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PT6A posted:Honestly, though, for all the things people say about running government like a business to improve things, who can actually name a business that's consistently effective and pleasant to deal with? I can't think of one, it's all just shitshows of varying intensities. I've read other people's complaints with Amazon's systems and yeah they're all real things, but in practice at least for me the customer experience is still much better than other companies and I rarely have serious problems. edit: also yes Costco imo is pretty decent. Very barebones but it's fine. I used to work there, and that was also fine. edit2: and let's be real, "lol are there any businesses that people like??" is an extremely D&D thing to ask that's totally out of touch with normal people, very few of whom are socialists who just hate businesses in general Cicero fucked around with this message at 11:42 on Dec 2, 2020 |
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Dec 2, 2020 11:37
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Cicero posted:edit2: and let's be real, "lol are there any businesses that people like??" is an extremely D&D thing to ask that's totally out of touch with normal people, very few of whom are socialists who just hate businesses in general Yeah, this kind of post is totally alien to most people. My experience as a retail customer in the US is that it is extremely convenient and great. There is so much competition in retail, and as a result the businesses, including Amazon, IMO provide great customer service. The companies with bad customer service are the ones with little to no competition--they are even worse than government. It seems to me like a more effective way to improve the lives of American retail workers would be to regulate the retail companies more heavily or to expand the welfare state. I don't think a government-run version of Amazon would be something that non-D&D people would want.
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Dec 2, 2020 12:49
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Recently I ordered some gloves off Amazon. I got 25 sheets of black crepe paper instead. I went to the "return items" section and they wanted me to physically deliver the gloves myself somewhere, probably down a darkened alleyway in Kamurocho. At that point I just accepted that I got scammed and wrote off the £5
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Dec 2, 2020 12:49
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Most people shop at Wal-Mart because it is cheap, not because of any ideology. Amazon as a company is bad for a lot a reasons, but at the same time they do let me buy anything I can think of usually near the cheapest price that shows up with free shipping in a few days. That is a crazy strong argument for the average consumer. I personally try to shop local whenever I can, but as a person who manages a small business I can also directly see what Amazon ECT have done to my bottom line. We are able to keep going because of good customer service and a dedicated group of core customers that value our existence. At the end of the day shop at places you like when you can, and don't be surprised when they shut down if you don't.
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Dec 2, 2020 12:53
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silence_kit posted:It seems to me like a more effective way to improve the lives of American retail workers would be to regulate the retail companies more heavily or to expand the welfare state. I don't think a government-run version of Amazon would be something that non-D&D people would want. A government run Amazon wouldn't work unless you fixed the current problems that make governments in the US largely very very bad at technology.
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Dec 2, 2020 13:05
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Gort posted:Recently I ordered some gloves off Amazon. I got 25 sheets of black crepe paper instead. I went to the "return items" section and they wanted me to physically deliver the gloves myself somewhere, probably down a darkened alleyway in Kamurocho. So you just return a box of paper and get your money. The mistake is assuming Amazon cares either way, both sending you an item (whether the correct one or a box of rocks) and receiving a return (whether the item or a box of rocks) will not be handled by anyone who is paid enough to care.
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Dec 2, 2020 13:10
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Gort posted:Recently I ordered some gloves off Amazon. I got 25 sheets of black crepe paper instead. I went to the "return items" section and they wanted me to physically deliver the gloves myself somewhere, probably down a darkened alleyway in Kamurocho. This summer I ordered a $400 air conditioner that my wife wanted and was not available at any brick and mortar nearby. As expected for such items, it arrived in the manufacture's box with a UPS shipping label. Perhaps as a "gently caress you" to us assholes ordering huge window air conditioners, it was apparently not treated super well by UPS as one of the corners of the unit was crushed. That's an unfounded theory given there was no visible box damage or to the sterofoam. It was clearly cosmetic and didn't affect the units operation as I confirmed by plugging it in. It was also on the outside part so we'd never see the damage in the living room. I don't like getting mildly damaged goods ( I prefer to damage my stuff on my own accord) but theorizing what I figured a return would entail, I was fine with it as is. My wife , however,was super upset and immediately Karened Amazon about returning it. Dreading either having to drop it off at UPS or even just shepherding on my deck for a pickup, my wife relayed the most shocking outcome: Amazon was refunding the full amount of $400 and had to dispose of it ourselves. I get that the cost of shipping of drat thing must have been considerable (to Amazon, not me their Prime member) and paying for a return to them then again to the manufacturer wouldn't make monetary sense. It might even had been the last unit in stock in late July. But the outcome was still amazing to me.
