Amazon ups hourly wage to $15, will advocate for higher pay

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by frahse

Platform Economics and the "End Game"

Jeff Bezos is the fox and the rest of us are the chickens--- mine

cluck, cluck, ...

Really good find. Thanks.

The professor recalled listening to Bezos speak back in the early 1990s, when everybody thought he was just a book seller and wondered how he would ever turn a profit.

“We didn’t understand that he was in the business of accumulating customer information and really didn’t care about short-term profits because he, unlike the rest of us, understood platform economics,” Meyer said.

And he has since moved beyond that to ecosystem economics, which don't depend on rock bottom pricing. Or wages. But by advocating for higher wages for his competitors he consolidates his gains and can move on without worrying about being undercut by the startups that he's foreclosed.

Still one step ahead.
Yeah, he's crazy like a fox.

[frahse]

I should have known never to doubt a multi-multi Billionaire. All will be well and there will be a chicken in every pot. I feel warm already.

Amazon reasures Bernie!

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by frahse

I should have known never to doubt a multi-multi Billionaire. All will be well and there will be a chicken in every pot. I feel warm already.

Amazon reasures Bernie!

Better off on paper.
For 2018.
Let's see how the numbers look when the stock hits $2500.
Or when income tax rates go up again.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Better off on paper.
For 2018.
Let's see how the numbers look when the stock hits $2500.
Or when income tax rates go up again.

Or not as Amazon plunges down to 1,755 from a high of a bit over 2000. Stock prices rises and falls are more of a trailing indicator than a leading indicator and sometimes have nothing to do with the actual health of a company.

Amazon has some interesting issues. In project management, there is an old saying - "Cheap, fast, good - chose two of the three". My observation is that saying is a bit optimistic, frequently you end up with one. Amazon is built on the idea that one can get all three, cheap quality good that are delivered fast. More specifically, prime customers have come to expect fast free delivery. The question is can Amazon continue to deliver, so to speak.

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by frahse

I should have known never to doubt a multi-multi Billionaire. All will be well and there will be a chicken in every pot. I feel warm already.

Amazon reasures Bernie!

There is a further increase for workers over $15 and replacement bonuses for gone bonuses that your link did not mention.

Amazon is raising some workers’ pay further after controversy

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

More specifically, prime customers have come to expect fast free delivery. The question is can Amazon continue to deliver, so to speak.

I don't see the problem. They used to undercut everybody else to grab marketshare, right? Why couldn't they do that again? Except this time they are not lowering the prices, but keeping the prices the same as if nothing happened. Don't worry, it will be only temporary until everybody else is forced to increase their prices after Amazon out of the goodness of their heart successfully lobbies for increasing all competitors wages as well.

That is how you stick it to the politician.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

I don't see the problem. They used to undercut everybody else to grab marketshare, right? Why couldn't they do that again? Except this time they are not lowering the prices, but keeping the prices the same as if nothing happened. Don't worry, it will be only temporary until everybody else is forced to increase their prices after Amazon out of the goodness of their heart successfully lobbies for increasing all competitors wages as well.

That is how you stick it to the politician.

Even better for them: with a tightening job market, they were going to have to raise wages for the temps anyway. By moving ahead of their competitors they get first crack at available labor this holiday season. Competitors will either have to make do with lower ranked labor or face a shortage.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...004-story.html

Here's how wage analyst Sylvia Allegretto, a labor economist at UC Berkeley, put it in the Washington Post: "We have a tight labor market, and these are tough jobs with high turnover rates. You add in that Amazon is competing for workers, and it makes sense that it is raising wages."

Once the labor market hits full employment — an all too rare occurrence in recent decades — even employers of the magnitude of Amazon have to kick up pay to hire and keep the workers they need. Economists call demand for labor "derived" demand, as it is derived from the consumer demand for the goods and services workers produce. Such demand is strong right now, and companies either staff up to meet that demand or leave profits on the table.

Market forces alone would have moved them higher anyway but with the offset the net impact is reported at 1% whereas for the competition the impact will be much higher. Revenue growth can offset the 1% without impacting stock growth. Without a comparable offset, the impact will be higher on the competition. Walmart going to $11 was going to cost them $300M--going to $15 would add even more on top of that. For Amazon it's estimated at a billion before the offset. Walmart is not going to enjoy a billion increase in costs. Other competitors can't even dream of adding even a fraction of that.

The real driver is 4% unemployment, not political pressure.
But letting the politicians take credit was really useful.

[frahse]

The Unforseen Problems with $15 per hour

The Analysis goes on and on. I can hear the discussions in the business schools now, and of course the politicians will have their say.

