Quote:
Originally Posted by ProfCrash
Amazon is not doing anything that other companies running warehouses are doing.
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The weakness of the
Financial Times article was that they didn't put this to the test by interviewing workers at other area warehouses. Maybe there weren't any.
When the Allentown Pennsylvania newspaper did their investigation a few years ago, workers told them that the Amazon warehouse was the worst they had worked in. Follow-up articles said it had gotten better, in what seemed to be a true power-of-the-press moment.
I'm skeptical there's a science of management proving that treating your workers poorly makes you more profitable. If you look at lists of the best companies to work for (
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortu...iid=bc_sp_full), most are the type that employ the highly educated, but not all. We've been shopping at #5 (on my last link) Wegman's supermarket a lot lately, and are extremely price conscious. And isn't a supermarket basically a warehouse? Wegman's mails coupons for a few free items most weeks, and their everyday prices are often right there with WalMart. Promotional discounts are generally less dramatic than at competitors, but it depends on the item.
Maybe Amazon has experimented with other warehouse management methods and they failed. But I haven't read about that. It's at least as possible that they simply aren't a good employer.
I do think that, over time, there are fewer good jobs for people who aren't high performing lifetime learners. That one can't be Amazon's fault.