It will have more business people asking about robots, other than that I doubt it will. Amazon don't even care if the packages are late because of this, they still get your purchase.
they truly don't care. I had an order that was supposed to be delivered tuesday by 8pm (delivery guarantee!) but at 8:10 switched to "now arriving Dec 27th". The person I chatted with gave me a $10 amazon credit and refused to even acknowledge my (much more expensive for them) solution that since all the items in my order were showing "delivery by Dec 19th" they should resend everything Prime. They still have my money even if I don't have Christmas presents, and I need to go through the hassle of returning it - when I eventually get it.
> don't even care if the packages are late because of this, they still get your purchase.
Not at this time of the year. If something doesn't have a pre Christmas delivery, it won't be bought in many cases. Or even if it does, people may hear about the strike and not risk it.
It'd be the delivery thad' be late, not the delivery estimate on the order page. The potential impact here would be related to how many newly triggered returns happen due to the gift arriving after Christmas.
i used to work on bezo's fc automation back in 2012 to 2016, they've been they'd been talking about "lights out fc" being just around the corner since since those days. if anything we had adjacent teams that were working on temp worker and worker scheduling systems, "people management" systems that had more interest from leadership. imo a lot of the automation stuff ended up being real timid and imo really was to juice valuation.
Amazon is only well run for the shareholders and executives. It is not well run for the people filling the boxes. It seems down right sadistic. Like the executives don't even see them as people.
And they sent me a 43" Samsung TV when I ordered a 42" LG OLED. How the hell can their many billions of dollars of IT investment not automatically scan the barcode on the box or weight the box or use computer vision and notice this error before they sent the wrong TV out?
If you buy this [0] Startech 25U open server rack (unsure about other sizes), there is a non-zero chance you’ll receive a pallet of them – 9 in total – for the price of one. It’s a running joke in r/homelab. It happened to me, and then I found out it happened to a lot of people.
Also, for this reason, it’s somewhat common to see them for sale at a steep discount in r/homelabsales. Only makes sense if you’re within driving distance, but hey – cheap rack.
A couple of years ago, my (now) wife ordered her mother a battery case for Christmas because she had seen the same one at our apartment and mentioned wanting one. Since it was ordered using the gift wrapping options, we didn't open it when it arrived, and she gave it to her mother to unwrap. Her mother was quite confused when she unwrapped her gift and found a sushi-making kit. It's become a recurring joke in our family now that we need to check any gifts ordered from Amazon in advance to avoid accidentally giving someone a sushi kit.
The amount of leverage workers have is proportional to how hard it is for the company to replace them. Replacing unskilled workers isn't that hard so those workers don't have much leverage.
The only real solution is to become skilled workers. Which, almost ironically, is to do the thing the company threatens to do -- find a way to automate work like this, so the people working at the warehouse are robotics technicians etc.
> Isn't Amazon getting to the point where they're having trouble finding employee candidates they haven't previously fired?
This apparently happened somewhere in a rural area with a small local population. It's obviously not going to happen at a warehouse in, say, New Jersey.
And to the extent that it actually happens somewhere it's not like their response would be hard to predict. Calculate how much they would have to increase local wages to expand the candidate pool enough, see if this is less than it costs to move the warehouse somewhere with a larger pool of workers, if not then move the warehouse.
Notice that Amazon warehouse workers get paid more than minimum wage. This is why. Unskilled workers don't have zero leverage, they just don't have much.
it's likely not the case here but more powerful unions can block non-union scabs from taking the jobs of striking workers (in that this is usually part of the contract the union has with the employer). at scale, unions have a lot more power to affect things
but the point is it's not about worker skill when unions are at sufficient power levels
When unions get to be that size is when they get captured by organized crime and other interests, because then they're acting as a de facto government and susceptible to the same corrupting influences but without the (by no means perfect but far better than nothing) safeguards we put on governments in modern democracies.
This is also why corporate monopolies are a fiasco and need to be prevented as well.
The general rule is "prevent any one group from consolidating too much power". If someone's solution is "let our group consolidate a huge amount of power" they're admitting they're the villains.