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Dec 2, 2020 13:25
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Cheesus posted:How do the various Amazons around the world work? Are they basically independent entities that are franchised from the US mothership? Little trivia bit: Amazon is now over one million employees, putting them at around half of Walmart.
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Dec 2, 2020 13:28
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Cheesus posted:How do the various Amazons around the world work? Are they basically independent entities that are franchised from the US mothership? I had a similar AC situation and they still had us send it back but they sent UPS to pick it up for free. Fortunately we did find a similar one we've been happy soon after at a brick and mortar. But yeah the one we ordered was "packed" similarly and like both of the back corners were dented in in such a way that it couldn't even go into our window.
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Dec 2, 2020 14:57
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Kohl's has made a cottage industry out of being Amazon's return point. I've had to return two things I've ordered, and both times I just dropped them off at the store. They took care of all the packing and poo poo. I mean it's possible it never actually got returned to Amazon, who knows, but I got an immediate refund for what I returned.
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Dec 2, 2020 20:42
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Cheesus posted:But the outcome was still amazing to me.
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Dec 2, 2020 20:44
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Motronic posted:I mean, you're free to you know.....support the position that the government is full of elected and politically appointed officials that are totally working for the good of their agencies and not their own political power in whatever way gets them through the next election and also that the same level of talented and driven engineers voluntarily and in bulk choose to take lower paying positions with lower standards of working environment where they typically get to use tools that are several years if not more behind those of their peers in private industry. Dunno about other places working for ol' Uncle Sam, but the Department of Energy has a pretty decent standard of a working environment. And there is absolutely, positively no chance to work in the private sector for what I did there. If there was, I'd be fine suicide bombing the place rather than applying there. And the "several years out of date" tools were important for purpose, because those electronics are far and away easier to harden. The zombie roaches where some pretty wild stuff tho.
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Dec 2, 2020 22:09
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Small businesses are better if only because they exert less political power and make billionaires more slowly. If you have time to post on SA then you have time to avoid amazon.
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Dec 10, 2020 15:57
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NaanViolence posted:Small businesses are better if only because they exert less political power and make billionaires more slowly. If you have time to post on SA then you have time to avoid amazon. Not fully true, they form organizations to lobby for terrible poo poo like keeping the minimum wage low. Like a union of sorts, but for jackasses.
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Dec 10, 2020 16:05
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PT6A posted:Not fully true, they form organizations to lobby for terrible poo poo like keeping the minimum wage low. Like a union of sorts, but for jackasses. You didn't read my post. I said less, and that's totally true. I didn't say none.
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Dec 10, 2020 16:08
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NaanViolence posted:Small businesses are better if only because they exert less political power and make billionaires more slowly. If you have time to post on SA then you have time to avoid amazon. LoooL you think the consumer facing retail thing is what Amazon is
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Dec 11, 2020 00:42
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It's a big part of Amazon, yes.
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Dec 11, 2020 00:47
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Try to consider just how many websites and internet services you use in a given day that rely on Amazon Web Services. You can't avoid Amazon. You can try, but don't pretend that you're either making a dent, or even avoiding them.
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Dec 11, 2020 01:39
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Amazon is at this point AWS with its own storefront. Everything about Amazon is either funded, enabled, or powered by AWS.
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Dec 11, 2020 03:17
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Amazon's net income numbers for 2019 are +$7 billion North American retail, -$1.7 billion international retail, +$9.2 billion AWS. AWS is more profitable than storefront, but not overwhelmingly so. Also, I don't think there is anything particularly immoral about how AWS is run? I haven't heard anything particularly bad about AWS sys admin jobs compared to ones at google/microsoft/cloudflare/IBM/rackspace/wherever. They're generic white collar tech jobs, not like the lovely warehouse jobs behind the storefront stuff.
