[dolni]

The fine doesn't even amount to a slap on the wrist.

It's like if someone stole $1000 worth of merchandise from a store and the only punishment is a $1000 fine... and you get to keep what you stole.

Why be law abiding when you could break the law and potentially make more money? You'd have to be stupid to be law abiding in a system like that.

[Aurornis]

> It's like if someone stole $1000 worth of merchandise from a store and the only punishment is a $1000 fine... and you get to keep what you stole.

No, it's not like that at all. The fine was for two specific locations and it was for not disclosing specific quotas in writing. Drawing analogies to a person stealing from a store doesn't make sense.

The fine was likely calculated to offset any potential gains they may have made by failing to disclose quotas, whatever that may be. So again, your analogy about getting to keep what you stole doesn't make sense.

Basically none of these analogies or proportionality arguments in this thread make sense at all. I suspect half of the reason is that nobody read past the headline far enough to realize that it was for two specific locations, not for Amazon the entire giant business. The people trying to use Amazon's total earnings across all business units across all locations as part of their argument are extremely misleading.

[zamadatix]

"The fine was likely calculated to offset any potential gains they may have made by failing to disclose quotas" sounds an awful lot like what I got out of the analogy made by GP. I.e. it wasn't about saying it was literal theft of goods but that the risk is no greater than the reward and so the worst case return on breaking the rule is you're back to where you would have been had it been followed.

Similarly people referencing Amazon's total earnings aren't necessarily trying to be misleading about how many locations this occurred at or ignorant of more than just the article's headline (some are though, this is always true in a large discussion). Typically said people are just frustrated with all the above and would like to see much higher fines in this kind of scenario so the overall business cares more.

I'm not saying you should necessarily agree with those stances or conclusions, I don't completely myself, but it should take a bit more than what you wrote to brush everyone off wholesale like that.

[chefandy]

Well, if you have an unethical profitable company-wide policy that's illegal in many jurisdictions that is punished by merely trying to offset your gains from what's provable, and you're unlikely to be prosecuted everywhere it's illegal, it's still a huge net gain for a company to break the law. The idea behind fines being large enough to make a company really hurt is they're discouraging some MBA sitting down and figuring out that violating [labor/environmental/financial/etc] regulations designed to protect the public's interests are actually more profitable than the punishment, so the appropriate business decision is to ignore the law.

[nwienert]

On a more general note, fines need to be something like 5-10x of the benefit, not 1-2x. Of course the gov has limited resources, limited ability to win trials, etc, so they need to be far beyond just compensation.

[JumpCrisscross]

> fines need to be something like 5-10x of the benefit, not 1-2x

There is zero chance Amazon was saving more than $1mm at these two warehouses from hiding quotas since the law went into effect. We’re already at 5x+ (most likely 10x+) benefit before considering damages.

[chefandy]

My back-of-the-napkin math: Amazon warehouses run 24/7, so a million divided by 365 is $2740 per day, which turns out to about $114 per hour. Amazon warehouses employ about 1500 people (even though SoCal warehouses probably employ more.)

I would be absolutely gobsmacked if they saved that little.

[cool_dude85]

I'd be interested to see what labor costs are at these facilities. I could easily buy that, if they rightfully disclosed the quotas they put people under, they would need to pay significantly more in order to attract and retain workers. Maybe 10% - 20% more, including taxes and benefits?

[seanmcdirmid]

Is this why Europe fines American companies based only on their global income? Like, hey you violated this privacy thing in the EU, and you made a lot of money outside of the EU, so give us a few billion.

[Mo3]

Surely the fines will become exponentially bigger every time they are caught doing the same, right?

[erikaww]

They’ll learn to cover their tracks better

[DaoVeles]

Yep, every time someone is defeated they can learn one of two lessons. How not to do it again OR how to not get caught again.

[6510]

We will keep the secret quotas secret from hereforth.

[giuseppe_petri]

Not... double secret quotas!

[fwungy]

From the politicians they funded?

[coldtea]

LOL, doubt it

[darth_avocado]

It’s actually more like:

You stole $1000 and if you are caught, your fine is $10.

[6510]

No it is more like:

You stole $1000 from me and now you have to pay $10 to someone else.

[refurb]

Not really.

If their revenue was $100M from breaking the law, but the margins were only 1%, then they profited $1M.

So a $5.9M fine would have been almost 6x the benefit.

[rahimnathwani]

  It's like if someone stole $1000 worth of merchandise from a store and the only punishment is a $1000 fine... and you get to keep what you stole.

Not the best analogy... In San Francisco if you steal $950 worth of merchandise from a store, there is no fine or punishment, and you get to keep what you stole.

[bee_rider]

Would you say that’s a good thing or a bad thing? If you think it is a bad thing, then it seems like a fitting analogy, right?

[rahimnathwani]

If GP's point is about the justice system in general, then yes. If GP's point is about this fine in particular, or about how big corporations are treated in general, then it's a poor analogy.