FOX News is the billionaire propaganda mouthpiece. It’s all it does.
Well, MAGA ideology propaganda, but same thing.
One of the best arguments against this type of propaganda is to look at what actually happened in places where they treat their workers more fairly.
Like, you hear people say that fast food would become prohibitively expensive if we raise the minimum wage, but when you look at countries where they have decent minimum wages, the fast food there is basically the same price. Maybe pennies more.
The best way to combat this propaganda is simply to experiment or call their bluff. You know, try it out and see what actually happens. When NYC does this and nothing bad happens, maybe that will be a clue to other cities.
Fast food is a crazy example they point to. You’ll spend 12-15 dollars a person easily at fast food places these days, and they serve hundreds of customer an hour. Giving the entire staff a $15/hr raise would be an extra 2-4% to the cost of a meal.
If you have 5 employees working the shop and average 100 meals an hour, you’re looking at an extra $0.75 per meal to give each employee and additional $15/hour - which is a life-changing raise at a cost customers wouldn’t even notice.
All you have to say is Scandinavia. Any corporatist concern trolling can be countered by a policy in a Scandinavian country.
This is semantics, but it’s funny to read this comment because The Nordic model of Scandinavia is given as the most comprehensive form of social capitalism on Wikipedia. But corporatism is easier to pronounce than corporatocracy so I’m not surprised the internet has started using the former to mean the latter.
Like, you hear people say that fast food would become prohibitively expensive if we raise the minimum wage
You don’t even have to scale this to countries. Cities with a higher min wage have proven better results.
What about the fact that it’s ok if deliveries are slower? How many of the things that people buy online, whether from Amazon or not, actually need to be same day or next day? If there were options for “just sometime in the next month”, I’d chose that.
Of course, I understand that be a logistics nightmare to schedule, I’m only making the argument that delivery speed is a more a luxury than necessity. As is Amazon itself.
Not to mention that theres almost always enough order volume for a bulk same-day delivery. Id imagine theres enough orders for 30+ deliveries in a 4 block radius on any given day
I avoid Amazon but when I do make the mistake of ordering from them, they literally hold my order until the delivery date. It’s effectively same day every time, to encourage me to buy Prime.
They also deliver 24 hours a day here. Multiple vans daily. It’s all a farce to avoid paying their fair share.
A priest was giving a sermon about how the life and experiences of Jesus are still relevant to us today. “He faced all the same temptations we face today. All of them.”
Afterward a member of the congregation approached him and said “father, I enjoyed your sermon, but there is one temptation we face today that Jesus never had to.”
“And what’s that?”
“Speed.”
Amazon actually does have that option for deliveries. It’s typically labeled either “Amazon Day” (where they try to group orders into fewer deliveries / boxes, though it’s pretty mixed on that), or No Rush (where it might be a week out and they give you a dollar credit for something as an incentive).
Though that’s usually more “in the next week or so” than “next month”
Did they start recently? I haven’t seen anything like that.
It’s been around for a couple years.
This option has always been a huge scam. Whenever I choose it, Amazon waits until that day to even ship the thing, then it takes an extra day or two on top of the voluntary initial delay. So my 2 day delivery turns into 6-7 days
It’s actually devastating to society. The whole Amazon delivery mindset is a plague that affects so many people now.
A customer buys a used piece of equipment off ebay, mind you something big enough to go on a skid, and within the day they buy it; “Is it shipped yet? I need the tracking number. When will it be here?” I hate these morons.
This mentality bleeds into repair work as well, which I got tired of, I’m just going to do something else for work. One
cuntI meant customer told me she needs this fixed yesterday. I intentionally took my time. Same goes for the idiots that call me and ask if I can come out right now, or “can you come in at 4AM before we open to fix this machine?” Like yeah, I’m going to go to the shop, pick up tools and parts at 2AM, then drive an an hour to your restaurant so I can make pretty much minimum wage—(taxes, fuel, insurance, wear and tear on my car, billing, inventory, part shopping, etc, all the invisible expenses) and then of course having to justify why I charge so much to fix something in minutes. Yeah like the over a decade of experience was just given to me on a flash stick that shoved up my yass and I learned everything instantly.It wasn’t like this when I first started doing this kind of a job. People were more relaxed. I’m keeping doing repair work to a minimum, and I work on a lot of really expensive equipment. And there’s a severe shortage of people that do what I do. Part of it is the expenses, part of it is everyone’s Amazon like mentality. And don’t forget the “why does this cost so much more for the same work you did two years ago.” Sigh. Trade work was fun but the last few years I can’t be bothered anymore. Sorry for the rant.
