At Amazon, we like to pioneer, we like to invent, and we're not willing to do things the normal way if we can figure out a better way.
One area where we've seen particular success is our fulfillment center network. Sustained innovation inside our fulfillment centers has driven improved reliability, accuracy, and speed of delivery, as well as productivity and safety. Our high productivity allows us to pay our fulfillment center employees 30% more than traditional physical retail store employees while still offering customers the lowest prices. Our work on safety practices has been so effective that it's statistically safer to work in an Amazon fulfillment center than in a traditional department store.
O RLY, Jeff Bezos?
While technically importing Chinese factory conditions to America might be definable as "innovation", it's really nothing to brag about on your homepage.
They've really been pushing their "Fulfillment by Amazon" program lately, telling me how much I'll save and how much more profitably I'll be if only I use their extensive system of warehouse Gulags to pack and ship my junk. And if I were a bigger operation they'd probably be right. Packing and shipping stuff isn't cheap- my shipping cost for an 'average' book is about three bucks, not counting labor.
Out of curiosity I did the numbers and using their system would end up being a tiny bit more expensive for me, but even at this point it would probably pay for itself in labor costs- it takes time to pack books, it takes time & money to drive them to the post office.
Y'know, if I didn't mind exploiting workers with no other options.
Qualms about this sort of thing are what make me a bad capitalist, I guess.
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