These days I just put items in the cart, and place order whenever it reaches $35. If I need an item in a hurry -- which rarely happens -- I go to a store to buy it.

This barely affected me, and I ended up with much fewer impulse purchases.

What's funny though is that the "standard" delivery often takes 5 calendar days. But AliExpress shipments can take as few as 8 calendar days. I ended up spending even less -- well, if the items are manufactured in China, why not just order on AliExpress where you get the same/similar items and pay less.

Anybody else? I have no idea how long it'll take them to process my order, how long it takes for it to be processed by DHL/DPD/GLS and how long the actual delivery will take.

Then again I don't have a business that relies on things getting to me fast. I'm just a guy who buys crap online for myself and my family. If I'm getting a book or some electronic doodad it rarely matters to me if I get it tomorrow or in 10 days.

For most Amazon non-business shoppers is getting stuff delivered quickly really an important consideration? I've always assumed that fast shipping, and the importance that Amazon places on it, was at least partly because of their desire for rapid cash flow. That fast shipping was more instituted because of Amazon's accounting needs than because most customers actually needed it. Maybe I'm wrong. It would be nice to hear people's informed opinions on this.

Most websites won't even give you a realistic shipping time (major brands might but the long-tail of online merchants don't). They might say "2-3 day shipping" but that's how long it takes after they ship it, sometimes it can take up a week before they actually ship it. It means than if I buy from anyone but a massive retailer I am rolling the dice on if I'll get something in 2 days or 2+ weeks. Some things can wait 2 weeks but when I'm moving between my house and my parent's house (I visit often) it's really hard to remember "2 weeks before I move locations I need to start directing packages at the other location". The two locations are 3hrs+ apart so I can't just pop over and pick up something sent to the other place.

And you still get free shipping over $35 which covers most anything else.

Prime is too heavily tied to video now, which is a $0 value for me.

I just don't ever have the problems with Amazon that people complain about online.

For a lot of other stuff, it feels like they've lost their edge on price and shipping.

Often my main reason for using Amazon is that it reduces the friction associated with buying for more retailers. For example worrying about data breaches, being put on spam email lists, etc.

Not sure about OP, but for me it's about convenience. My pet peeve is credit card forms. Do you know what % of websites I've used that have at least minorly broken credit card forms? It's literally 99%.

Random common issues that are annoying but can be fixed:

- autocomplete doesn't work at all

- autocomplete only fills in half the fields

- autocomplete only fills in 1 field at a time

- autocomplete doesn't interact correctly with the rich widgets they provided for date picking or zip code

- autocomplete doesn't play well with js validation, which is only on callbacks for typing. Now I have to go backspace and re-insert the last character of every field so it doesn't think it's blank

- my town name has a ' in it. complete fucking crapshoot on whether sites DEMAND or HATE the '.

Common issues that are complete fucking messes that can't be fixed:

- javascript between fields fights over edits between them and I can't get the form simultaneously filled out correctly

- rendering issues on mobile leaving fields not visible

- autocomplete doesn't work and I've for some reason forgotten my CVV again and don't want to go get my wallet

I could go on and on. It's amazing how hard it is to get this right and how obviously nobody tests the flow where PEOPLE GIVE THEM MONEY which as I understand it is the primary purpose of these places.

It's enough of a pain in the ass that most people would rather not deal with it at all. An extra layer of security to help it not happen is a very nice benefit.

No, but you're still paying for it.

Let's say you're a small EU-based merchant accepting payment for international orders via Stripe. An incoming iDEAL payment costs €0.30 / transaction. An incoming credit card payment? €0.25 / transaction, plus 2.5% of the transaction value. On top of that, you as merchant are charged €20 for every chargeback! And those additional costs are of course passed on to the customers because they will raise all prices by 2.5% to make up for it.

There is no free lunch. You are implicitly buying fraud insurance on every order and paying 2.5% for it.

It feels like this is part of a larger dynamic where companies are basically arbitraging consumers' feeling bad about waste and environmental destruction to increase their own bottom line. Like Target is abjectly terrible at packing items in boxes, such that things often get crushed in shipping. So then you're left with the dynamic of either complaining and accepting that return/resend creates a bunch more waste, or just shrugging off the damage they've caused (willfully, at this point). Now that I've seen the pattern, I just call that bluff too.

One of the things you lose from online shopping is sizing. Shoes run in different sizes, lengths, widths. How do you suggest you order shoes to find the right size if shopping online?

There are some audible-only titles, which is frustrating.

Instead, you had situations such as the type compositors unions bargaining for sinecures for their members, rather than participating in, and informing the usage of the new systems, contributing to a decade of ugly "Desktop DTP".

On-going automation should reduce the total number of hours which humans need to work to ensure that humanity is housed, clothed, fed, &c. --- why aren't we talking about reducing the workweek? See recent story in Tokyo:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42342203

Or, if the U.S. gathered together all the money used for Disability, SSI, WIC, Unemployment, Welfare, Social Security &c. _and_ their administration and overhead, there would be a significant amount of money --- would that be sufficient to fund a Universal Basic Income?

Developers obviously have no direct impact on labor conditions of the warehouse workers. However, all the time-tracking, logistical optimizations, employee monitoring systems, etc. that enable Amazon to squeeze every bit of efficacy and profit out of these warehouse workers had to come from somewhere/someone.

I believe by contributing to companies that are as highly unethical as Amazon, developers are supporting entities that enforce and perpetuate such awful labor practices conditions. I am not assigning personal blame to any developer directly, but I do believe that as developers we need to be more considerate of the downstream ethical impacts that our work may have on others.

If a line of reasoning can equally justify all the people who pushed opioids onto Americans, then it’s not a good one.