You don’t get rich without exploiting. No wait, I mean you don’t keep your shareholders rich without exploiting.
This is why regulation is necessary. The moonshots returned $14 for every $1 spent thanks to science and innovation we benefited from it. Lobbying government returns $120 for every $1 spent.
Financialization returns exponentially more. In fact, most of the billionaires that exist are finance bros that got rich from private equity and market manipulation. Stock buybacks are a recent number-go-up tactic. These things, like rent-seeking, don’t actually produce value but make profit.
So when we say the ultra-wealthy got rich by exploiting, we are totally underestimating the amount of wrongdoing they are committing.
But then Marx notes in Das Kapital that the capitalist will always seek to capture government and regulatory bodies in order to game the system, thereby destabilizing it until it collapses. The process feeds on itself and gets worse at an accellerating rate.
Unless something very radical is done, civilization worldwide is going to fall.
I genuinely see the point and I think the argumentation that he can afford it is also sound. But the flaw is that Bezos will just hand off the cost to consumers. This won’t affect his income or wealth at all. We need measures that target anti competitive behaviors and monopoly building as well as taxing people that have way too much.
Too big to fail just also happens to be too big to care.
Competition is good for the consumer and keeps prices low automatically.
In my opinion, too big to fail means too big to risk it. Nationalize Amazon.
Too big to fail == too big to live, at least it would be in a sane world.
Remember what we did to Ma Bell?
Well I admit, phones were free then. Repairs were free then.
Competition is so rarely a thing though. The barriers to entry are significant enough that if you actually go through them all… why wouldn’t you just price shop and then charge about the same as your “competitors”? You don’t need to talk to effectively collude.
That’s entirely dependant on the economy. If the average consumer is doing well then what you are saying does happen.
But if they are not doing well financially, like right now, then stores begin to compete more. I’m starting to see this locally myself in grocery prices. Some things are actually coming down slightly, at least for the moment. I expect with the increasing price of diesel prices will skyrocket again, but maybe we’ll get lucky and companies will have to eat the cost this time. Everyone is so broke right now they may not be able to pass the cost on
So…read the room.
That’s the thing though, the price will not go to the consumer. People use Amazon for the convenience and the fact that it is often cheaper than going to the store yourself.
If suddenly it’s more expensive than the store it really incentives going to the store. And that is precisely why prices will remain the same.
You might have a point there. Might also just increase the price of prime just a touch.
That’s a good point. If they raise the cost of prime by even $1 nationwide they make up the difference and hide the cost
Of course he’ll hand the cost off to consumers. As if his wedding yacht ring, like everything else he does, wasn’t directly financed primarily by his consumer-facing business!
Retail isn’t as easy to maintain a monopoly as most industries. The moment Amazon gets more expensive than the next guy, the whole thing falls apart.
Read up on prime and why that only works to bind customers as long as you are the biggest in the market. Also the price increase still hits all the online shops, so whatever Amazon’s competitive advantage is still in place.
the price increase still hits all the online shops
No, it hits the online shops that underpay their staff.
Most shops don’t have the benefit of vertically integrated logistics nationwide. Amazon literally doesn’t pay what the owners of dhl and FedEx earn.
What he’s actually saying is, “I won’t spend the money to provide the level of service we have been up to this point.” Because there’s nothing Mamdani has done here that will cost jobs or slow delivery times - Jeff is the one cutting jobs and slowing delivery times. Maybe New Yorkers will just stop shopping Amazon when they downgrade their services, that wouldn’t be a bad thing.
NYC is so dense and populous, there would instantly be space in the market for someone else to offer same/next day delivery for most common items if Amazon decides to start killing off its golden geese like that (being America’s #1 source of shit ordered online is just one of them).
I’ll bet they won’t, and they’ll blame the drivers.
Jeff isn’t saying anything because Jeff hasn’t been the CEO of Amazon in years…
$600 a year… on extra delivery costs on the average household?
… How much are americans ordering online?
Obviously as think link is an image of a tweet, I don’t have the original article to reference.
But it says “average household delivery costs,” so it’s quite likely that it doesn’t just include Amazon or other online ordering.
In order to make their point as persuasive as possible, they likely fudged the numbers and included all deliveries. Saying things like, “Well, UPS would save money by contracting the last mile, as well, so the fact that this stops them from doing that is a cost for New Yorkers.”
Anything that makes the number larger and has any sort of stupid excuse would be enough. If the number is larger, they can scare people and make it more likely that they get their way.
My online orders dropped off to basically nothing since the tariffs began. Now I buy EVERYTHING from brick and mortar just like the good old days.
