Amazon

[Longhorned]

Should we just stop supporting this company?

[azgreg]

Why?

[phenom5]

because they raised the annual rate of Amazon Prime AND the delivery got slower.

[Longhorned]

Why?

So we can be good, discerning capitalists and create demand for businesses that don't bite us in the ass.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/2 ... blogs&_r=0

[Alieberman]

I say we create our own Amazon!

Screw TOS!

[NYCat]

Still using the student membership they have, which is $40 a year - I'll keep using it till they take it away from me.

[3dmk]

I say we create our own Amazon!

Screw TOS!

lmfao I approve of this message, except when i don't. They have been consistently lowering the price of their AWS services because of competition from others.

[Catintheheat]

The way Amazon treats their own employees is just awful. Perhaps the worst in the industry. I do very little business with them now, and only when I can't find an item someplace else.

Whereas some Amazon employees are in constant motion across the floors of its enormous centers—the biggest, in Arizona, is the size of twenty-eight football fields—others work on assembly lines packing goods for shipping. An anonymous German student who worked as a temporary packer at Amazon’s depot in Augsburg, southern Germany, has given a revealing account of work on the line at Amazon. Her account appeared in the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the stern upholder of German financial orthodoxy and not a publication usually given to accounts of workplace abuse by large and powerful corporations. There were six packing lines at Amazon’s Augsburg center, each with two conveyor belts feeding tables where the packers stood and did the packing. The first conveyor belt fed the table with goods stored in boxes, and the second carried the goods away in sealed packages ready for distribution by UPS, FedEx, and their German counterparts.

Machines measured whether the packers were meeting their targets for output per hour and whether the finished packages met their targets for weight and so had been packed “the one best way.” But alongside these digital controls there was a team of Taylor’s “functional foremen,” overseers in the full nineteenth-century sense of the term, watching the employees every second to ensure that there was no “time theft,” in the language of Walmart. On the packing lines there were six such foremen, one known in Amazonspeak as a “coworker” and above him five “leads,” whose collective task was to make sure that the line kept moving. Workers would be reprimanded for speaking to one another or for pausing to catch their breath (Verschnaufpause) after an especially tough packing job.

The functional foreman would record how often the packers went to the bathroom and, if they had not gone to the bathroom nearest the line, why not. The student packer also noticed how, in the manner of Jeremy Bentham’s nineteenth-century panopticon, the architecture of the depot was geared to make surveillance easier, with a bridge positioned at the end of the workstation where an overseer could stand and look down on his wards. However, the task of the depot managers and supervisors was not simply to fight time theft and keep the line moving but also to find ways of making it move still faster. Sometimes this was done using the classic methods of Scientific Management, but at other times higher targets for output were simply proclaimed by management, in the manner of the Soviet workplace during the Stalin era.

http://www.salon.com/2014/02/23/worse_t ... g_workers/

[Longhorned]

Am I supporting Amazon when I buy something from a small vendor through the Amazon site?

[beames]

The wars of our future will be fought not by nations but between companies like Amazon, Google and eharmony. It is important that you rigidly define your allegiances now because they will be most definitely be skimming your cookies! So to answer the question: what? Oh, hey, I love free shipping!!!

Oh, and going neutral like Yahoo is totally lame.