I'm curious if Lyft and Uber will attempt to work with national grocery store chains to handle delivery. Most grocery stores have some sort of pick-up at store. It seems like Lyft/Uber could be used to then convert that pick-up at store into grocery delivery if they were integrated into the grocery stores checkout process.
That way Lyft and Uber wouldn't have to necessarily create their own storefronts like Instacart has and the grocery chains would be less worried about being commoditized since the grocery chains would control the customer relationship.
I would definitely like to use multiple grocery delivery services so as to keep multiple grocery stores in business to avoid having Amazon/Whole Foods be a single point of failure, but the grocery chains' delivery is backlogged.
It seems counter intuitive for Lyft and Uber to not be finding ways to keep their drivers. Otherwise they will end up working for Amazon doing Whole Foods delivery. In fact, IIRC Lyft was actively encouraging them to go work for Amazon/WF [1].
Why should they use a third party when said chains already have a huge workforce? They can ask them to make deliveries, pay them good including a hefty compensation for using their own car (an X amount per mile and / or hour).
Uber / Lyft need to be put out of business, not given extra work to keep them in business. Their drivers need to be given a proper contract, pay by the hour / week / month instead of this fucky zero-hour contract, because as it turns out everyone that depends on work from Uber is left in the dirt right now, because they're not actually employees.
mlrtime 1467 days ago [-]
Because they aren't doing it.
crispyporkbites 1468 days ago [-]
That would not be very efficient though, instead of a chilled single truck carrying a days worth of deliveries targeting one geographic area you’d have 20 times as many uber drivers turning up at random times. All of whom have to be paid, not to mention the burning of fuel.
I don’t think uber have the right setup for this and even if they did I can’t see how they have a competitive edge.
dan_quixote 1468 days ago [-]
We don't need efficiency right now, we need resiliency. Stock is inconsistent and smaller suppliers/grocers are at serious risk. I don't care if necessities cost a little more or take a little longer to show up. I do care that my family stays fed and healthy.
somethoughts 1468 days ago [-]
As far as I know Instacart shoppers are using personal cars for their deliveries. I don't believe they require refrigerated trucks.
Agreed Uber/Lyft might not be setup for groceries just yet but it seems like it'd be pretty easy to provide Kroger and Safeway with an API hook to schedule an Uber/Lyft driver for pick-up and delivery (versus setting up a store front and sync'ing up all the inventory with Kroger and Safeway like Instacart did/does).
d1zzy 1468 days ago [-]
Not more inefficient than everyone driving their single occupancy car to grocery store and buy stuff, as things worked before the pandemic.
wlesieutre 1468 days ago [-]
They wouldn’t be better than the regular grocery delivery truck, but they have spare capacity when the demand for grocery deliveries has probably skyrocketed.
I wouldn’t think there are enough refrigerated trucks available in the world for grocery stores to all scale their delivery fleets rapidly at the same time.
wlesieutre 1468 days ago [-]
Plus grocery stores wouldn’t necessarily want more trucks if they anticipate this pandemic-fueled demand being temporary. If the stores buy more trucks, the manufacturers build more trucks to meet that demand, what happens with all the extra trucks once this pandemic is over? Will all the new delivery customers keep getting their groceries delivered, or will many switch back to shopping at the store?
Given both those factors, UberEats style deliveries for groceries could make decent sense as a temporary measure.
fovc 1467 days ago [-]
I'm guessing you are not in the US :-) Over here, a lot of grocery delivery is done with personal cars, uber style.
Don't want to sound too much like a shill, but Peapod and https://shop.usepepper.com/ (NYC only) operate more like how you describe
losteric 1468 days ago [-]
Lyft/Uber could batch the deliveries, deliver within an hour specified by the customer... those companies already have data on ratings, they can pull the best drivers on-demand and offer premium pay that's still substantially less than the overhead of a store's truck + driver... plus offering last-mile logistics for multiple stores allows for greater efficiency over store-dedicated trucks.
Insulated boxes, bags with ice, or have the stores define packaging... maybe the store packages goods separately in reusable cloth / insulated bags as appropriate for goods with a deposit for return (in-store or during the next delivery).
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rococode 1467 days ago [-]
That sounds a lot like Uber Eats though. It might even be more efficient than Uber Eats, actually, since instead of going to restaurants all over the city, the drivers can just pick up from a couple specific places.
vidarh 1467 days ago [-]
Uber Eats and Deliveroo both have grocery stores on their platforms where I live (London).
It's an ok add-on for "emergencies" but can't compete with the streamlined delivery solutions on cost.
math0ne 1467 days ago [-]
In Canada take out places are adding grocery boxes, wine and beer to their take out menu's. Seems like this may not even need to involve grocery stores. Why not get some essentials if you are already getting delivery.
hef19898 1467 days ago [-]
In my opinion, every solution that uses existing infrastructure and services is a good one. Because time is the main issue.
One big difference between this crisis and past catastrophes, which a lot of organizations are well prepared to handle, is, that noye all infrastructure is intact. Processes and supply chains are disrupted on a global scale, so.