And I’m never going back to the online shopping horse shit either. At least with stores you can shoplift guilt free with zero carbon footprint.
USA Amazon user. A lot. But I have better financials than many.
Example: Cat litter that we prefer comes in 25lb boxes. Why lug that when it can come to your door? I don’t think my spouse could even lift it due to an injury. But I feed the Bezos machine and I’m not proud of it.
I’m not even American, but even I order tons of stuff (not from Amazon*). Basically anything other than groceries.
Oil, filters, belts for my cars? Twice as expensive in person. Other parts? Not in stock at those stores and still more expensive - it’ll get here by next workday afternoon (sometimes same day), so it’s still faster than online, but I have to visit the store twice or call ahead and in general, mistakes happen more easily when I’m not the one looking at parts catalogues.
Computer parts? The big chain may have some stuff in stock and its prices are fair, but the closest store to me is 70 km away since I no longer live in any of the major cities. The other electronics stores don’t really sell desktop parts and the things they do sell (thumb drives, cables) are overpriced compared to online stores.
Hell, when my kid was young enough to get formula, I ordered that online in bulk to get a discount compared to buying in person.
Usually get most of my shit delivered to a package locker rather than to my door, but I’d guesstimate about ~30-40 orders a year. If I didn’t get free delivery on half of them (online car parts store has free parcel locker delivery starting 50€ cart and free home delivery starting 70€) that would easily be 150€ in delivery costs a year. The question is what kinda math Amazon be using here because they could just claim that Mamdani’s going to 5x the cost of delivery and then even a modest amount of deliveries like mine would balloon to a huge amount of “extra” cost.
* Had to make an exception this year, this was like the 3rd time I’ve ordered from Amazon in my life. Needed two special tools for my car. VW/Audi of course would’ve charged me a grand total for the originals. Local online retailers had one of the knockoffs for just under 100€ but nobody had the other one. Aliexpress showed a month long delivery time from China and prices even slightly higher than Amazon. Amazon got me both tools for 60€ delivered in under a week. Not complex tools whatsoever, but fabricating shit at home is a pain if you don’t have a welder. I should learn to weld.
I’ve gotten spoiled by grocery delivery, but usually stick to the $25 minimum as best as possible and find that in the end I’m spending far less than wandering the grocery store.
Other than groceries, I do almost all of my shopping online and delivered.
Soap, deodorant, toothpaste all that kinda thing. Household cleaners. Cat food, litter, supplies. Clothes, shoes, etc.
I work a shitload of hours (also online, from home) and I live miles from the nearest town.
EX: If I want to drive through and get a McGross burger and a diet coke, it’s a 30 minute round trip. The closest non-grocery stores are a 30 min drive away, or an hour round trip plus shopping time.
Or I can do three clicks and someone brings me the same shit within a few days. 99.5% of the time, that is sufficient.
Have ypi considered you can get your soap, deororant and stuff at the same time as your groceries?
In their mind, all costs should be born by the consumer (and employees, of course), and none taken from their profits.
Forever.
They demand higher profits every quarter. It has to come from somewhere, and it won’t be from their pile of gold.
This is why our government shouldn’t base policy on what they want. They want everything, it’s a given. We know
They shouldn’t but they do, because the billionaires and corporations have bought the government. That is to say they’ve bribed the officials in the government, though for a while now there are no laws or enforcement mechanisms in place to prevent this kind of corruption.
Lobbying the government is very profitable, far more so than any kind of positive innovation that capitalism is allegedly supposed to promote. It’s why governments criminalize this kind of influence from business interests or wealth. Usually companies just pass laws so that smaller rival businesses cannot compete, but they can also pass laws to give companies huge subsidies, no-bid contracts and tax cuts.
Financialization, it turns out, is even more profitable, which is using financial shenanigans like private equity to turn a reputable business into a giant ponzi scheme. The financial bros are long gone when the massive loan burden of the company is due. It leaves huge sinkholes in the economy, including Toys R Us, which is now a bunch of abandoned warehouses and unused giant outlets.
Currently, our ultra-wealthy, most of whom got rich through financialization, are trying to do the same thing with the US, itself, getting elected officials to pass huge budgets giving them no-bid contracts where they can charge grossly inflated prices. In the meantime, all this is incurs a huge amount of national debt.
Since Trump is doing everything in his power to isolate the US from the rest of the world (he wanted to do this since the beginning of his first term), when the bond market collapses, there won’t be anyone in the world willing to help us out, and the US will be reduced, like Toys R Us to husks of storefronts.
