I've worked in a warehouse pulling orders (mostly phone commerce but because it was 1995 or so) . It wasn't that bad, possibly because it was harder to really exploit people during a better economy or possibly because the company I worked for wasn't exploiting workers enough to survive. Anyway, it went broke shortly after Amazon became a thing.
It would be great if the ILWU could organize these warehouses. Think of a strike that affected even 50% of internet-purchased goods! That would bring the capitalists to their knees!
Also, regarding those slave camps on the Florida plantations, someone should write a novel about a group of people who arm themselves, go down to Florida, search every plantation, and liquidate any plantation owners who were forcing their workers to live and work under slavery conditions. I would very much like to read such a novel.
I agree you need awareness to make change, but I still don't see how regulations aren't the tool once you have the will. If minimum wage weren't as well enforced at big companies, we'd hear the exact same stories about how it's systemic rather than bad-actors. It wouldn't change regulations being the answer.
I boggle at the interviewee who thinks UMC social awareness can solve anything via exerting market demand for standards. Even if it works for what it's intended to do - and I don't know how well fair trade and its kind actually work - it's inherently limited to a minority of the market.
possibly because it was harder to really exploit people during a better economy
And why do you think we had a housing bubble?
Oh wait the billionaire banksters and masters of the universe are really really fucking stupid. Paul Krugman tells me so.
Oh. and Shock Capitalism v 2.x coming up Winter-Spring 2012-2013. We are going over the fiscal cliff.
You will blame the Republicans. The Republicans will blame the Democrats, but they're crazy, like me.
Are you cold, forlorn and hungry? Are there lots of things you lack? Is your life made up of misery? Then dump the bosses off your back!
Union and OSHA are good ideas. Might removing the sales tax exemption help push some sales from online back to the RW?
If you've had enough of the 'Blood of the Lamb', then join in the Grand Industrial Band. If for a change you would have eggs and ham, then come do your share, lend a hand!
I don't know that this is tied to a specific location. It's not like it needs a port. It's a big box with industrial shelving and conveyor belts which just needs to have good Interstate access, a nearby airport with good freight facilities and a siding off a Class I railroad. There are hundreds of failing towns and cities that fit that description where you could plop down such a box. Some of them are in right-to-work states.
Might removing the sales tax exemption help push some sales from online back to the RW?
That would just shift the practices to the retailers' distributors, if they aren't identical already. Removing the sales tax exemption is good for a multitude of other reasons.
I would think that the quantities involved would mitigate some of the worst parts of it.
I'm having a really hard time reading the article. First observation:
Other signs proclaim that a good customer experience, to which our goal-meeting is essential, is the key to growth, and growth is the key to lower prices, which leads to a better customer experience.
This is a significant part of the problem: customer expectations have been driven so sky-high* that companies feel forced to maintain and perpetuate the inhumane conditions they themselves made necessary by fostering these customer expectations.
* (item should arrive within 3-4 days, preferably 2, and I can get it in 1 if I pay a tiny bit extra; and goddammit if that hyper-pace isn't kept up, well, I customer have no idea what's actually involved in the doing, but I'm going to bitch about it, alot)
Oh, I see. Maybe some, but not reliably or satisfactorily. Also, as a strategy it's infuriatingly timid: we don't have the political will to enforce the most basic labor standards, so let's change tax structures in hopes of encouraging a different kind of business model where physical factors reduce the potential for exploitation.
Finally, given the long-tail model of Amazon and other online stores, I think even adding sales tax individually-shipped online commerce would thrive. (Or alternatively, the physical stores become half bestsellers and half special orders, and the quantity advantage making their distributors more humane disappears.)
It would be great if the ILWU could organize these warehouses.
Wouldn't it be . . .
If minimum wage weren't as well enforced at big companies, we'd hear the exact same stories about how it's systemic rather than bad-actors. It wouldn't change regulations being the answer.