Comparing that to, say, the tsunami catastrophes. In these cases, infrastructure was destroyed locally or, at the worst case, regional. The challenge was to build ad-hoc infrastructure to get stuff out of the global supply chains to the region. This approach doesn't work now.
I like the idea if piggybacking on food delivery services. There should be at least one in every village, or at least near by. It could run decentralized. And the principal would scale pretty well.
jxramos 1468 days ago [-]
From a customer's perspective they appear to be highly adaptive. I've experienced a range of changes to the workflow, eg prime now orders will replace items with near substitutes. You get a time sensitive text message to confirm whether you approve of the replacement. Otherwise they'll make the choice for you upon decision timeout. Non essential items still come, they appear to be pushed back a month. This seems to be contingent on where the item is in the warehouse network. Stuff that shipped closer to home seemed to be a handful of days delayed or something. Jury's still out for us on how subscribe and save will behave since we are awaiting the next batch. Amazon has also implemented quotas on all sorts of products. Grocery delivery orders used to reset their clocks at midnight, now they seem to randomize it since people caught on and jumped in on the order openings. They've been rolling out a steady stream of these workflow changes; I find it very impressive and dynamic that they can carry this out in near realtime.
freyir 1467 days ago [-]
Amazon completely lost my trust due to their poor quality control and flagrant reselling of counterfeit goods. And that makes me hesitant to buy their groceries.
But Covid-19 has kind of forced my hand. They've consistently provided same-day deliveries on Prime Now, whereas Instacart almost never has any available delivery slots, or if they do, the shortest delivery time is almost a week.
mancerayder 1467 days ago [-]
I'm in NYC and it's the reverse. Amazon / Whole Foods is a nightmare for delivery. OK, workflow is I spend 30 minutes putting things in my cart. Sometimes as I click it says No Longer Available. Eventually I get to check out. No delivery slots available. I check back again a few hours later. Now most things have been autoremoved from my cart. Try again. Same result. Tried every few days for two weeks.
Instacart had same day delivery and a shopper that interacts with you on the app to ask about substitutions, using the automation of the app, and sometimes chat and pictures. Great luck with that.
The Amazon grocery shopping experience has been an absolute nightmare. I've stopped even bothering.
freyir 1466 days ago [-]
I agree, the way Prime Now removes half the items in your cart is infuriating. Especially when the items are still available and you can manually add them back.
lozaning 1467 days ago [-]
I dont buy it from Amazon it goes on me or in me. In me referring to things like protein powder and vitamins, but I think if was in the market for other things to put inside me I'd shy away from amazon for those too.
ilamont 1468 days ago [-]
Amazon has also made some changes for third-party sellers, many of whom lost income when Amazon stopped inbound shipments of non-essential goods a few weeks ago and extended order fulfillment of many such items to April 21. This announcement appeared on the Seller Central website yesterday:
In light of the evolving COVID-19 crisis, we will waive two weeks of your inventory storage fees for products stored in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, and the Czech Republic. This is in addition to the previously announced updates including:
- Waiving the April 15 long-term storage fees for inventory stored in the US and Europe.
- Pausing repayments and interest until April 30 for sellers with direct loans from Amazon Lending.
- Waiving April fees for those using Seller Account Management or the Launchpad program.
We are also making policy adjustments to proactively mitigate the impact of the crisis on the health of your Amazon seller account and you can now use the updated Restock Inventory page and Restock report to check which products are eligible for shipment creation.
themagician 1468 days ago [-]
In Australia they are actually asking companies to remove their inventory from Amazon to make space for essential items.
Is linking to stolen content allowed on this site?
black_puppydog 1467 days ago [-]
Seems like a good place to turn to this "invisible hand" I hear so much about.
If work is more risky, and you're standing to make a killing, consider paying your workers better?
If that ends up putting your margin so low that you can't sustain operations, well then maybe you weren't so competitive after all...
earthboundkid 1467 days ago [-]
> If that ends up putting your margin so low that you can't sustain operations, well then maybe you weren't so competitive after all...
I think that the crisis is revealing that a lot of "efficiency" in today's economy was just disguised fragility. If we can't take month off without triggering social collapse, uh, maybe we're not building a robust system?
a_lieb 1468 days ago [-]
Are there any online stores where we have good evidence that they have good practices around COVID-19? Despite the crushing demand, Costco seems like one employer that might try extra hard to see after the safety of its workers.
They deliver groceries from restaurant suppliers, so it's logistically more efficient, helps support those businesses through the crisis, and steers away from the AMZN monoculture.
Disclosure: friend of one of the founders
claudeganon 1467 days ago [-]
Given everything that’s been going on with Instacart and Amazon strikes, can you speak to compensation and safety for their delivery workers?
AznHisoka 1468 days ago [-]
It looks like the number of visits to Amazon the 2nd week of March increased the same % as it did the 3rd week of Feb (year to year). why would this be true if the pandemic only became more urgent in Mid March?
pampa 1468 days ago [-]
Some people looked at China and Italy, extrapolated, and sarted preparing before SHTF?
davidw 1468 days ago [-]
That is exactly what I did. I have friends and family in Italy (they're doing ok so far). I saw what was happening and that there was no reason to think "it can't happen here".
