Amazon UK Unpacked: Sad Conditions at the Rugeley Warehouse

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by rdfry

Wow, Jeff Bezos has always been about profits and market share. Suck everyone in with cheap prices control market then raise prices.

Can you give an example of Mr Bezos raising prices, please?

[jgaiser]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

And it's not all that different from working at a factory assembly line, now or ages past.
Take a widget from a conveyor, attach a screw, put it back on the conveyor... Repeat every other minute for 8 hours straight. Entire nations have been built that way.
You respect the workers but that is life in industrial society and always has been.
(A bit late for hand-wringing.)

This.. In the mid 1960's I worked at a cannery producing canned green beans. Talk about mind numbing, repetitious minimum wage job, overseen by supervisors on your back seemingly every minute.

Been there. Done that. Lasted a summer.

[Mike L]

Originally Posted by Billi

but I'm afraid it won't help you much as it is in German

We're not all Anglophone monoglots, you know.

Mike

[rdfry]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Can you give an example of Mr Bezos raising prices, please?

I should have said to eventually raise prices.

[jgaiser]

Originally Posted by rdfry

I should have said to eventually raise prices.

Yep. One of the stories about the evil Amazon that's been going around. You'll let me know when that actually happens and I and the rest of Amazon customers go somewhere else.

Bezos and Amazon are very smart marketeers. I ain't going to happen.

[Apache]

Price Rise is inevitable but, not because of evil men. When the cost of supplies, goods and labor rises, business must raise it's prices. Look at my industry. The price of gold has risen drastically since I first opened my store. When I started Gold was $250.00 a Troy Ounce. Now, as I write this, it is $1594.00 and ounce.
Here is a chart showing the price of Gold for the last 10 years.

And if you have any interest check out the spike in Rhodium prices in December of 2007.

It rose over $9,000.00 a Troy ounce in a matter of days.
Apache

[jgaiser]

And Rhodium crashed the next year.

Gold and Rhodium prices have nothing to do with anything but speculation.

Gold prices were held down by of the U.S. Government for years, but it's current prices is just because of the speculation market

[FizzyWater]

I don't have an assumption that it will happen on Amazon across the board, but I do remember when it first launched (and was only/mostly a print book store), all print books were sold at a discount, including MMPB. I don't remember specifics much - I think it was 25%.

I remember a friend of mine calling me and telling me I just had to try it.

They eventually took the flat discount away on ALL books and only offered it for certain ones (or the buy 4 for 3 program on MMPB).

So there is *some* history of them offering lower prices to get you hooked, then raising the prices.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by rdfry

I should have said to eventually raise prices.

A precog!
You must be making a killing betting on the ponies.

[rkomar]

Originally Posted by jgaiser

And Rhodium crashed the next year.

Gold and Rhodium prices have nothing to do with anything but speculation.

Gold prices were held down by of the U.S. Government for years, but it's current prices is just because of the speculation market

Gold is also what people buy when they're worried about currencies plunging. I saw a talking head on TV recently who said that the price of gold dropping recently was a good sign that economic conditions were less threatening globally.

[Apache]

Originally Posted by jgaiser

And Rhodium crashed the next year.

Gold and Rhodium prices have nothing to do with anything but speculation.

Gold prices were held down by of the U.S. Government for years, but it's current prices is just because of the speculation market

Originally Posted by rkomar

Gold is also what people buy when they're worried about currencies plunging. I saw a talking head on TV recently who said that the price of gold dropping recently was a good sign that economic conditions were less threatening globally.

It still affects my business drastically. I used to guarantee estimates for 30 days. I can not do that any more.
And it is the same for those in the retail oil business.
Apache

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by ProfCrash

Amazon is not doing anything that other companies running warehouses are doing.

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.

[Billi]

Originally Posted by Mike L

We're not all Anglophone monoglots, you know.

Mike

Ups, I didn't want to imply this at all, sorry! There are simply too many beautiful and useful languages around to learn as a second or third or fourth language that we can't expect that you choose German (although we may hope you do ).

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by Billi

Ups, I didn't want to imply this at all, sorry! There are simply too many beautiful and useful languages around to learn as a second or third or fourth language that we can't expect that you choose German (although we may hope you do ).

Why should we hope foreigners will learn German? Have you never heard of the old Chinese saying: "天不怕，地不怕，就怕老外講中國話！“ "Don't fear heaven, don't fear earth, fear foreigners speaking Chinese!" It isn't much better for European languages.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

the old Chinese saying: "天不怕，地不怕，就怕老外講中國話！“ "Don't fear heaven, don't fear earth, fear foreigners speaking Chinese!"

Or as google translate has it: "Days a fearless, afraid of foreigners speak Chinese"