[hmaxwell]

I won't touch any of amazon's products with a 10ft pole because of the way they treat their warehouse workers. Making their warehouse employees pee in bottles to make their metrics or risk being fired, that's just on a whole new level of extracting every joule of work out of a human being.

[scruple]

I agree with you but that's not unique to Amazon and nor is it a modern problem. More than 20 years ago, I was pissing in empty bottles next to trucks to make my quotas when throwing boxes for FedEx when I was in university. Ditto when I threw boxes at an Abercrombie & Fitch / Hollister distribution warehouse in university. Same story when I worked construction jobs. Same story when I was a teenager, picking corn and beans by hand in the fields near where I grew up. In fact, of the over a dozen manual labor jobs I've had in my life, the only one where I had convenient and frequent access to a restroom facility was a Thomson Consumer Electronics glass factory.

[pengaru]

It's been surprising to see how much better people tend to view Amazon vs. Walmart when Amazon is just the next iteration of megacorp retail consolidation in the same vein with an increasingly horrible record of employee exploitation and abuse.

[rchaud]

That's because we've had a good 15 years of tweets and articles from tech luminaries and op-ed writers that used their shopping experience at Amazon as a stick to beat Walmart with. For the most part, those thought pieces have always been written by white-collar people who had no idea of the human toll that two-day shipping takes.

Their entire experience w/ Amazon starts at the website and ends with the brown box with the smile on it.

[me_me_me]

When even one cent difference in cost equals millions in profit, its much easier to pretend you are dealing with numbers and not people.

I am not defending anyone only pointing out that maybe we shouldn't have entities so big that dissociation of mid to high level management decision's to reality is so easy. Where guilt and responsibility is pushed down the ladder on daily basis.

[m1gu3l]

fair but wildly off-topic.

[pengaru]

Off-topic I'll give you, but wildly?

That strikes me as wildly hyperbolic.

[VWWHFSfQ]

no no the topic of this post is "amazon bad"

[sn_master]

amazon technical != amazon retail

and the conditions have only been improving, and with more robots, the number of warehouse workers will only keep getting less. drivers on the other hand is a different story..