Evil Amazon

[Svartalf]

and all governments have one goal : making us all stupid.

[Brian Peacock]

Maybe in your case Svarty, but I was born this way.

[Hermit]

and all governments have one goal : making us all stupid.

Not all.

[Scot Dutchy]

What was an obvious mistake Amazon fails to act:

New York boy stuns family with $2,618 Amazon order for SpongeBob popsicles

Noah Bryant, four, who is on the autism spectrum, sent a 51-case order of SpongeBob treats to his aunt’s house

A four-year-old New York boy has left his family with a huge bill after he secretly ordered a staggering $2,618 worth of SpongeBob popsicles from online retailer Amazon.

Noah Bryant, from Brooklyn, ordered 51 cases containing a total of 918 popsicles to be shipped to his aunt’s house, the local TV station ABC7 reported.

Amazon said they would not take back the treats, leaving Noah’s mother, social work student Jennifer Bryant, facing the giant bill.

But the story has a happy ending. Amazon now says they are in contact with the Bryant family and will donate the proceeds of the popsicles to a local charity. Meanwhile, a GoFundMe page has raised more than $11,000.

The family says all additional funds will go towards Noah’s education, ABC7 said. Noah is on the autism spectrum.

How can a four year old order on Amazon?

[Svartalf]

Either that brat is REALLY gifted, or whoever owns the computer on which he passed the order is an absolute moron.

[Tero]

My phone in my pocket was just one click away from ordering a fake Rollex from Amazon. It was cheap, but I would have had to return it.

[Scot Dutchy]

Either that brat is REALLY gifted, or whoever owns the computer on which he passed the order is an absolute moron.

It makes you wonder. Mind you my wife has a grand niece who is five and has her own smart phone which she operates without any problems. (pure madness)

[Svartalf]

What I don't get is how the kid could find the treats and press the right buttons if he doesn't even read yet.

[Sean Hayden]

Kids can identify signs before they can read. So, Amazon --> picture of product in view history --> Buy Now "sign"

....the quantity is still a bit strange.

[Hermit]

What I don't get is how the kid could find the treats and press the right buttons if he doesn't even read yet.

You're assuming the kid set out to order 51 cases of SpongeBob treats and send them to his aunt’s house.

[LucidFlight]

What I don't get is how the kid could find the treats and press the right buttons if he doesn't even read yet.

You're assuming the kid set out to order 51 cases of SpongeBob treats and send them to his aunt’s house.

How do we know that this kid doesn't have a very particular set of skills, skills acquired over a very long career?

[Hermit]

What I don't get is how the kid could find the treats and press the right buttons if he doesn't even read yet.

You're assuming the kid set out to order 51 cases of SpongeBob treats and send them to his aunt’s house.

How do we know that this kid doesn't have a very particular set of skills, skills acquired over a very long career?

We don't. It's just another assumption.

[Tero]

Based on this I would guess that 500 million people buy stuff from Amazon at least weekly.

Probably every American with a credit card goes there at least once a year.

[Tero]

In his drive to create the world’s most efficient company, Jeff Bezos discovered what he thought was another inefficiency worth eliminating: hourly employees who spent years working for the same company.

Longtime employees expected to receive raises. They also became less enthusiastic about the work, Amazon’s data suggested. And they were a potential source of internal discontent.

Bezos came to believe that an entrenched blue-collar work force represented “a march to mediocrity,” as David Niekerk, a former Amazon executive who built the company’s warehouse human resources operations, told The Times, as part of an investigative project being published this morning. “What he would say is that our nature as humans is to expend as little energy as possible to get what we want or need.”

In response, Amazon encouraged employee turnover. After three years on the job, hourly workers no longer received automatic raises, and the company offered bonuses to people who quit. It also offered limited upward mobility for hourly workers, preferring to hire managers from the outside.

As is often the case with one of Amazon’s business strategies, it worked.

Turnover at Amazon is much higher than at many other companies — with an annual rate of roughly 150 percent for warehouse workers, The Times’s story discloses, which means that the number who leave the company over a full year is larger than the level of total warehouse employment. The churn is so high that it’s visible in the government’s statistics on turnover in the entire warehouse industry: When Amazon opens a new fulfillment center, local turnover often surges.

My goal in today’s newsletter is to highlight a larger economic trend that Amazon reflects: Many Americans today are strikingly powerless while they are on the job. Their employers treat them as “an expendable work force,” to quote a phrase used by an Amazon employee in the story. They often lack the leverage to demand higher pay or different working conditions.

At Amazon, workers sometimes find out about a new shift only the day before, scrambling their family routine. When workers want to get in touch with human resources by phone, they must navigate an automated process that can resemble an airline customer-service department during a storm. Employees are constantly tracked and evaluated based on their amount of T.O.T., or time off task. One employee who had earned consistent praise was fired for a single bad shift.

Even so, work at an Amazon warehouse is often better than the alternative. JFK8 now pays at least $18.25 an hour, which translates to about $37,000 a year for a full-time worker. After decades in which pay has failed to keep pace with economic growth — except for the upper middle class and above — many blue-collar workers do not have a better option.

By David Leonhardt NYT

[Tero]

Amazon worker to another: "I got fired by the Algorithm again. I'll be back in December when they need everybody."