- "I've worked everywhere," a forklift truck driver tells me. "And this is the worst. They pay shit because they can. Because there's no other jobs out there. Trust me, I know, I tried. I was working for £12 an hour in my last job. I'm getting £8 an hour here. I worked for Sony before and they were strict but fair. It's the unfairness that gets you here."
- Shops employ 47 people for every $10m in sales, according to research done by a company called ILSR. Amazon employs only 14 people per $10m of revenue. In Britain, it turned over £4.2bn last year, which is a net loss of 23,000 jobs. And even the remaining jobs, the hard, badly paid jobs in Amazon's warehouses, are hardly future-proof. Amazon has just bought an automated sorting system called Kiva for $775m. How many retail jobs, of any description, will there be left in 10 years' time?
I do have me some schadenfreude for Amazon. Love seeing them featured for foul play. It's funny to me how everyone's eager to jump down Walmart's throat, but rarely says boo about Amazon. I'm hardly immune- I buy from them all the time. Yet I would love to see them unionize. That would be funny.
Aye, the focus on cutting every single corner for the sake of "lower prices for consumers" rang all my neurons linked up to the memories of Walmart. I'll gladly pay the extra bucks if it meant better wages for warehouse workers. Sadly, the tactics of employing primarily temporary workers is a common union-busting technique... Hell, Amazon probably has the capital to move shop if workers in one town start acting out.
I wonder about that. Amazon is basically Walmart without the profit. Even the most staunch defenders of Amazon's business model can't get around the math that Amazon's only hope for profit is volume, and the only way to make volume is to eliminate profit. They are a cash poor organization. Rather than link to Business Insider, here's a fun quote from January:We just explained why the market currently loves Amazon and hates Apple.
One of the reasons this drives Apple lovers crazy is that Apple's profits are significantly bigger than Amazon's.
"Significantly" might not be a strong enough word for the difference between the two companies' profits.
Bloomberg editor Mark Gimen points out that Apple earned $13.1 billion in profits last quarter. From the time Amazon turned a profit in 2003 to the end of 2011, Amazon has earned $5.1 billion in profits. (From inception, adding up losses, it's $1.5 billion, says analyst Benedict Evans.)
We want to say that again: Amazon's total profits are ~$5.1 billion. Apple did more than double that in the last three months.
(Amazon's price-earnings ratio is currently a mind-boggling 3,275x. Apple's is 10x. Traditional valuation metrics are obviously pointless for Amazon, but if you were to use Amazon's PE for Apple, the stock would be trading at $144,618 per share, for a market cap of $136 trillion. Those numbers are totally meaningless, but it's funny to think about.)