This is true, but I also think there are real limitations on the limits of what regulation can accomplish. Minimum wage laws have the advantage of the fact that there's a *solid* paper trail documenting what people work and what they get paid (and, not incidentally, most of the complaints about companies violating minimum wage laws are based on forcing people to work unpaid overtime, rather than paying people less.
Regulations for ergonomics are hard to write, and probably not easy to enforce either.
The most useful regulation would be some limits about the uses of temporary labor -- penalties both for companies who keep temporary workers on past some amount of time and also companies who have too much turn-over among temporary workers -- but, again, hard to write and hard to enforce.
I don't know that this is tied to a specific location. It's not like it needs a port. ... There are hundreds of failing towns and cities that fit that description where you could plop down such a box.
You're probably correct. There's certainly a lot less infrastructure requires than for a port. At the same time there are meaningful limitations on their ability to pick up and move, but clearly not enough to be a significant source of leverage.
Removing the sales tax exemption is good for a multitude of other reasons.
Agreed.
It's funny how much that article strikes a chord with me. It's clearly not the worst job around. But the degree to which that job is structured to remove any slack, an most autonomy (or any potential for having interesting interactions or experiences at work).
13.1 --OSHA first. Union if it can be done. Sales tax as a distant third. Or fourth, if someone has a better idea than blood in the streets.
I'm confident that rules can be written which would greatly mitigate the physical impacts. Nothing can be done to make these jobs intellectually stimulating or socially valuable.
Regulations for ergonomics are hard to write, and probably not easy to enforce either.
To end 99.9% of workplace injury, even inadvertent? Yes. To end this kind of backbreaking shit? No.
Nothing can be done to make these jobs intellectually stimulating or socially valuable.
Less specialization: make the jobs 50% of the day running around picking and packing, and 50% of the day doing minor management stuff. Or 60/40, whatever. Where a day = 8 hours. You wouldn't be able to promote every pick-and-packer to partial management stuff, of course.
I can't manage to believe that company profitability absolutely requires this much exploitation. Mandatory 10-12 hour days? Hire more people! How much would you have to reduce the income of top management at Amazon in order to do that?
This all does make me fairly hand-wringy, I'm afraid.
As for "socially valuable", CC, I guess you mean valuable to the workers? It does seem to be socially valuable to the customers.
Workers, yes. Customers are getting exactly what they want: cheap stuff, fast and easy.
OSHA regulations can be helpful in mitigating some of the worst of the abuses. At least the employees can have something to push on that threatens productivity, but a union would be better.
(shiv once organized an impromptu strike at work when management screwed up their pay for the third week running. Turns out if you shut down an operation that costs $40k/day to stand idle you can get the bosses on the phone pretty quick. I was very proud.)
Or fourth, if someone has a better idea than blood in the streets.
Voting rights is third - for example, an enforced national holiday on election days, and alternative voting options for people who can't take that day.
I know we've discussed this before in connection with the earlier piece on Amazon's warehouse practices; people took me to be calling for a boycott of Amazon, though that wasn't it. Rather, customers clearly need to make real to themselves what it means when they (as this article particularly mentions) order paper towels online.
The earlier Amazon article had people on e-commerce discussion lists saying that, hell, with free shipping, they order something like cable ties online (for $3.99 with free shipping) rather than drive over to the local store to purchase same. Not because the savings is that huge, but because it's so convenient. e-commerce merchants have intentionally inculcated that mindset. That sort of consumer disconnect needs to stop.
Nothing can be done to make these jobs intellectually stimulating or socially valuable.
This sentence is stupid. These concepts are all a matter of degree. What if the workers were allowed to have conversations with each other? Then the jobs would be more intellectually stimulating and socially valuable.
people on e-commerce discussion lists saying that, hell, with free shipping, they order something like cable ties online (for $3.99 with free shipping) rather than drive over to the local store to purchase same. Not because the savings is that huge, but because it's so convenient.