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Dec 12, 2020 22:16
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Foxfire_ posted:Also, I don't think there is anything particularly immoral about how AWS is run? I haven't heard anything particularly bad about AWS sys admin jobs compared to ones at google/microsoft/cloudflare/IBM/rackspace/wherever. They're generic white collar tech jobs, not like the lovely warehouse jobs behind the storefront stuff. The internet is a public good and more-or-less can't function without AWS. Its existence in its current form is a policy failure.
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Dec 12, 2020 22:30
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saintonan posted:Kohl's has made a cottage industry out of being Amazon's return point. I've had to return two things I've ordered, and both times I just dropped them off at the store. They took care of all the packing and poo poo. I mean it's possible it never actually got returned to Amazon, who knows, but I got an immediate refund for what I returned. They also give you a 30% off coupon on your proof of return, and when I returned a poo poo quality hand blender from Amazon and saw that I went over to buy a more expensive/nicer model while I was there.
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Dec 13, 2020 00:12
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TheScott2K posted:The internet is a public good and more-or-less can't function without AWS.
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Dec 13, 2020 01:14
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There's also the frankly undeniable fact that AWS (and cloud services in general) is being propped up by an irrationally exuberant economy. You pay a significant price premium for cloud resources over what you would pay for those same resources in privately-owned fixed infrastructure, and when capital is easy to come by it's easy to make the trade of more expensive for more convenient. AWS is probably going to take a significant hit when the overdue market downturn finally descends upon us; not only because it'll outright wipe out a lot of the dotcombubbleesque companies whose only income streams are venture capitalists that are shoveling money into AWS, but it'll force larger enterprise companies into belt-tightening too and they'll likely start weighing the cost/benefit of owning their own infrastructure versus throwing money at Amazon or Microsoft instead.
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Dec 14, 2020 03:15
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TheScott2K posted:The internet is a public good and more-or-less can't function without AWS. Its existence in its current form is a policy failure. The internet is fine without AWS. It doesn't do anything on the routing/telecom side, and on the cloud subpart of server/storage side, AWS is only about 50% market share and falling. More importantly though, nothing that AWS does is magic. People pick them because of low setup costs & economy of scale effects, but renting space for a server in a colo is still extremely common (AFAIK somethingawful does this for example). If AWS tried to jack up prices, business would just move to google/microsoft or to self-owned things. Like for example, Netflix is AWS's biggest customer. They started off in their own datacenters, moved to entirely AWS because it was cheaper, then recently have started to move some stuff back. From an end-user/public good argument, it really doesn't matter whether TV is streaming from an Amazon-owned datacenter, a Netflix-owned datacenter, or a Equinix-owned datacenter Netflix is renting space in.
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Dec 14, 2020 04:32
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Foxfire_ posted:The internet is fine without AWS. It doesn't do anything on the routing/telecom side, and on the cloud subpart of server/storage side, AWS is only about 50% market share and falling. More importantly though, nothing that AWS does is magic. People pick them because of low setup costs & economy of scale effects, but renting space for a server in a colo is still extremely common (AFAIK somethingawful does this for example). If AWS tried to jack up prices, business would just move to google/microsoft or to self-owned things. Yeah, that's how I see it. There's a reasonable need/demand for some company to do roughly what AWS does, but there's no specific reason it needs to be Amazon, and if it weren't then someone else would pick up the slack. I suppose if it were to disappear overnight that would be an issue in the short-term, but it's rare for things to collapse in that fashion. Whether they make most of their money from AWS or their retail operations doesn't matter; the retail aspect of the company is far more anti-competitive and problematic than AWS.
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Dec 14, 2020 04:38
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Repurpose all defunct malls as skateparks for dogs https://twitter.com/i/status/1338007233704185856 Foxfire_ fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Dec 14, 2020 |
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Dec 14, 2020 04:54
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Foxfire_ posted:The internet is fine without AWS. It doesn't do anything on the routing/telecom side, and on the cloud subpart of server/storage side, AWS is only about 50% market share and falling. More importantly though, nothing that AWS does is magic. People pick them because of low setup costs & economy of scale effects, but renting space for a server in a colo is still extremely common (AFAIK somethingawful does this for example). If AWS tried to jack up prices, business would just move to google/microsoft or to self-owned things. Though to be clear I want to note that Netflix hosts everything except the actual videos in AWS because paying those data charges would be insane.