Still it is a good discussion to have.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by frahse

The Unforseen Problems with $15 per hour

The Analysis goes on and on. I can hear the discussions in the business schools now, and of course the politicians will have their say.

Still it is a good discussion to have.

There is little unforseen in the discussion.
It is a long-running debate going back decades.
And the consequences are well documented.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/26/b...imum-wage.html

https://pjmedia.com/trending/2016/02...s-into-effect/

(Note that the Seattle increase was local so a lot of business just moved jobs outside the city. Not an option under a federal hike.)

The biggest part of the problem is they keep forgetting the "minimum" part of minimum wage. And that living costs are different across the country. Forcing every business in every town to pay San Francisco wages will kill entire businesses elsewhere, like bookstores. Since book prices are printed on the cover bookstores don't have the option to raise prices. Not every community has big tech companies pouring cash into their economies. Some have to get by with farming, manufacturing, and service industries.

Other businesses have similar problems because price elasticity means higher prices lead to lower traffic. Sit-down family restaurants are fragile enough that even slight economic downturns kill them by the dozen.

Blind one size fits all advocacy is a surefire mess in the making.

[Apache]

Ebay is now suing Amazon for poaching third party sellers.

“Amazon’s illegal efforts to lure eBay sellers appear to be part of a larger pattern of aggressive, unscrupulous conduct,” the suit states.

Amazon did not respond to National Jeweler’s request for comment on eBay’s allegations by deadline.

Ebay’s suit brings a total of five counts against Amazon: intentional interference with contractual relations; intentional interference with prospective economic relations; fraud; violation of the California penal code (eBay is based in San Jose); and violation of the California business and professions code.

The company is asking for an unspecified amount in damages as well as a permanent injunction on Amazon representatives using M2M or the eBay platform to solicit sellers.

Full article here.
https://www.nationaljeweler.com/majo...zon-in-lawsuit
Apache

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

I don't see the problem. They used to undercut everybody else to grab marketshare, right? Why couldn't they do that again? Except this time they are not lowering the prices, but keeping the prices the same as if nothing happened. Don't worry, it will be only temporary until everybody else is forced to increase their prices after Amazon out of the goodness of their heart successfully lobbies for increasing all competitors wages as well.

That is how you stick it to the politician.

Sorry, got side tracked from the important stuff by work.

The technical term is rent seeking, i.e. using the power of government to put you in a more advantageous situation.

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Sorry, got side tracked from the important stuff by work.

The technical term is rent seeking, i.e. using the power of government to put you in a more advantageous situation.

If what they are doing is obviously that term you call rent seeking, then I don't see how that applies. Is it not rather the opposite? When I googled rent seeking it appears to supposed to be initiated by a (corrupt) company to lobby advantages to them by imposing restrictions on the competition that is unwilling or incapable to sink to the same low. Amazon is making themselves look better in the media by raising the wages without having to pay anything extra. Nothing extra to pay since some of the cost increase come from culled benefits.

Amazon's reaction is to the pressure from politicians in the press, not Amazon pressuring the press to make them look bad. So who is lobbying? Amazon or the press?

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

If what they are doing is obviously that term you call rent seeking, then I don't see how that applies. Is it not rather the opposite? When I googled rent seeking it appears to supposed to be initiated by a (corrupt) company to lobby advantages to them by imposing restrictions on the competition that is unwilling or incapable to sink to the same low. Amazon is making themselves look better in the media by raising the wages without having to pay anything extra. Nothing extra to pay since some of the cost increase come from culled benefits.

Amazon's reaction is to the pressure from politicians in the press, not Amazon pressuring the press to make them look bad. So who is lobbying? Amazon or the press?

Amazon is lobbying the government to raise minimum wage to $15 per hour so everyone has to pay the higher rate. Rent seeking basically refers to any effort to lobby the government to do something that would put your company in a more advantageous situation than your competitors. For example, large corporations like regulation because they are large enough that the cost of regulation is a smaller percentage of their overhead than it would be for their smaller competitors. They already have an army of lawyers and accountants. It's not just sinking to a low and isn't necessarily corrupt. Many regulations are well meaning, but perhaps not necessarily effective.

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Amazon is lobbying the government to raise minimum wage to $15 per hour so everyone has to pay the higher rate.

This is an unusual kind of lobbying because they would lose the advantage of paying higher wages than competitors. The advantage is that you can be much fussier, in hiring productive workers, when you pay more.

[frahse]

Amazon Just Caught a Key Problem in Its Plan to Pay Workers $15 an Hour. (Here's What the Company Says It's Doing Instead

A plan within a plan?

Why is it always "Next, the fine Print..." "Now we lift the hood..." "Is something going on, is something planned."

It is like the "Never ending story..." (Die unendliche Geschichte)