Amazon v/s Walmart

[aczlan]

And when you have as many Walmarts in the area as we do, things are in different places in different stores.:laughing: And different stores stock different merchandise, too. Not all the Walmarts have the same things.

Lowes is the that way around here, I have one 15 mins away and one 20 mins away. The layouts are completely different.

Aaron Z

 

[dmccarty]

I read the same article.

Like it or not, that is the new reality about low-skilled jobs these days. No one held a gun to the head of any of the workers and forced them to work there.

I think every high school in the country ought to have all students read that article at least once per year.

* * * * * * *

We have Amazon Prime. I think it is $75 per year for free 2-day shipping, which makes getting most things reasonably fast.

I like Amazon because I can find things easily which are hard-to-find locally in a small town, and the prices are good. I have never had a problem with returns, which are mostly items broken in transit.

I bought a Kindle 15 months ago because it would save me a bunch of money buying the online version of the WSJ vs the paper version. I did this knowing I would be a pioneer because the Kindle Fire was new and the WSJ app was even newer. I try to avoid being a Tech Pioneer because, just like in the days of wagon trains, pioneers tend to collect arrows the hard way. Well, I collected some arrows because of the WSJ app. I ended up talking on the phone for over an hour with an Amazon employee in WA on a Friday or Saturday evening. I do lead an exciting life. :laughing::laughing::laughing: It was one of the best, if not the best customer service calls I have ever had. The problem, as I suspected, was not with the Kindle but with the WSJ app. Amazon ended up comping me my Amazon Prime membership because of the WSJ problem! :confused3: Eventually, the WSJ application was fixed and all was well. What the Kindle Fire cost me has been saved in one year of buying the WSJ online version vs the physical paper.

I spent enough time on the phone with the support guy I asked him how he liked Amazon. He loved it. Treated him well, pay was good, no quotas on how many calls he had to answer, etc. Now he is a professional compared to a part puller so things might be different. OTH, I have heard that UPS and FedEx can work you hard but you can make decent money if you can handle the work. Jobs can be stressful regardless of education level. I think my jobs are FAR more stressful than any part puller...

We buy most of our stuff from Amazon now because their prices are good, they have it in STOCK, we can get it shipped in two days, and it costs us nothing to shop. For us to go to a Walmart or Target is close to an hour round trip which is expensive in time and money. We can order on Amazon and be done in minutes. I spent close to a month trying to find funnels for canning. :confused3: Tried the local grocery store, two local dollar stores, drug store and finally Target. Nada. Looked on Amazon and they had exactly what I needed, in a product that was far better than anything I would ever find locally, and I had it in two days.

I still compare prices. If I compare between Amazon and two other companies, they are almost always the same price. One might beat the price of the other company but it is usually a small difference.

We buy Amazon Prime because it saves us money with shipping. $70-80 for second day shipping for a year is CHEAP. We also stream video from Amazon Prime which makes it that much more useful. Use an Amazon card for your orders and you can save even more money.

Later,
Dan

 

[powerpace]

I read an article last summer about working at those large distribution centers. I don't remember if Amazon was explicitly named, but that is who I pictured while reading it.

The author of the article went to work at one of these places to get an inside perspective. The employees were all through temp agencies, low pay, no benefits, very rigid about sick days, lunch and bathroom breaks, etc. And according to the author, you could work like a dog and hardly ever meet the quota for items picked per shift.

Anybody ever work at an Amazon distribution center, or know somebody who did? We don't have any around here.

Ingram Content Group based in Tennessee is a Amazon shipper for books out of four locations. One of those is in Oregon. I worked there thirteen years. When I started the Oregon distribution center had six-hundred fifty associates. Now they have about one-hundred fifty. The reductions is in large part because of the e-readers and Amazon's own distribution centers doing their own book distribution. In my own experience and contact with other distribution centers they are man-killers. High production requiremnents and long hours. Never knowing when you are getting off work or beginning the workday the next day. The start time could be 7:00 AM one day and 9:00 AM the next or any time chosen by management. Any reason used to fire a person. Usually the people that were there the longest would be the target. The worst day was reporting to work and having a supervisor standing in the hallway and waving their finger at you to left or right. A wave to the left meant work, wave to the right meant meeting room and termination. One-hundred and forty people terminated in one day. It hasn't changed and I have been out of the place for two years.

 

[MasseyWV]

Ingram Content Group based in Tennessee is a Amazon shipper for books out of four locations. One of those is in Oregon. I worked there thirteen years. When I started the Oregon distribution center had six-hundred fifty associates. Now they have about one-hundred fifty. The reductions is in large part because of the e-readers and Amazon's own distribution centers doing their own book distribution. In my own experience and contact with other distribution centers they are man-killers. High production requiremnents and long hours. Never knowing when you are getting off work or beginning the workday the next day. The start time could be 7:00 AM one day and 9:00 AM the next or any time chosen by management. Any reason used to fire a person. Usually the people that were there the longest would be the target. The worst day was reporting to work and having a supervisor standing in the hallway and waving their finger at you to left or right. A wave to the left meant work, wave to the right meant meeting room and termination. One-hundred and forty people terminated in one day. It hasn't changed and I have been out of the place for two years.

That sounds like a horrible place to work. And they wonder why ex-employees sometimes bring guns (or worse) to their former workplaces... that kind of stress can and will make people crack, where the end result is usually not pretty.

 

[rekees4300]

IMO Amazon is in a league of its own. Prices, delivery speed, and customer service are second to none. We are Prime members and spend thousands there every year. Wifey recently got a Kindle Fire and loves it! Walmart has been making an effort to improve their online experience but sales tax plus shipping plus slower delivery puts them at a disadvantage. We only buy from Walmart if Amazon does offer item (which is rare). Never used their ship-to-store service since nearest store is 90 minute round trip.