The part that boggles my mind is the self-described environmentalists who like "free" shipping. You limit the number of vacations you take by air because you're worried about carbon, but you're ordering things from the other coast 2-3x a month?!?!
20.last is great. Go shiv!
and 18 is right. In every the mundane, routinized job I've worked or witnessed, there have been some ways to creatively restaff that would make them a lot more bearable. Not perfect, not delightful, but definitely nicer. Heck, even having slightly more autonomy is guaranteed to make your workday less stressful.
It's also worth noting that some tedious jobs have gotten a little nicer in the past 10-20 years. Every single (unionized, not-beaten-down) cleaner in my office building has an iPod, a iPhone, or similar. As far as I can tell, they spend their entire shifts happily chatting away to friends and family, or listening to their choice of music. I've never seen a supervisor so much as chastise them (they're all still working, just now with headphones).
23: I found the sentence of 16.last stupid as well. I've been trying hard to be polite when the whole thing upsets me quite a bit.
23, 24 -- I stand corrected. I don't think either a union or OSHA is going to get you there, though.
I'll stop digging. Noting only that what Witt describes in 25 is not the job being stimulating/valuable, but rules making it less deadening/boring than it might otherwise artificially be made to be. A very fine idea.
Every single (unionized, not-beaten-down) cleaner in my office building has an iPod, a iPhone, or similar.
When I clean my own home listening to my iPod, I find it so pleasant that I wonder if cleaning office buildings might actually be the perfect job for me. The only reason I can think not to let cleaners listen to iPods is the belief that an activity must be unpleasant to count as work.
Sorry to be rude, CC. I just don't want people saying "Well what can possibly be done?" as if the situation has been the same for generations when it has actually been getting worse.
I will also say that I heard about some research (and was very frustrated that I couldn't get the citation) that concluded that every type of job that had been studied had workers with three types of feelings about it: people for whom it was a j-o-b, people for whom it was a career, and people for whom it was a calling.
That rings totally true to me. I have known people who have worked in jobs that I would find disgusting or mind-numbing, but they genuinely appreciated things about the jobs that mitigated those factors for them.
Even when I worked in a library processing center, a lot of my own colleagues would groan or roll their eyes when they found out what department I was in, because they thought heaving heavy bags of books around was a nuisance and the cataloging was boring. I actually enjoyed the puzzle of packing bags efficiently and the creativity of designing a computer record that patrons would be able to find. (And I was there for years, so it wasn't just a summer job.)
Shorter me: Every job can be made more brutal or more humane. And within those constraints, different people will value and like different things about their work.
I don't order stuff online much at all, but there are times that it makes sense, usually because what I want cannot be had in town. There's no obvious advantage, as a customer, to having a local vendor special order a generic low cost consumer item. I'm going to have to go get it from the vendor, when it comes in, rather than just have it sent right to me. Three interactions with the vendor (ordering, finding out it's in, picking up), driving several miles round-trip (yes I could ride a bike 7 miles rt -- it's 37 and rainy today, not exactly an easy sell), paying the same price or more, waiting longer. Sure, I buy live when there's any advice/expertise involved, or when the item is in stock.
I really don't see how that toothpaste gets put back into the tube.
I'm fine with starting with OSHA, moving on toward figuring out what to do about the many-decade trend toward part-time/temp workers with no benefits (or vacation or sick days). I don't see any way around the proposition that large -- and probably mid-sized -- companies expect profit levels that they don't actually need in order to stay healthily in business. Their appeal to the bottom line, their claims that they have no financial choice but to engage in these employment practices, I ... I just can't take seriously.
(I'm going to be faced with an interesting situation after I move in July. Big national box stores very convenient to the house; smaller locally owned outfits much further away.)
32: waiting longer
I'm not criticizing the general sentiment in 32, but I'm curious about this.
