Quote:
Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze
And some might suggest you were being willfully obtuse.
As should be obvious, no one is suggesting that Amazon maintain the same conditions in their warehouses as exist in a standard book store.
My staggeringly obvious point was that supporting local book stores means supporting the people who work in them and therefore allowing those people to work under better conditions than exist in Amazon's warehouses.
Supporting Amazon alone and telling local stores to go to hell means supporting the imposition of a Metropolis-ready work environment and the demise of better conditions in local stores.
Here's where someone will likely raise the point I've already mentioned: That there aren't many book stores left. To which my answer was and is, bingo -- the slow death of local stores is precisely why I mentioned this. We're heading toward a model of commerce which disincludes them. That's why we should perhaps reexamine the supposition that warehouse-based booksellers are always better. Convenience and better pricing for the consumer do not come without other kinds of prices -- to the worker and to the local economy.
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The point is this. If a company told you "we are 5% more expensive than our competitors, but all the money goes straight to our employees" how many of us would go shop there? Another question is, what is a reasonable working environment? There can't be any pressure? I see it all the time. People come to me to get them some products from European companies. I send an e-mail and very rarely do I get a reply within one week. A similar e-mail to an Asian company hardly ever takes longer than 24 hours before they send me a reply. You really feel the urgency to help and please customers. A customer needs urgent delivery for a European made machine? Unless the seller happens to have stock, forget about it. Yes, it is just my personal experience and that of many people I know but (with notable exceptions) efficiency, flexibility, and competitiveness are just unheard of in Western Europe. (Many companies just live off their reputations of past excellence). And when a company tries to introduce these the employees start to complain. Ever tried to go into a German retail store 1/2 before closing time? Many are already closing the doors and try to keep new customers out while they do their best to herd out the remaining ones.