AznHisoka 1468 days ago [-]
That might be true but my guess is that the Comscore data is wildly inaccurate. it would have been helpful if they included January traffic data as a benchmark. A real shame they didn’t.
dboreham 1468 days ago [-]
I began buying things on Feb 24th. Pulse oximeter, nebulizer, spent some time researching O2 concentrators before concluding too difficult to do supplementary O2 at home. Anyway, even then those things were getting hard to find on Amazon.
delfinom 1467 days ago [-]
Many people have brains and use them as well as not drinking the America #1 koolaid. The end result is realizing we were going to get hit with the virus pretty early on, even in January once China did their lockdown.
deeblering4 1468 days ago [-]
Are any companies providing hazard pay to employees being exposed to COVID-19?
It seems like an appropriate thing to do for “essential” workers who are being regularly exposed.
jmckib 1468 days ago [-]
Not sure if it counts as hazard pay, but it says in this article that all Amazon fulfillment employees are getting a $2 raise through April.
Cthulhu_ 1467 days ago [-]
$2 per hour I presume, and do they get paid overtime as well?
gwbas1c 1468 days ago [-]
I've been interviewing for a role within AWS and the process is frustrating. I've had two situations where the interviewer didn't show up and they rescheduled later.
I hope this isn't "business as usual" when interviewing with Amazon.
EpicEng 1468 days ago [-]
My brother has had an interview scheduled for weeks, moved many times. First he was supposed to meet with the hiring manager... then they said the hiring manager wasn't approved (they had some other term) for interviewing. Then the hiring manager changed. Then the group he would be joining changed. Then the boss of the second hiring manager in the old group called him directly and offerred a 1 year contract to hire position and asked that he not mention it to the internal recruiter (what?!). Now the hiring manager has changed again.
Ridiculous.
rcaught 1467 days ago [-]
How many red flags does he want?
EpicEng 1460 days ago [-]
Apparently at least one more. That sweet sweet $AMZN is too tempting.
bvandewalle 1467 days ago [-]
I have had the same experience in the past. 2 phone interviews that never called and the recruiter feeling sorry and claiming this is "exceptional".
It must be so hard being the biggest online retailer in the West when literally every brick and mortar shuts in one go. These things are minor, everyone is still ordering from amazon by default. Coronavirus is more like a wet dream for Bezos than a challenge.
colechristensen 1468 days ago [-]
All you have to do is sell food to stay open. Sometimes not even that. Most of the big box retailers added grocery in the last couple of decades. Even office max was open a few days ago when I needed some shipping supplies.
kaikai 1468 days ago [-]
Stores that sell equipment for working from home are considered essential, and Office Max definitely counts.
CydeWeys 1468 days ago [-]
This varies significantly on a state by state basis.
colechristensen 1468 days ago [-]
I'm in Santa Clara county, CA. Where it first started and the first restrictions were put in place (a short walk from the first case in a hospital in the US). I can imagine that there are a few places stricter, but I haven't heard of any of the traditional big box stores closing (at least any of them which would have a banana for sale).
jjav 1468 days ago [-]
Most places also deliver, useful particularly now. I needed some office supplies recently and amazon was showing delivery more than a month away. I tried office max and they had it in stock for free overnight delivery.
cowsandmilk 1468 days ago [-]
Many of them are starting to feel the strain now though; normally you can order delivery from Home Depot stores, they have moved to a $45 minimum for that service.
freepor 1468 days ago [-]
This is what happens when an economy pays essential workers like throwaway workers and then the throwaway workers realize it.
krapp 1468 days ago [-]
The throwaway workers always realized it, and so did the public who mostly didn't care as long as they got their stuff on time, and probably still don't.
If anything, hostility towards Amazon employees seems to have increased because now the public feels like their complaints are interfering with the delivery of essential goods.
sickleave 1468 days ago [-]
History repeats itself, and a lot of people seem to have no idea. It's funny how it's okay to pay essential people crap wages until they decide to take a stand and assert their worth.
blunte 1468 days ago [-]
Fortunately for Amazon, while their retail side may be suffering, their cloud side should be booming.
ctvo 1467 days ago [-]
Where did you get their retail side is suffering? The article is about the massive, holiday like demands and how they’re working to meet it.
davidw 1468 days ago [-]
Everyone should have paid sick leave so they don't have to choose between doing the right thing (staying home) and paying rent. Everyone should have a safe working environment.
mcv 1467 days ago [-]
Not paying for sick leave would mean that an employer forces their sick employees to infect their healthy employees, hurting the continued operation of the company.