And then, our ultrawealthy can buy up US land for a song, and turn it into quarries, oilfields and data centers as far as the eye can see, though they seem completely oblivious about how they’re going to keep the workforce alive to run them.
Fox News is the very definition of billionaie propaganda.
he wasn’t this concerned with tariffs increasing prices. probably was convinced to remove the tariffs warning after someone told him he would get double paid eventually.
If Amazon can’t operate a delivery business without blatantly exploiting workers and “subcontractors” (between brackets because the subcontractors don’t operate independent at all), then they shouldn’t operate a delivery business. Leave it to the companies that do respect worker’s rights.
The exploitative system that Amazon wants to maintain:
*As the mayor’s office said Monday, at least 11 last-mile facilities have opened across New York City since 2020, with subcontractors running the warehouses as Amazon directs the hiring of delivery drivers, the routes they use, and requires them to use Amazon-branded vehicles and uniforms.But while exerting control over the deliveries, Amazon pushes responsibility for the vehicles used onto the subcontractors, as delivery workers explained in a video released on social media by Mamdani on Monday.
“When injuries and worker accidents skyrocket, Amazon says they have nothing to do with it. They can’t have it both ways,” said the workers.*
https://www.commondreams.org/news/delivery-protection-act-nycWe had a similar situation in my country (Belgium) a few years back, where the most exploitative delivery company was PostNL. The government raided and seized their warehouses for a good while, locked up a few executives for a shorter while, and then unfortunately failed to get convictions, so only administrative fines were handed out. Even though there were no significant fines, it did scare the sector and working conditions have improved since then, which anecdotally had the following consequences: shops offer choices when it comes to delivery (fake next day delivery is no longer standard, but requires a premium), cost per order went up a tiny bit (no more free delivery for small orders + next day delivery is more expensive), and deliveries became more reliable again (delivery time tables are easier to accomplish for the workers if they’re not mathematically impossible).
It’s called a ‘sham contract’ and are (mostly) illegal in Australia, but are still pretty rife. The driving school I used to work for basically had that set-up, which was why I didn’t stick around.
“subcontractors” (between brackets because the subcontractors don’t operate independent at all),
Not to be that guy but those are quotes, not brackets.
You’re right the system is so fucked. I hope it gets better in the USA, our labor practices are exploitative and basically you have to find a good company to work for then you feel stuck because you don’t want to leave for what may be a worse situation. Our healthcare and vacation time and retirement funding are all controlled by our employer (for most people) so that’s just one more thing they hold us hostage with.
Your English is really good, if you didn’t say you were from Belgium I’d say you were a native speaker. Well, I guess your education system doesn’t suck when it comes to language and you learn English early on so maybe you basically are a native speaker (or expat).
Thanks for the correction, it’s a good thing that not everyone is afraid of correcting others.
English education tends to have it easy because of circumstances rather than the schooling system: Dutch is a relatively small language and we mostly don’t dub foreign media. Lots of exposure to English makes it easier to teach English to a higher standard than would otherwise be the case. When I was in school, French was started 2 years earlier, got more hours, and still got worse results :D
If you’re terminally online, which, as a Lemmy user I’d say is a good chance, your exposure to English is going to naturally be a lot more too.
Like, I wish I could speak with you in Dutch or French but other than parler un petit peu francais my language skills are firmly grounded in English and that’s about it. At least it seems to be the language of the internet, so that’s something.
Thanks for the correction, it’s a good thing that not everyone is afraid of correcting others
Normally I wouldn’t even call it out but it seemed like something you might care about since you pointed the punctuation out. I’m glad you took it positively!
Nit. We seriously need to divorce benefits from employment. Especially healthcare. I still hear people say the company pays $X for my healthcare. No fuck they do not. You have a total compensation package that includes the cash part of your salary as well as how much of what could have been your cash part was diverted to pay for healthcare. Have you ever been handed a piece of paper where they itemize your pay? You get $40k and then there’s another line where it says $10k for healthcare etc so they really pay you $50k? Well on the one hand that’s true. The company pays you. You pay for everything else. You just don’t see all of it. They usually give you that paper during raise time to justify lower raises.
We need a mental shift in this country. People need to stop believing companies give you stuff.
The thing is, if Bezos wants the deliveries to take longer, they will. And he can easily lie about it and tell people it’s not his fault.
Translation: FOX News is promoting threats of econonomic terrorism against the general public on behalf of Jeff Bezos
Mamdani creates delivery network for NY, uses delivery revenue to pay livable salaries for drivers instead of buying himself a mega-yacht.
