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.
Fox News sharing billionaire propaganda
Submitted 2 weeks ago by VetOfTheSeas@discuss.online to workreform@lemmy.world
https://discuss.online/pictrs/image/78ce0e21-80ff-409a-97b6-968858be9ef9.jpeg
Comments
Tilgare@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
boonhet@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
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).
JamieDub86@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
I’ll bet they won’t, and they’ll blame the drivers.
Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Jeff isn’t saying anything because Jeff hasn’t been the CEO of Amazon in years…
BillyClark@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
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.
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
Kurtismayfield@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
All you have to say is Scandinavia. Any corporatist concern trolling can be countered by a policy in a Scandinavian country.
Jaycifer@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
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.
Sunspear@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
$600 a year… on extra delivery costs on the average household?
… How much are americans ordering online?
bold_atlas@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
My online orders have 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 not going back to the online shopping horse shit either.
boonhet@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
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.
some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 2 weeks ago
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.
Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Chewy.com might have it at the same price or cheaper.
BillyClark@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
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.
Dohnuthut@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
BillCheddar@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
vaionko@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Have ypi considered you can get your soap, deororant and stuff at the same time as your groceries?
RunawayFixer@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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. * commondreams.org/…/delivery-protection-act-nyc
We 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).
LePoisson@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
“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).
RunawayFixer@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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
daychilde@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Fox News is the very definition of billionaie propaganda.
Avicenna@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
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.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
fox news was always billionaire propaganda, culture war is thier side business to reinforced the billionaire propaganda.
anon_8675309@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
kablez@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Translation: FOX News is conducting threats of econonomic terrorism against the general public on behalf of Jeff Bezos
Mulligrubs@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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 year. 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
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
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.
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
FOX News is the billionaire propaganda mouthpiece. It’s all it does.
Well, MAGA ideology propaganda, but same thing.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
culture maga/ is a side piece to reinforce the billionaire one.
bampop@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Scaling that down by a factor of 50,000, it’s like having a net worth of $5.52 million, and a boat worth $10,000. You spent $1,100 on your wedding and bought your wife a ring worth $100.
anon_8675309@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
And if you did that each day of your life you still couldn’t spend as much as Bezos is worth in on lifetime.
testaccount789@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Why 50k?
bampop@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Just putting it at a level that we could relate to, like someone who is comfortably wealthy but not insanely wealthy. What we see as ludicrous extravagance is cheap and trivial to someone like Bezos.
updn@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
You don’t get rich without exploiting. No wait, I mean you don’t keep your shareholders rich without exploiting.
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
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.
BillCheddar@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Ever notice that these propagandizing assholes never even bother to cite their lies anymore?
Dude just writes “FOX said, trust me” and they eat it up.
Same shit happens on the left. Someone just says something, attributes it without a link, and the comments section eats it up, true or not.
MBech@feddit.dk 2 weeks ago
Yea I’m gonna need a source for all that.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
What he is really saying is that he can’t offer the same level of service at the same cost - and still maintain his OBSCENE profit margin.
I’m tired of these Sociopathic Oligarchs acting like they are entitled to those ridiculous levels of profit, and any “solutions” we suggest need to preserve their profits FIRST, then somehow solve our problems after that.
No, those outrageous profits are the EXACT problem. Those profits should have been shared by the workers who earned them, instead of going 100% to the guy at the top who did literally nothing to earn it.
So he will maintain the same level of service, at the same costs, and he will just have to buy one less yacht, or private jet, or Italian Palazzo this year.
Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Jeff Bezos hasn’t been in charge of Amazon in like 5 years dude.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
He’s collecting the money, he gets the blame.
DGen@piefed.zip 2 weeks ago
They really have an attitude to shift shit like this on the people instead of taking good Business strategies up
Smug_Marmot@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Wait, he only gave her a $5M ring? Was he only applying taxable income to the two-month rule? /s
antianarchist@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Amazon != Jeff Bezos. For quite a while now. The current CEO of Amazon is the issue.