Is it something that you really needed in 5 days, and could not wait 10 days? (This comes up all the time in online bookselling, where someone orders an obscure and rather scarce book which he or she probably had on a wants list for quite some time, and suddenly they behave as though they need it NOW, and it is a huge problem if they don't get it in 4 days, and they're really frustrated if it takes 7 or 8 days, which apparently just ruined their lives. Even though it's clear that their lives were fine two weeks ago. We always wonder whether the person is quite right in the head.)
The most useful regulation would be some limits about the uses of temporary labor -- penalties both for companies who keep temporary workers on past some amount of time and also companies who have too much turn-over among temporary workers -- but, again, hard to write and hard to enforce
The Obama administration tried to crack down on "independent contractor" abuse in 2010, but I don't know if it went anywhere. I've been Googling around trying to find an updated link.
It's certainly a problem I've seen repeatedly -- companies hiring people who are by *every possible definition* an employee, and yet classifying them as independent contractors.
Until I read the above link, I didn't realize just how few protections contractors have:
Estimates are that companies can hold down labor costs by as much as 30 percent if they use independent contractors, because they don't have to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes, provide vacation or sick leave, pay for workers' compensation and unemployment compensation insurance, or worry about minimum wage or overtime provisions. (Employers also get a break on potential legal headaches - among other statutes, independent contractors aren't protected by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination.)
Further to 34: Everything is a tradeoff. Right now I've got a box full of receipts from my local hardware/paint store and Home Depot. I'm saving them up to send to Lowe's to show them exactly how much money they lost from me when they caved to anti-Muslim hysteria last year and canceled their sponsorship of that dumb TV show.
36 last -- That stuff is all true, but woe betide the employer who thinks he's going to get around workers comp by having a contractor who is by every other legal measure an employee.
http://www.dailyinterlake.com/news/local_montana/article_0a7673d0-55a9-11e0-8db2-001cc4c002e0.html
|| Soooo much hate for preening, self-satisfied Memorial Day FB posts. "You might think it's just about BBQs, but my 6th cousin once removed served in Germany during the Gulf War for your freedoms!!!"|>
38: My anecdata outnumbers your anecdata by a gazillion lot.
If I were advising a small business, I'd remind them they were running a small, though potentially expensive, risk. If I were talking to a worker, I'd tell them that in reality, the odds that their employer would in any way be held responsible if they were injured or even killed are exceptionally low.
Per this example, an illegally-operating company that had an actual employee (not contractor) killed on the job was fined about $20,000. Hardly an effective deterrent.
41 -- I don't disagree with you in the least.
http://www.totalinjury.com/blog/death-by-chocolate-results-in-personal-injury-lawsuit/
Fines may not be the end of it.
38, 41: Did small construction firms stop making everybody a contractor? Back in the latest 80s, I worked for a guy where everybody was a contractor. The next guy kept me, and the other guys who didn't work on any sites but his, as regular (but benefitless) employees.
40: Sorry about that. It's just that I appreciate being an un-lampshade.
36: It looks like it wasn't killed on sight by the Republicans, at least - the April budget continuing resolution bill text, Section 1808, says "That of the funds made available by this section, not less than $21,332,000 may be used by the Secretary of Labor for the purposes of program evaluation, initiatives related to the identification and prevention of worker misclassification, and other worker protection activities." (Link)
In the interest of jacking the thread, maybe Unfogged can help me unriddle this mystery:
a) Craigslist ad: "sale for homeless by army sgt. make an offer" Contact seller with low bid. Response: I got a higher bid of $60.
b) Contact three weeks later for same item. Says still available, makes up story about being on trip. Offer $55. Response: "Got higher bid of $100 will contact if doesn't work out"
c) Contact again with different email, offer $100. Response: OK you got it will get back to you. No further response.
So the riddle is, why put up an item with no intention of selling? Why make up a bogus story about being a sgt in the army and conducting a sale for the homeless? Or about having been on a trip? I knew there was something wrong after the first exchange. I'm stumped.
Are you sure you didn't click the casual encounters link instead of the for sale one?
Don't worry these jobs will mostly be eliminated soon enough and you all won't have to feel guilty about indirectly employing poor people.
