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by lupire 1532 days ago
Jeff Bezos's $200B says he's not paying the most he can while still surviving in business.
1 comments

Let's do some math for fun. Amazon now employs about a million workers in the US. Let's naively assume 3/4 of them work in warehouses and delivery as opposed to corporate. Let's also assume they work, on average, 2000 hours a year (roughly full-time). For Amazon to raise those wages by $1/hr (or lower efficiency demands by ~7%) it would cost them around $1.5B every year.

Now, you're probably thinking that's chump change compared to Amazon's profits, but fun fact: Amazon's online sales segment doesn't make much profit. In fact, it lost $200M in Q4 [1]. So you basically want Amazon to either go deeply in the red, or else they have to raise prices on products to also raise worker wages.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/04/amazons-profit-engines-are-h...

Amazon doesn’t lose money with what you’re saying. They are moving money around. We need to stop trusting wildly rich and powerful people and corporations so much.
If it was really losing $800M/year why would they keep it running at all? Could this be "creative accounting"?