No u!!
But seriously, if you really think humans are garbage bags it’s a bit rude to keep your anti-natalism to your self, imo. Those sheepish vegans aren’t much better.
Btw I made that post right below this one concurrently; it wasn’t a direct reply to you, so, weird.
But I’m saying give me the good stuff, that’s why we’re here in an intimate setting, as opposed to reddit or twitter or youtube comments or what not.
Man hands on misery to man,
It deepens like a coastal shelf;
Get out as early as you can
And don’t have any kids yourself.
eta: the words are correct but I prefer my punctuation to the original
1 Like
I’m tempted to say much closer to the worst because it’d be snarkier, but how in the world are we close to the best? Lots of people here are good and lots of people not here are good. We act worse than most though imo because 2p2 was a shitty culture developed by a bunch of single poker players in their early 20s and we’ve inherited it. Here or 2p2 though, everybody had been cool irl and I’m sure I’ve met more than 50 people from the forums.
1 Like
Ok, fine, I’m the best, you all suck. You got me.
2 Likes
I didn’t mean 99.9999th percentile, let’s not go crazy. Top quintile? I’d feel confident stating you all are the top quintile of people goodness.
Plus, there are a lot of people in the world, like almost 8 billion. I really feel like that’s overlooked in these discussions. If I said that ~99% of people suck total ass, that still leaves almost 100 million wondrous perfect creations. So when one of you says that you know good people I’m like, of course you do, there are millions upon millions of them out there!
If you’re giving 1% I’ll take it. We were on 0% half an hour ago. That’s like 150 million worthwhile people popping into existence every hour! Prettty good!
1 Like
I know this thread has moved past Amazon sales logistics but…
I just want to note manufacturers sell their wares to retailers at a large disparity at prices. Most items in brick and mortar stores exist because of a car buying like negotiation to get the product.
There are too many factors to list but it’s likely on a lot of products the price manufacturers sell their products for vary greatly. So that cost has always been spread across. Many products have suggested sale prices etc etc.
What Amazon is doing is not something that came out of nowhere.
You may go around to buyers with a price sheet saying your widget is $1.10. The mom and pop will negotiate you “down” to $1.03 plus a promotional budget. Walmart will crinkle up the price sheet, shoot it like a Curry three into the trash, laugh and say “.71 cents a unit. Take it or leave it. Let me know when I can send the P.O., bye”
Then you will likely have 30 other negotiated prices between that extreme and every other retailer is subsidizing walmart and walmart customers.
The problem unique to online vs b&m is the ease of putting up a store and the ease of consumer access.
I was a retail buyer a long time ago. I’m never going to side with the manufacturers. It’s just like those companies who claim they went out of business selling in walmart. Don’t care, that was your choice. If you can’t meet my price, we shake hands and go our separate ways. People wouldn’t feel sorry for a store who went out of business selling everything below cost because otherwise nothing would sell.
1 Like
We’re going to have to agree to disagree here. I think Walmart is a huge problem too. Anyone who has so much market control that not doing business with them isn’t really an option is a problem full stop.
I remember vividly being a kid in a small town in Maine and watching a Walmart open… and every other retailer in town close. Those small retailers were the ones paying the manufacturer 1.03 a unit.
In other news if Walmart tells you that your price is .73 you don’t have a whole lot of choices about whether you’re going to outsource to some third world hell hole. You can do it or you can go out of business. Which actually makes it way easier for you to morally justify closing your plant and laying off all your workers… after all their jobs were gone whether you outsourced or not.
If you have low prices because you are legit making stuff for less than other companies good for you, but most of the time cheap has a horrifying externality somewhere in the supply chain. That isn’t to say that there aren’t plenty of horrifying externalities in the supply chains of products with high price points (Hi Apple!), but I’d argue that those are also the result of a worldwide culture of aggressively unsustainable cost cutting.
As a very small business owner I don’t read this as much different than “Don’t like using a diaper, sorry it was your choice to work at Amazon.” I know a “manufacturer” who sells at Walmart. He’s probably dumb to be doing it, but he’s literally trying to feed his kids and not get evicted.
(manufacturer in quotes because he has some shit made in China ldo)
3 Likes
This doesn’t even get into the downward pressure on the consumers wages that the giant is creating by squeezing everyone they do business with every second of every day. Very hard to give your workers a raise when your price per unit needs to fall steadily over time. Obviously this is compounded by shareholders expecting to see EPS go up at the same time.
We’re literally describing one of the primary mechanisms that drives income inequality. It’s people with leverage chipping away at the share of the pie the people without leverage receive.
This doesn’t even always have to be that indirect. If Amazon has its way delivering parcels will go from being a union job that pays 50k+ with good benefits to gig work that pays 1099 workers 15 bucks an hour net after they cover the cost of the equipment they have to buy for themselves. And that’s how MBA’s ‘cutting costs’ works in a nutshell. They take a shit which then rolls downhill until it lands with a splat on some poor. Amazon couldn’t muscle UPS and Fedex so they went out and recruited some ‘entrepreneurs’ to haul the loads for them who they would have that kind of leverage over.
3 Likes
Yeah… the good news is that freight brokerage is a huge industry with a massive amount of competition. We’re already pretty automated and the parts that aren’t are not something you want a bot doing in competition with yours truly.
Who is psyched for Prime Day? Bring on the deals! In all seriousness I will probably be buying a few random items that I wouldn’t know where else to get (such as a random Asian replacement controller for my Switch) with the free Amazon money my inlaws usually give me for holidays/birthdays.
When we were actually discussing Amazon, people mentioned used items being sold as new, right? My wife bought a “new” Roomba off Amazon that had clearly been used - covered in dust and even dinged up in a few places. Returned it and got an actually new one from Best Buy. Another time she accidentally bought a “mix pack” of La Croix which was just a box that someone had filled with different flavored cans.
The hyper efficiency of modern capitalism
Footage gathered by ITV News shows waste on an astonishing level.And this is from just one of 24 fulfilment centres they currently operate in the UK.Undercover filming from inside Amazon’s Dunfermline warehouse reveals the sheer scale of the waste: Smart TVs, laptops, drones, hairdryers, top of the range headphones, computer drives, books galore, thousands of sealed face masks – all sorted into boxes marked “destroy”.
An ex-employee, who asked for anonymity, told us: "From a Friday to a Friday our target was to generally destroy 130,000 items a week.
"I used to gasp. There’s no rhyme or reason to what gets destroyed: Dyson fans, Hoovers, the occasional MacBook and iPad; the other day, 20,000 Covid (face) masks still in their wrappers.
3 Likes
The solution to the problem of post-scarcity.
wtf
Yeah… The fact that I’m not shocked right now…
The thing they don’t tell you is that the only stuff in the world they aren’t grossly oversupplied on is the stuff that is having a shortage. Literally everything else we have too much of.
My problem with this is that the stuff we are making it out of is finite and the environmental harm we’re incurring to create it is extremely real. As a global civilization we need to make raw materials much much more expensive ASAP.
I needed a new phone case. Because of this thread I skipped Amazon and ordered straight from the manufacturer’s website. They expect to ship my order in … 6-8 business days 
and then another 3-5 business days to have it in my hands
If I had ordered the exact same case on Amazon it would have arrived tomorrow afternoon. Instead, it’ll arrive sometime in July lmao. No wonder the bad guys always win.
If my phone breaks before this case arrives I’m sending a bill to UP headquarters.
3 Likes