I eat too much fast food for that to happen.
Possibly topical: It is impossible to order fries and not get ketchup even if you ask for mustard.
Ksky had a good point, expressed here I think, that liberal minded consumer boycotts/actions/whatever that aren't part of an organized campaign with clear goals (eg a specific union asking for a boycott for specific reason) are useless wankery.
53 to the idea that somehow personally resolving to do less online shopping or whatever will make a whit of difference.
This bartender is either suspicious about a fake ID or not so good at math.
53: I addressed that in comment 22. This "what I personally do doesn't make a whit of difference" is garbage. Sorry.
Alone, we are weak. United, the people are invincible and all too likely to scapegoat some minority.
The ass your mom rode in on is garbage.
Or is that supposed to be "the horse"? I mess up with these insult things.
61: You twisted the formula but in an inventive way.
won't have to feel guilty about indirectly employing poor people.
Personally, I don't have a problem about employing poor people, but I have a problem indirectly employing people whose wages and working conditions don't accurately reflect the value they produce.
50: I was thinking about trolling people with the suggestion that technology would end these drudge jobs, but I don't think that ad is a good example. The main virtue of the product they are pushing is that it means workers don't have to walk around the warehouse. The product comes to them. This means that the job is more like line work. A thing comes, you put it in a box, you scan the next tag.
Automation is made from two processes: breaking up the job into tedious, soul sucking portions and then designing the robot who can do that. Often these process work separately, so the job is broken up long before the robot is available to fill it. (This observation via Lewis Mumford.)
The article certainly is something. They should just put up a signs and videos of "Big Customer", but the Two-Minute Love is cancelled every day in the interest of meeting targets.
I'm also trying to tease apart the elements of actual internet ordering from traditional warehouse work (the buffer of the store presumably obviating the direct connection to the impatient asshole waiting for their item) or even more so traditional catalog-serving warehouses. The direct from internet stuff is surely but a part of it.
Columbo is on Netflix streaming. I'd forgotten how murder-prone Robert Culp was that first season.
Before the gang violence of the 80s, most murder was done by the upper middle class and the wealthy.
I really hope they exaggerated how easy it is too make a car explode with just a gasoline fire.
Was somebody blackmailing you supposed to be on the car but instead you would have killed your secretary if it worked?
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This is a bummer. The local left-hippy church down the street from me is burning, perhaps due to a lightning strike. They've been extraordinarily generous to the artistic and radical communities of Mpls. over the years. Presumably they have some insurance, but I will be gladly signing on to help provide whatever extra support is needed.
http://www.walkerchurch.org/
http://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2012/05/27/firefighters-battle-mpls-church-fire/
I really was not expecting another annus horribilis so soon after 2010.
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Don't be so quick to blame lightening until the guy in the trench coat says so.
Columbo: lower-class non-rhotic accent pitted against upper-class non-rhotic accent.
Back in the 70s, everybody did rhotics.
Nice article, thanks for the information.
Before the gang violence of the 80s, most murder was done by the upper middle class and the wealthy.
They were the only ones with the free time. Everyone else was working twelve-hour shifts. Finish one of those, get back to your brick-built hovel for a nourishing meal of chalk and botulism, and who has the energy for murder?
66
I was thinking about trolling people with the suggestion that technology would end these drudge jobs, but I don't think that ad is a good example. The main virtue of the product they are pushing is that it means workers don't have to walk around the warehouse. The product comes to them. This means that the job is more like line work. A thing comes, you put it in a box, you scan the next tag.
Kiva was just bought by Amazon which gives the ad added relevance. And the ad claims that (with the Kiva system) workers can do 2-4 times as much which means 50-75% of the jobs are being eliminated.
Automation is made from two processes: breaking up the job into tedious, soul sucking portions and then designing the robot who can do that. Often these process work separately, so the job is broken up long before the robot is available to fill it. (This observation via Lewis Mumford.)