Even from a business perspective, paid sick leave is obvious. From a human perspective doubly so.
plandis 1467 days ago [-]
I disagree if you are arguing for the sick pay Amazon workers are walking off demanding. They are asking for unlimited sick pay if they decide they need to self isolate. Let’s say Amazon goes and capitulates to this demand. Why would anyone in their right mind bother coming into work when you get full pay, get to do zero work, less social interaction, all from the comfort of your couch?
adelHBN 1467 days ago [-]
Amen brother. People shouldn't have to choose.
ajross 1468 days ago [-]
Obviously you're being downvoted by the libertarians here, but possibly also by people who think this isn't relevant to the discussion. To those folks: it absolutely is.
Employers are never going to get this right. Amazon specifically (and obviously they're not alone) is looking at a huge financial impact to "doing the right thing" here. Yes, we'd all want our employers to take this kind of safety seriously, and a few will, but most of them won't either because they don't care or because they're worried their competitors don't. Bezos isn't any different than anyone else here, really. Maybe someone will get to him to be kind, maybe they won't, but for employees that's just not something that's ever going to be a security guarantee.
Realistically, governments are the only entities capable of providing this kind of security in extremis. Employers, at best, get this right (due to competetive pressure) during steady state situations. When the world blows up, they can't help.
nostromo 1468 days ago [-]
If the government wants people to have something, the government should provide it, and provide it to everyone.
Does the government want people to have healthcare? Then the government should pay for it, not require employers to pay for it. If the government wants people to have paid leave or a pension, then they should pay for that too.
Imagine if we tied other benefits to employment. Maybe the government could require your company buy you a car and dinner every night. People need transportation and food, right? So lets make employers provide it! It's free for the government and legislators get to feel virtuous for providing it, when actually they have just offloaded their costs to someone else.
It's madness. The government should provide these things, and employers should focus on whatever it is they do best -- not being a healthcare provider.
davidw 1468 days ago [-]
> It's madness. The government should provide these things, and employers should focus on whatever it is they do best -- not being a healthcare provider.
The startup I worked for in Italy had about 40 people by the time I left.
They dedicated ZERO person hours to anything health care related. No insurance, no administration, nothing.
Italy has plenty of other obstacles for startups of course, so that in and of itself didn't make it easier to do one there - but what a nice thing for a business to be able to ignore.
nimish 1468 days ago [-]
Agreed, and employers should pay taxes to fund the government services they rely on. Unfortunately the corporate world has decided that having to fund an extra HR person to deal with healthcare is preferable to any sort of taxation and oversight. Society suffers. The last 50-75 years of corporate thought has been to attack any sort of taxation entirely.
bluGill 1467 days ago [-]
It is good for companies, it makes it that much harder to quit or retire if you can't ensure your health care remains.
Mirioron 1467 days ago [-]
It doesn't really matter what tax pays for this. Ultimately, the customer pays for it (the average person). Corporate taxes are just a roundabout way of taxing the investors. This means that it will affect where investors are willing to invest - they will still want investments to pay back what they expected. This means that investors will simply put their money elsewhere to get their expected returns.
mcv 1467 days ago [-]
Also because healthcare and other benefits provided by your employer are unreliable. If your employer can easily fire you when you're sick (it's illegal where I live, but there are probably ways around it, and I understand that in many US states it is easy to fire people for any reason), then getting sick directly threatens your health insurance, at exactly the time you need it most.
Also, if something is essential, then it's also essential for unemployed people. Providing it through employment makes no sense.
fyfy18 1467 days ago [-]
Don't forget that you are still paying for healthcare even if it's not called a tax. Part of the revenue a company makes needs to go towards paying for healthcare, which comes out of the pockets of investors, owners and employees, and customers need to pay higher prices to cover it. Maybe it doesn't go to the government, but at the end of the day it is effectively a tax, as you have no choice over whether you pay it or not.
In 2017 the US spent roughly twice per person on healthcare than France ($10,224 vs $4,902) [0], the next few months will show how effective that spending has been...
The government requires a minimum wage, and companies pay for it...
malandrew 1468 days ago [-]
The government doesn't pay for anything. Taxpayers do.
Now I'm not against taxpayers paying for something so long as all taxpayers pay for that thing that everyone enjoys. What isn't right is when someone votes for a tax they won't feel the burden of.
Everyone who gets the benefit should also have skin in the game to pay for that benefit.
bosswipe 1467 days ago [-]
> What isn't right is when someone votes for a tax they won't feel the burden of.
The real freeloaders are the well off republican voters that keep voting for more and more tax cuts, deficits be damned, putting trillions of dollars of burden onto the next generation.
markstos 1468 days ago [-]
So children should pay for playgrounds and schools?
jonhohle 1468 days ago [-]
Schools are a net benefit to a community. According to some studies, it’s an annual 18% return on investment and a lifetime 11x return per dollar spent. There are not many places that one can get that kind of return over many decades. We’re pretty foolish for not investing more.
malandrew 1467 days ago [-]
Or you can bring in highly educated and highly motivated immigrants at almost $0 cost to your taxpayers. It's just the cost of vetting and processing applications. You also have the benefit of only getting the good eggs with few to none of the bad eggs. It's almost certain that H1Bs and other skill-based visas have a much much higher rate of return.
mcv 1467 days ago [-]
I'm not opposed to the idea of immigration, but proposing it as a replacement for education is bizarre. If you have a population of uneducated idiots, pretty soon you won't be able to afford those highly educated immigrants anymore.
dexterdog 1468 days ago [-]
If they have income yes. If they are supported by adults then those are the people paying.
ineedasername 1468 days ago [-]
By the time my kid pays for his sandbox he'll be too old to care about it.
