This article is written by the NYT.
What person who works for Google or Facebook or Microsoft or Apple or Target calls themselves Googleonian.
Imo, reading this guy’s response felt like reading something someone in a cult would write.
I just get creepy vibes from it.
Is Amazon making any profits yet? The cost for delivering all their stuff has to be unbelievably expensive part of their operations. USPS, UPS, Fed Ex, and whoever else Amazon uses…they aren’t delivering Amazon’s stuff for free.
Ok, I just read the LinkedIn response and re-read the NYT piece. Take a bunch of former employees and what will you get? A snapshot of the company as it stood a couple or more years ago when they left. Things change. People tend to remember the extremes. One horrible boss in one of the many divisions of a sudden becomes the face of the entire company. People have biases. The reality is that Amazon is neither the draconian regime nor a coddling environment. It is focused on efficiency, because the customer demands it. Remember the outcry about Amazon raising its Prime membership fees?
Lizard - the super profitable thing that Amazon does flies under the radar…
“Amazon had a good quarter, squeezing an unexpected $92 million profit out of $23.18 billion in revenue. But the picture for its cloud division Amazon Web Services was even better: a $391 million profit based on $1.82 billion in revenue.Jul 23, 2015”
$395/$1820 is very impressive.
I’m an Amazon vendor. The system is challenging, to say the least. And, what they do with sales data deserves an investigation. We have sold thousands of a $45 item over the past few years, by including it in the FBA (fulfillment by Amazon program), where we pre-ship to an Amazon warehouse and they ship it out. They have recently cut all Amazon vendors out of FBA for this item. They are purchasing it directly from the source, and undercutting the vendors who identified the products to sell, made the sales, and created the sales data for them.
On the subject of air conditioning the warehouses, I suspect they have only done a few. We have been restricted on temperature sensitive foods (like chocolate) because the warehouses are not air conditioned, and the shipments are not temperature protected.
mom22039, amazon probably should not be trusted as a go between you and end users. if a product is selling they will squish you.
borders screwed up back when e commerce was taking off turning over their on line business to a head on competitor at the time (amazon started off selling books and cd’s etc) look how that ended. Netflix uses them for data (amazon is a competitor to Netflix), which ins beyond nuts too. but direct sales can be done without amazon or e bay for that matter.
UPS is terrible to work for, read up on their discrimination cases.
A relative of mine would be in jail or dead from drugs and alcohol had he not joined UPS. He works as a driver and unloads planes, and he has no control over his schedule, plus they forced him to come back to work while on disability or lose his job.
Let’s all boycott UPS then.
I thought the Hachette thing was fine. Why shouldn’t a distributor negotiate for the prices it wants to sell at and the cut it wants?
Zo, I understand that you are typing this on a smartphone or something like that, but could you please, as a matter of common courtesy, try to use punctuation etc. Your posts come across as screaming, and that does not fly well in this forum.
AC consumes a whole lot of power. How come all the greenies aren’t applauding Amazon for being so environment-friendly? As one who used to live a lot closer to the tropics at one time, and experienced the sea-level humidity, and A/C was available only in the IBM 360 computer rooms, I can state that everyone, including those doing physical work, adjusted to it and did fine.
@Dadof3, LOL, where were you on the global warming thread?
Tbh, these intense, high pressure corporations seem no different from academia, where the pressure to always be working and producing is insane (“You have 5 publications this year? Why not 10?” “You received $2 million in grant funding this year? Why not $4 million?” You had a average score of 4.5 on your teaching evals? Why not 4.8 out of 5? Oh, and don’t forget to explain why you only have 5 publications this year."). Plus, everyone competes openly with everyone else, and any failures–or even being “good but not great,” which is a failure–are seen as yours and yours alone. But somehow people think that academia is just a cush, idyllic working environment, when it’s actually an extremely high pressure, product-based working environment.
But once you get to tenure the pressure is off isn’t it?
Amazon in some ways is like Walmart, in that its size can allow it to do things that may or may not be recognized as good. Walmart for one because of its size put the screws to producers of goods to reduce their prices with their mania for “low prices”, and because Walmart represented such a large market, they basically were forced to go overseas to match the price points Walmart wanted from them, and if they didn’t, their competitors would and it was too large a market to lose. In the book market, because of the kindle and its popularity, and because of people liking the deep discounts Amazon gave them (they basically were selling books at cost, or maybe even lower than cost, depending on who you talk to), they became the gorilla in the room with book purchases, and hence the battles with publishers (and for the record, I am no fan of the book publishing industry, I think they authors and readers alike), and while I like their self publish options on e-books, which helps break the hold of ex English majors on what can be read, there are some problems with their model, too.
bezos responds…but perhaps he is more like marie annointe, he is not exactly in the fray! he is the cause and aloof.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/jeff-bezos-says-hed-quit-the-amazon-described-in-new-york-times-bombshell-2015-08-17?siteid=rss&rss=1
LOL.
He is the cause indeed. But he is in the fray, and he’s been doing very well. Based on the Times article, some of his employees’ lives would be easier if he actually were aloof. He isn’t.
Maybe the Times piece is a you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours article written to carry water for Wapo journalists who can’t stand working for Mr. Bezos.
dadx, he is in the fray(causing the issues)but he is sitting on his throne…not like the peasants on the battle field. he is aloof to their needs not in a literal sense like he is out in the garden drawing water colors of the flowers.
i work in a hyper-competitive field and most folks I know who read the Times article said, “sounds like a cool place…how can I get a job there?” 
Working at Amazon in a white-collar job sounds as bad as being a young attorney at a large New York law firm, if one has the ill fortune to end up working for one of the many “difficult” partners. Including the extremely high turnover rates, and the general assumption by one’s employer that they “own” you, 24/7. But without the high pay, and with fewer women.
The guy behind this article is on cnbc today. He is not very convincing to me through the interview.