 

[dave1949]

Ingram Content Group based in Tennessee is a Amazon shipper for books out of four locations. One of those is in Oregon. I worked there thirteen years. When I started the Oregon distribution center had six-hundred fifty associates. Now they have about one-hundred fifty. The reductions is in large part because of the e-readers and Amazon's own distribution centers doing their own book distribution. In my own experience and contact with other distribution centers they are man-killers. High production requiremnents and long hours. Never knowing when you are getting off work or beginning the workday the next day. The start time could be 7:00 AM one day and 9:00 AM the next or any time chosen by management. Any reason used to fire a person. Usually the people that were there the longest would be the target. The worst day was reporting to work and having a supervisor standing in the hallway and waving their finger at you to left or right. A wave to the left meant work, wave to the right meant meeting room and termination. One-hundred and forty people terminated in one day. It hasn't changed and I have been out of the place for two years.

Thanks for that info. I guess the article author wasn't BS-ing. The focus of the article was that there is an ugly side to your Amazon-type shopping experience that most are not aware of.

 

[300UGUY]

That's why we call them Wall Martians. I tell you one thing I am done with yesterdays tractor

You had a problem with YTMAG?

 

[Bird]

Never knowing when you are getting off work or beginning the workday the next day. The start time could be 7:00 AM one day and 9:00 AM the next or any time chosen by management.

Some of the other things you talked about may be much worse, but this not knowing when you're going to work or going to get off isn't exactly new. I went to work as a clerk in the Dallas Post Office in March, 1959. In those days, new clerks (and mail carriers) were known as "Subs"; i.e., substitutes. When we got off work, we checked a bulletin board to see what time to come to work tomorrow. It could be any time, but usually was between 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. And you got off work when the supervisor told you to go home. You were guaranteed 2 hours and couldn't be required to stay more than 12, so you got off work sometime in there.:laughing:

But as with most jobs, much depended on the employee. A lot of subs complained that they weren't getting enough hours to make a living; some even quit for that reason. But all of us newer clerks started our day on the 3rd floor, running cancelling machines and doing the initial sorting of mail that had been mailed all over town that day. But through a little observation and just a few questions, I learned that when told to go home, some of the guys would go to the second floor where outgoing parcel post was sorted, and ask a supervisor if he needed more help. If not, then go to the 4th floor where they were sorting incoming mail and ask a supervisor there if he needed more help.

Those of us who did a decent job soon found those supervisors coming to the 3rd floor before we got off there to ask us to come help them when we were told to go home. It soon got to be a standing joke for 5 of us to ask if we could go home as soon as we got to work.:laughing: So I only averaged 48 hours a week; and almost never less than 40.

 

[jinman]

I find the descriptions of distribution and shipping jobs sound very familiar. Those are the exact environments I saw in the late '60s on the assembly line at Texas Instruments. My wife worked there for about a year putting the labels on transistors. She sat in front of a noisy machine all night, either setting up the label or feeding transistors into the machine. There were strict breaks, lunch times, and just tedious work where you were evaluated almost entirely on the quantity of work. I've never been in an electrical assembly environment that changed all that much from the TI model. When I worked building F-16s in the '90s, the harness fabrication and electronics assembly jobs were still very tedious and dull with demanding hours and limited freedoms. There were more machines doing automated testing and even stuffing boards with components, but anywhere there were manual jobs, the environment was restrictive and demanding. I don't know for sure, but my guess is if you are on the assembly line at GM or Ford, you'll also have to stay right there on the job and meet quotas.

My youngest daughter works in the distribution center for GameStop, the video game retailer. The work is cold in winter and hot in the summer with a steady stream of trucks coming and going constantly. That's just the nature of a distribution center. I suspect UPS, FedEx, and other shippers are under similar stresses. It just goes with the territory. Frankly, the only job I ever had that I never worried about losing or being part of a layoff was the US Navy.

 

[300UGUY]

I find the descriptions of distribution and shipping jobs sound very familiar. Those are the exact environments I saw in the late '60s on the assembly line at Texas Instruments. My wife worked there for about a year putting the labels on transistors. She sat in front of a noisy machine all night, either setting up the label or feeding transistors into the machine. There were strict breaks, lunch times, and just tedious work where you were evaluated almost entirely on the quantity of work. I've never been in an electrical assembly environment that changed all that much from the TI model. When I worked building F-16s in the '90s, the harness fabrication and electronics assembly jobs were still very tedious and dull with demanding hours and limited freedoms. There were more machines doing automated testing and even stuffing boards with components, but anywhere there were manual jobs, the environment was restrictive and demanding. I don't know for sure, but my guess is if you are on the assembly line at GM or Ford, you'll also have to stay right there on the job and meet quotas.

My youngest daughter works in the distribution center for GameStop, the video game retailer. The work is cold in winter and hot in the summer with a steady stream of trucks coming and going constantly. That's just the nature of a distribution center. I suspect UPS, FedEx, and other shippers are under similar stresses. It just goes with the territory. Frankly, the only job I ever had that I never worried about losing or being part of a layoff was the US Navy.

On the assembly line in a auto plant, you don't see any fat folks. In assembly, most of the folks retire after 30 years, it's hard work, especially as you get older. And it is highly regimented, as the song goes, " The foreman didn't waste words". As far as being worried about losing my job, yeah, 35 years in the tool & die biz, it was always there. I know of one guy who closed 9 GM plants. Each closing meant a layoff, sometimes for periods long enough to break senority. And usually moving somewhere. And starting over again in senority, for shift purposes. I'd have changed careers, but he hung in there.