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mcv 1467 days ago [-]
> "The government doesn't pay for anything. Taxpayers do."
By that logic, taxpayers also don't pay, but their employers do. And they don't either, but their customers do. It's the cycle of money in every economy.
But perhaps more important than that: in a democracy, the government represents the citizens (including the taxpayers). The government pays for stuff on behalf of the citizens for the benefit of the citizens. At least if the system functions correctly.
9nGQluzmnq3M 1468 days ago [-]
Smart employers don't offer sick leave out of the goodness of their heart: if the sick employee stays home, they don't infect others, so overall productivity is higher. And of course this applies even more with the pandemic.
ajross 1468 days ago [-]
Yeah, but that's a long term kind of decision-making and market pressure that, as I said, really only works in a steady state environment.
Right now Amazon needs to worry that if they offer this, everyone will take off sick out of fear. They have to worry that if that happens that it won't happen to Walmart, who didn't offer the benefit. There isn't time for a feedback cycle to work, they're worried about losing a years worth of revenue right now.
You just can't trust an employer's self interest to align with ours at moments like this, for the same reason you can't trust our own self interests to align (c.f. people working when they're sick because they need the money, or sick new yorkers fleeing to other states -- both decisions made in immediate self interest).
krapp 1468 days ago [-]
And Amazon, being Amazon, generously offers their employees unlimited unpaid time off for the time being.
grecy 1468 days ago [-]
> Employers are never going to get this right. Amazon specifically (and obviously they're not alone) is looking at a huge financial impact to "doing the right thing" here. ....Realistically, governments are the only entities capable of providing this kind of security in extremis.
Oh come on. Amazon make huge profits (and McDonald's and Apple and Starbucks, etc.)
Yes, providing this kind of sick leave would reduce their profits, but they are absolutely 100% capable of doing so.
In almost every developed country in the world they do.
The government just needs to make it law, then Amazon won't be at a disadvantage to their competitors, they'll all be on a level playing field.
It's just a question of what's more important - corporate profits, or employee health, safety and ability to pay rent and buy food.
ajross 1467 days ago [-]
> The government just needs to make it law
That's exactly what I said.
EdwardDiego 1467 days ago [-]
> Amazon make huge profits
Not taxable profits ;)
halfjew22 1468 days ago [-]
> Bezos isn't any different than anyone else here, really. Maybe someone will get to him to be kind
I just can't help but think that this is an incredibly naive model of how corporations function.
I'm not saying I disagree with the premise but I do think it would be incredibly helpful to the people pushing for this to give off a greater sense of how multi billion dollar corporations function. It just really can't be that simple.
EdwardDiego 1467 days ago [-]
Sick leave backed up by social security works well in most social democracies I'm aware of.
jdminhbg 1467 days ago [-]
> Obviously you're being downvoted by the libertarians here,
Much like how when libertarians haven't touched the levers of power in decades you get indignant tweets about how they've caused the government to fail at something, we get comments here about how the top-voted comment in a given thread is "downvoted by the libertarians."
lonelappde 1468 days ago [-]
Sick leave is just "higher pay + unpaid leave" with extra steps. Sick leave means "get a doctor's note to prove you are sick" or wrestling with what counts as "sick".
kasey_junk 1468 days ago [-]
It’s also a culture of managers sending you home for the good of the team without it being punitive.
arthens 1467 days ago [-]
No it's not.
Unpaid leave puts people in the position of having to decide between health (and not infecting their coworkers) and losing money. Paid sick leave instead puts employees in the position of being able to look after themselves (and their coworkers) without penalties.
It might seem like a trivial difference for people who make decent money, but it's a huge difference for people who are not in a good financial situation.
> get a doctor's note to prove you are sick
Only if you work for a company that doesn't trust its employees.
I've only worked in countries with paid sick leave, and I honestly don't remember if I ever had to present a doctor's note.
chii 1467 days ago [-]
>> higher pay + unpaid leave
if your pay was low, and you get sick leave, then management is going to count the sick leave as part of your pay (even tho you don't necessarily use it up). This then incentivises the worker to "use up" sick leave even if they aren't sick.
Higher pay + unlimited sick leave (unpaid) means that the pay is upfront. The total amount paid being the same would mean that the worker doesn't have to fake a sickie every now and then to get their fair share of their wages. Managers also would not see any sick leave as the worker taking advantage.
hef19898 1467 days ago [-]
In Germany you only need one for more than three calendar days. Which is fair enough, if you ask me.
grecy 1468 days ago [-]
> Sick leave means "get a doctor's note to prove you are sick" or wrestling with what counts as "sick".
It doesn't have to be that way.