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Dec 14, 2020 11:06
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biznatchio posted:There's also the frankly undeniable fact that AWS (and cloud services in general) is being propped up by an irrationally exuberant economy. You pay a significant price premium for cloud resources over what you would pay for those same resources in privately-owned fixed infrastructure, and when capital is easy to come by it's easy to make the trade of more expensive for more convenient. Part of societies becoming increasingly developed involves ever-increasing specialization; companies outsourcing their server infra to other companies that specialize in it just looks like another example of that to me.
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Dec 14, 2020 12:04
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I have unfortunately been privy to way too many costs/benefit analysis and I have never seen Cloud not crush private data centers, until you get to whale scale ie Netflix, digital advertising etc. The rental argument falls apart once you compare it with the reoccurring labor/support costs with private. And that’s before you get into stuff like the quality of the data center labor (how many of you have had a server taken out by someone’s butt bumping out a cable?) or the entire platform of tools and capabilities the cloud gives you. I had someone complaining about my lambda expenses for example. He shut up right quick when I asked how much he pays for Informatica(hundreds of thousands of dollars). I do think there will be a trend back to private eventually but it will probably be led by the cloud companies in hybrid architectures. We are nowhere near that.
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Dec 14, 2020 14:15
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PT6A posted:
They're not disconnected though. IIRC the Congressional report on the tech monopolies earlier this year noted that it appeared that Amazon could or would use AWS to monitor their competitors (using AWS) and cross-feeding this to their retail side. One enables the other, in the same way Amazon used its retail marketplace to collect data on rivals to use against them.
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Dec 14, 2020 22:52
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The decline and decadence of the American empire in 13 charts https://twitter.com/wolfofwolfst/status/1339405181440573441?s=19
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Dec 17, 2020 16:44
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Golbez posted:You can't avoid Amazon. You can try, but don't pretend that you're either making a dent, or even avoiding them. I guess it feels better when this is what you tell yourself.
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Dec 17, 2020 22:01
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NaanViolence posted:I guess it feels better when this is what you tell yourself.
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Dec 17, 2020 22:09
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NaanViolence posted:I guess it feels better when this is what you tell yourself. Medium, so YMMV, but this is a post I found a while back describing how difficult it is to separate yourself from Big Tech in the modern era. The description even mentions using Amazon lockers in order to hide from other tech companies. Divorcing ourselves from FAANGs is easier said than done https://natematias.medium.com/https-medium-com-natematias-quitting-facebook-google-aaf8f4c80fbf
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Dec 18, 2020 21:28
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That’s a common damage to air conditioners they’re often not handled appropriately during shipping and not just the last leg to your house even vanning / devanning for the ocean container voyage. Edit: Good lord why did I think that was a new post, did not intentionally necro that.
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Jun 24, 2021 02:44
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https://www.wcvb.com/article/walmart-closing-all-us-stores-thanksgiving-2021/36636382 Walmart will be closed this Thanksgiving. The company says it's doing it to benefit the employees, but the article points out Walmart obviously feels they can make enough sales online to take this hit. I worked several Thanksgivings at a busy Walmart and it was always slower than normal, but never dead.
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Jun 24, 2021 16:18
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Working on an important holiday like thanksgiving or christmas really sucks for your personal life, but not so much actually working. Christmas eve, though... THAT is a day worthy of holiday pay.
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Jun 25, 2021 17:46
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Freakazoid_ posted:Working on an important holiday like thanksgiving or christmas really sucks for your personal life, but not so much actually working. I don't celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas, so years ago while working in the furniture department (which gets no business on the holidays) of a large department store I volunteered to work both days. Partly I did it so that my colleagues with families could be with them, but mostly it was because it was double time for very little work.
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Jun 25, 2021 17:51
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Jack B Nimble posted:https://www.wcvb.com/article/walmart-closing-all-us-stores-thanksgiving-2021/36636382 Give the employees a day of rest before black friday when the gates of hell open and swallow the souls of everyone with a blue vest.
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Jun 25, 2021 18:18
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