[harryh]

Amazon earns a lot of money from quite a few things that have nothing to do with warehouse workers. In particular I have read that half their profits come from AWS. I don't think that is enough data to support your claim.

A better set of numbers to look at might be Walmarts (more of a pure retail company). They make maybe 10B in profit per year (it varies a little) with 2M workers. That's $5,000 per worker which isn't much wiggle room.

[mikeash]

Money is fungible. Amazon can afford to pay better. The only data you need to know that is what I gave.

You’re giving a reason why they might not want to. I don’t think anyone here is arguing that they want to. If they wanted to, they would be doing it already.

[fuzz4lyfe]

So they are to run at a loss? Why not simply close down the warehouses and liberate these poor people from these terrible jobs?

[mikeash]

Who said anything about running at a loss? I’m just stating that they can pay more by taking less of a profit, “the market” doesn’t stop them.

[fuzz4lyfe]

They only make $5000 per worker per year or so, given that the stock market has consistent returns of about 7% lately it's getting to the point that it would be better to put that money there was opposed to paying workers with it for such small returns.

[mikeash]

$11 billion divided by 650,000 workers isn’t $5,000.

In any case, the point is that they can pay more. You can quibble over the amount. You can argue about whether or not they should. But they can, in the same way that I can buy an entire truck full of peaches if I decided that would be a good idea.

[fuzz4lyfe]

We are back at run the warehouses at a loss. The profits from AWS have nothing to do with the guys packing boxes and moving the profits from there to them is running it at a loss.