Every job I've ever had it's just a matter of emailing or calling my boss to say I won't be in, and that's that.
No Doctor. No authorization. No hassle. Unlimited days. Sick people shouldn't be at at work, and any job worth a damn trusts it's employees to do the right thing.
Jobs in Canada and Australia.
tomc1985 1468 days ago [-]
That's the way its always been for me, in the US. That sort of attitude is a failure of trust up there next to spurious drugtesting
kbutler 1467 days ago [-]
No. Incentives matter.
Sick leave = "stay home if sick, still get same money"
"higher pay + unpaid leave" = "stay home if sick, get less money"
Polylactic_acid 1468 days ago [-]
It ensures that they will always be paid enough to be able to take days off when sick and that they will always be able to take them when needed with 0 notice. There is a reason the rest of the world requires permanent employees to have them.
Mirioron 1467 days ago [-]
I think you're missing the point the parent is making. The parent is talking about total compensation.
An employer has x amount of dollars allotted for an employee. This x includes everything that the employer needs to employ you: your salary, your vacation time (and pay), you tools etc. If you require that employers provide sick leave then x is still going to stay the same. That sick leave will simply come from some other pool, such as the salary or the money allotted for training or tools.
sundaeofshock 1467 days ago [-]
Or perhaps it will come from the profit of the company?
PopeDotNinja 1467 days ago [-]
What if the to the company is unprofitable, as many companies choose to be while growing? No one is allowed to be sick?
Polylactic_acid 1467 days ago [-]
The company doesn't have a right to exist. The employee should have a right to sick days.
gwbas1c 1468 days ago [-]
That's why there is a difference between a contractor and a W2 employee.
Contractors get "higher pay + unpaid leave"
larzang 1468 days ago [-]
So when does this amazing higher pay kick in for the thousands of Amazon contractors?
mirimir 1467 days ago [-]
The "free market" response would be something like "when there's a shortage of them".
But in fact, it's misleading to call them "contractors". Back in the day, they would have been called "temps".
harry8 1467 days ago [-]
Ignoring differences in cashflow timing as irrelevant? Bold move if you made decisions that matter based on that. There's a whole island of bankers who will tear you a new one if you bring that weak stuff in their house...
tehjoker 1468 days ago [-]
No it's quite different. With higher pay, people will want to avoid going home because if they keep working while sick, they'll get paid more. If you have paid sick leave, they will stay home. See the difference?
repsilat 1467 days ago [-]
This is a good point.
The importance of sick leave isn't the gross expected balance of pay and work -- as the grandparent points out, for some values those things will be equal, and employees won't prefer one or the other. (Or, better yet, employees might prefer the higher wages because there's more optionality to it -- they get paid more if they're healthy, and they get paid the same if they're unhealthy.)
That misses the point, though. The real importance of sick-leave is about marginal incentives. If an employee is sick, they don't need to weigh one more day of pay against the risk of infecting their coworkers -- they have no incentive to come into the office.
How about treating workers with dignity and respect (by paying them what they're worth and giving proper benefits)? That would be a great start, in case anyone from Amazon is reading this and is curious where to begin.
beamatronic 1468 days ago [-]
Amazon, treat your workers well, or you won't have a business.
robertfw 1468 days ago [-]
Bezos asking for donations for a fund to help his workers was the final straw for me. The gap between his wealth, and the way they treat workers, is obscene.
I think that was the Whole Foods CEO, not Bezos himself.
jacobush 1468 days ago [-]
I have to grudgingly agree on this single point. Amazon are still actively deceiving customers and generally being horrible though.
But hey, enjoy Prime.
SketchySeaBeast 1468 days ago [-]
Yes, I'm not saying it's not horrible, just not horrible in this one way.
tick_tock_tick 1468 days ago [-]
Amazon treats workers as good if not better than most of the equivalent positions at any other company. The issue is that unacceptably low and will continue to be low as long as people hope to badger Amazon into changing itself rather than enforcing a minimum with laws.
Your statement is 100% incorrect they could treat them even worse and still do fine. It need to be done within the legal system cause people just don't care enough or don't have the time to research every company.
ThrowawayR2 1468 days ago [-]
If it didn't stop Walmart, it seems unlikely it'll stop Amazon.
Rendered at 14:48:04 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
That way Lyft and Uber wouldn't have to necessarily create their own storefronts like Instacart has and the grocery chains would be less worried about being commoditized since the grocery chains would control the customer relationship.
I would definitely like to use multiple grocery delivery services so as to keep multiple grocery stores in business to avoid having Amazon/Whole Foods be a single point of failure, but the grocery chains' delivery is backlogged.
It seems counter intuitive for Lyft and Uber to not be finding ways to keep their drivers. Otherwise they will end up working for Amazon doing Whole Foods delivery. In fact, IIRC Lyft was actively encouraging them to go work for Amazon/WF [1].
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/27/21197699/lyft-amazon-coro...