And Jeff Bezos is just a piece of shit by nature, as he has not even have to impress investors anymore. He is an ass, because he can.
anon_8675309@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
He’s the executive chairman and largest shareholder.
Amazon still does what he wants. He just doesn’t have to deal with day to day.
antianarchist@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
- Jeff Bezos has roughly 884 million shares. The Top 10 shareholders range from 31-192 billion shares.
- Jeff Bezos is the Executive Chair of the Board. The board has no executive power over a corporation. The CEO is the executing position. If the CEO.
- The board of directors consists of 7 people in total.
This makes me believe he has way less power over such decisions compared to when he was CEO.
ToiletFlushShowerScream@piefed.world 2 weeks ago
Mamdani creates delivery network for NY, uses delivery revenue to pay livable salaries for drivers instead of buying himself a mega-yacht.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
and unlike guliani/eric adams was trying to suck off trumps knob at every turn for “Favours”
cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Those amazon workers don’t even work for amazon, they work for contractors who pay way under the typical wage of UPS and FedEx.
Gullible@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
I don’t twitter, but wasn’t unusual_whales a senate stock tracker? When’d they sell out?
OldChicoAle@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You either die an unusual whale or live long enough to become a usual whale.
chewypoops@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Andy Jassy is the luckyest Billionaire CEO alive, since leftists have literally never heard of him and throw all their criticisms of Amazon at his predecessor…
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
bezos stepped down to avoid that criticism, but people in the amazon circle(job) Sub know hes also a POS, especially what happened with the Clark guy he ousted in early 2022, he likely pushed all the disastorous facilities to be built.
Unpigged@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
The only way to working class to win is to hijack the capitalism itself. Workers have to create pressure on the stock prices of large corporations themselves through collective action.
IronBird@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
eh, biggest misunderstanding the left has is that anyone actually gives a fuck about shareholders. unless you have a 10%+ stake nobody gives a fuck about shareholders, they exist to hold bags. and with how the US casino is setup specifically, ultimately price action is dictated by whoever has the most $ at play (with the lowest cost average, and assuming fundementals don’t assert themselves)
what workers need to do is learn the value of their labor…which is why US oligarchs have spent so much effort the last 5 decades killing public education (and before that, they designed it around growing compliant factory workers)
Unpigged@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
What I mean is that workers have to implement strategies where bad working conditions have definite negative effect on company valuation.
Randelung@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
anewfox@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
fox news is sharing billionaire propaganda? shocker.
umbrella@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
mainstream media is all propaganda anyway
spontaneoushumancombustion@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’m all for going back to a time when we used to leave the house to go searching for something and only sent away for what we couldn’t find, but could wait for.
Rooskie91@discuss.online 2 weeks ago
It’s a bluff to scare voters. No way in hell Amazon would exit or reduce their footprint a market as lucrative as NYC because of an increase in the cost of doing business.
DMCMNFIBFFF@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
$664 million a year ÷ 7 million in NYC < $94.86/year per person in NYC
umfk@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The tweet says $664 per household. Not $664 million in total.
DMCMNFIBFFF@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Thanks for the correction. 🙂
So let’s say $664 million/year ÷ (8.5 million people ÷ 3.4 people per household) = $265.60 per household per year.
Let’s say $664 million/yr ÷ $100 000/yr per Amazon deliverers = 6640 well-paid Amazon deliverers in NYC.
If NYC has 778.18 sq km of area,
that would be 6640 ÷ 778.18 > 8.5 Amazon workers in any sq km of NYC, or < than 11.82 hectares of NYC per Amazon worker —assuming they all worked the same shifts.
incompetent@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
*8.5 million
DMCMNFIBFFF@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
ty. 🙂
Nomad@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
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.
SeeMarkFly@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Too big to fail just also happens to be too big to care.
Competition is good for the consumer and keeps prices low automatically.
disorderly@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
In my opinion, too big to fail means too big to risk it. Nationalize Amazon.
Serinus@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
arrow74@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
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.
Nomad@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
You might have a point there. Might also just increase the price of prime just a touch.
unwarlikeExtortion@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
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!
skisnow@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
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.
Nomad@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
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.