Uber / Lyft need to be put out of business, not given extra work to keep them in business. Their drivers need to be given a proper contract, pay by the hour / week / month instead of this fucky zero-hour contract, because as it turns out everyone that depends on work from Uber is left in the dirt right now, because they're not actually employees.
I don’t think uber have the right setup for this and even if they did I can’t see how they have a competitive edge.
Agreed Uber/Lyft might not be setup for groceries just yet but it seems like it'd be pretty easy to provide Kroger and Safeway with an API hook to schedule an Uber/Lyft driver for pick-up and delivery (versus setting up a store front and sync'ing up all the inventory with Kroger and Safeway like Instacart did/does).
I wouldn’t think there are enough refrigerated trucks available in the world for grocery stores to all scale their delivery fleets rapidly at the same time.
Given both those factors, UberEats style deliveries for groceries could make decent sense as a temporary measure.
Don't want to sound too much like a shill, but Peapod and https://shop.usepepper.com/ (NYC only) operate more like how you describe
Insulated boxes, bags with ice, or have the stores define packaging... maybe the store packages goods separately in reusable cloth / insulated bags as appropriate for goods with a deposit for return (in-store or during the next delivery).
It's an ok add-on for "emergencies" but can't compete with the streamlined delivery solutions on cost.
One big difference between this crisis and past catastrophes, which a lot of organizations are well prepared to handle, is, that noye all infrastructure is intact. Processes and supply chains are disrupted on a global scale, so.
Comparing that to, say, the tsunami catastrophes. In these cases, infrastructure was destroyed locally or, at the worst case, regional. The challenge was to build ad-hoc infrastructure to get stuff out of the global supply chains to the region. This approach doesn't work now.
I like the idea if piggybacking on food delivery services. There should be at least one in every village, or at least near by. It could run decentralized. And the principal would scale pretty well.
But Covid-19 has kind of forced my hand. They've consistently provided same-day deliveries on Prime Now, whereas Instacart almost never has any available delivery slots, or if they do, the shortest delivery time is almost a week.
Instacart had same day delivery and a shopper that interacts with you on the app to ask about substitutions, using the automation of the app, and sometimes chat and pictures. Great luck with that.
The Amazon grocery shopping experience has been an absolute nightmare. I've stopped even bothering.
In light of the evolving COVID-19 crisis, we will waive two weeks of your inventory storage fees for products stored in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, and the Czech Republic. This is in addition to the previously announced updates including:
- Waiving the April 15 long-term storage fees for inventory stored in the US and Europe.
- Pausing repayments and interest until April 30 for sellers with direct loans from Amazon Lending.
- Waiving April fees for those using Seller Account Management or the Launchpad program.
We are also making policy adjustments to proactively mitigate the impact of the crisis on the health of your Amazon seller account and you can now use the updated Restock Inventory page and Restock report to check which products are eligible for shipment creation.
If work is more risky, and you're standing to make a killing, consider paying your workers better?
If that ends up putting your margin so low that you can't sustain operations, well then maybe you weren't so competitive after all...
I think that the crisis is revealing that a lot of "efficiency" in today's economy was just disguised fragility. If we can't take month off without triggering social collapse, uh, maybe we're not building a robust system?
They deliver groceries from restaurant suppliers, so it's logistically more efficient, helps support those businesses through the crisis, and steers away from the AMZN monoculture.
Disclosure: friend of one of the founders
It seems like an appropriate thing to do for “essential” workers who are being regularly exposed.
I hope this isn't "business as usual" when interviewing with Amazon.
Ridiculous.
"Amazon fires worker who led strike over virus"
If anything, hostility towards Amazon employees seems to have increased because now the public feels like their complaints are interfering with the delivery of essential goods.
Even from a business perspective, paid sick leave is obvious. From a human perspective doubly so.
Employers are never going to get this right. Amazon specifically (and obviously they're not alone) is looking at a huge financial impact to "doing the right thing" here. Yes, we'd all want our employers to take this kind of safety seriously, and a few will, but most of them won't either because they don't care or because they're worried their competitors don't. Bezos isn't any different than anyone else here, really. Maybe someone will get to him to be kind, maybe they won't, but for employees that's just not something that's ever going to be a security guarantee.
Realistically, governments are the only entities capable of providing this kind of security in extremis. Employers, at best, get this right (due to competetive pressure) during steady state situations. When the world blows up, they can't help.
Does the government want people to have healthcare? Then the government should pay for it, not require employers to pay for it. If the government wants people to have paid leave or a pension, then they should pay for that too.
Imagine if we tied other benefits to employment. Maybe the government could require your company buy you a car and dinner every night. People need transportation and food, right? So lets make employers provide it! It's free for the government and legislators get to feel virtuous for providing it, when actually they have just offloaded their costs to someone else.
It's madness. The government should provide these things, and employers should focus on whatever it is they do best -- not being a healthcare provider.
The startup I worked for in Italy had about 40 people by the time I left.
They dedicated ZERO person hours to anything health care related. No insurance, no administration, nothing.
Italy has plenty of other obstacles for startups of course, so that in and of itself didn't make it easier to do one there - but what a nice thing for a business to be able to ignore.
Also, if something is essential, then it's also essential for unemployed people. Providing it through employment makes no sense.
In 2017 the US spent roughly twice per person on healthcare than France ($10,224 vs $4,902) [0], the next few months will show how effective that spending has been...
[0] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...
Now I'm not against taxpayers paying for something so long as all taxpayers pay for that thing that everyone enjoys. What isn't right is when someone votes for a tax they won't feel the burden of.
Everyone who gets the benefit should also have skin in the game to pay for that benefit.
The real freeloaders are the well off republican voters that keep voting for more and more tax cuts, deficits be damned, putting trillions of dollars of burden onto the next generation.
By that logic, taxpayers also don't pay, but their employers do. And they don't either, but their customers do. It's the cycle of money in every economy.
But perhaps more important than that: in a democracy, the government represents the citizens (including the taxpayers). The government pays for stuff on behalf of the citizens for the benefit of the citizens. At least if the system functions correctly.
Right now Amazon needs to worry that if they offer this, everyone will take off sick out of fear. They have to worry that if that happens that it won't happen to Walmart, who didn't offer the benefit. There isn't time for a feedback cycle to work, they're worried about losing a years worth of revenue right now.
You just can't trust an employer's self interest to align with ours at moments like this, for the same reason you can't trust our own self interests to align (c.f. people working when they're sick because they need the money, or sick new yorkers fleeing to other states -- both decisions made in immediate self interest).
Oh come on. Amazon make huge profits (and McDonald's and Apple and Starbucks, etc.)
Yes, providing this kind of sick leave would reduce their profits, but they are absolutely 100% capable of doing so.
In almost every developed country in the world they do.
The government just needs to make it law, then Amazon won't be at a disadvantage to their competitors, they'll all be on a level playing field.
It's just a question of what's more important - corporate profits, or employee health, safety and ability to pay rent and buy food.
That's exactly what I said.
Not taxable profits ;)
I just can't help but think that this is an incredibly naive model of how corporations function.
I'm not saying I disagree with the premise but I do think it would be incredibly helpful to the people pushing for this to give off a greater sense of how multi billion dollar corporations function. It just really can't be that simple.
Much like how when libertarians haven't touched the levers of power in decades you get indignant tweets about how they've caused the government to fail at something, we get comments here about how the top-voted comment in a given thread is "downvoted by the libertarians."
Unpaid leave puts people in the position of having to decide between health (and not infecting their coworkers) and losing money. Paid sick leave instead puts employees in the position of being able to look after themselves (and their coworkers) without penalties.
It might seem like a trivial difference for people who make decent money, but it's a huge difference for people who are not in a good financial situation.
> get a doctor's note to prove you are sick
Only if you work for a company that doesn't trust its employees.
I've only worked in countries with paid sick leave, and I honestly don't remember if I ever had to present a doctor's note.
if your pay was low, and you get sick leave, then management is going to count the sick leave as part of your pay (even tho you don't necessarily use it up). This then incentivises the worker to "use up" sick leave even if they aren't sick.
Higher pay + unlimited sick leave (unpaid) means that the pay is upfront. The total amount paid being the same would mean that the worker doesn't have to fake a sickie every now and then to get their fair share of their wages. Managers also would not see any sick leave as the worker taking advantage.
It doesn't have to be that way.
Every job I've ever had it's just a matter of emailing or calling my boss to say I won't be in, and that's that.
No Doctor. No authorization. No hassle. Unlimited days. Sick people shouldn't be at at work, and any job worth a damn trusts it's employees to do the right thing.
Jobs in Canada and Australia.
Sick leave = "stay home if sick, still get same money"
"higher pay + unpaid leave" = "stay home if sick, get less money"
An employer has x amount of dollars allotted for an employee. This x includes everything that the employer needs to employ you: your salary, your vacation time (and pay), you tools etc. If you require that employers provide sick leave then x is still going to stay the same. That sick leave will simply come from some other pool, such as the salary or the money allotted for training or tools.
Contractors get "higher pay + unpaid leave"
But in fact, it's misleading to call them "contractors". Back in the day, they would have been called "temps".
The importance of sick leave isn't the gross expected balance of pay and work -- as the grandparent points out, for some values those things will be equal, and employees won't prefer one or the other. (Or, better yet, employees might prefer the higher wages because there's more optionality to it -- they get paid more if they're healthy, and they get paid the same if they're unhealthy.)
That misses the point, though. The real importance of sick-leave is about marginal incentives. If an employee is sick, they don't need to weigh one more day of pay against the risk of infecting their coworkers -- they have no incentive to come into the office.
(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22742054, but no thread there)
https://www.cnet.com/news/no-jeff-bezos-doesnt-want-your-pub...
Because otherwise, yeah, that's incredibly insulting.
https://www.businessinsider.com/whole-foods-ceo-employees-do...
But hey, enjoy Prime.
Your statement is 100% incorrect they could treat them even worse and still do fine. It need to be done within the legal system cause people just don't care enough or don't have the time to research every company.