The Kiva system splits the job in two and automates half of it. There doesn't seem to be any obvious reason that the other half won't be automated eventually as well.
Not to me it isn't. Must be deferring to your tender sensibilities.
That's odd. As far as I know there's no filtering on my work connection.
68:
Back in the early '70s, I worked for a chainstore HQ in the NYC garment center. On Friday afternoons, everyone went into the warehouse to get the schmattes out. From the chain's point of view there's no sense leaving a dress in the warehouse over the weekend when it could be sitting on a rack in a store where someone could see it, try it on and buy it.
There's probably more time pressure on the conventional warehouse since the e-commerce customers' demands are abstract, while store managers' demands are concrete and were in my ear.
Picking in a conventional retail warehouse is much more efficient. One moves much less. A large shipment comes in from a vendor and is broken down to each store's allocation: these many pieces in this size mix, for dresses. The picker stands in front of the racks, pulls an allocation, turns and hands it off to the packer, turns back and pulls another. It's physical work and even by the end of an afternoon, I had grooves in the edge of my hand from the wire hangers. But there's not much wandering around.
The e-commerce warehouse, on the other hand, is highly inefficient. The picker walks around the warehouse, picking a single item here, tagging it to be packed, then walking on to pick another single item there, tagging it to be packed. One could, in theory, optimize a pickers path through the warehouse by reordering the queue of items to be picked, but too frequent reordering creates its own inefficiencies.
The yelling and timekeeping is a result of that inherent inefficiency.
81: That combined with the arm dog makes me think they don't understand how g-spot stimulation works.
The picker walks around the warehouse,
Not with the Kiva system!
86: As Congress can attest, an ideal stimulus plan remains elusive.
Surface-mount pick-and-place systems are way radder than warehouse pick-and-pack.
I don't know if there's much to do about jobs like this except find some way to give workers bargaining power. Lower unemployment, stronger unions, you know the drill.
Environmentally, I wonder if online ordering is inferior to buying stuff locally, given that we're mostly talking about stuff that isn't manufactured locally. The shipping is the same total distance from factory to home, and the last ten miles are (for most customers) in a fully packed commercial vehicle rather than a single-occupant family car. I'd believe that either was preferable depending on how the details work out, but it doesn't seem obvious to me.
I don't know if there's much to do about jobs like this except find some way to give workers bargaining power. Lower unemployment, stronger unions, you know the drill.
This. Back in the olden days, when workers' rights and job conditions were a normal part of the political discourse, it was still the case that a lot of people had shite jobs. The response of the left was that if the shite jobs needed doing then the people who did them should be paid more and work shorter hours. Not rocket science, really.
Environmentally, I wonder if online ordering is inferior to buying stuff locally, given that we're mostly talking about stuff that isn't manufactured locally. The shipping is the same total distance from factory to home,
Except that with online ordering -- and the GET IT NOW!! philosophy -- the shipping is often by air rather than by truck or rail. I cannot believe that air transportation is not grossly worse for the environment.
92: this is going to depend very much on what you're ordering and from whom. Books from Amazon will come from the regional distribution warehouse, by surface transport (courier or Royal Mail). Online groceries will come from a nearby supermarket, by van. Stuff that I buy from someone in another country (ebay or whatever) will come by normal post - airmail.
Certainly buying your groceries online is better than driving to the supermarket yourself and picking them up, for the reasons in 90.2.
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Fans of long-form journalism, investigative reporting, and/or mesmerizing human-interest stories should check out this remarkable ProPublica/This American Life collaboration, Finding Oscar: Massacre, Memory, and Justice in Guatemala.
The radio piece is available as an mp3.
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http://sierraclub.typepad.com/mrgreen/2009/12/how-to-shop-to-drop-your-carbon-footprint.html
Suggests that it's complicated, but online ordering is mildly more green unless you're doing your local shopping by bike.
Books from Amazon will come from the regional distribution warehouse, by surface transport (courier or Royal Mail).
Is this a US/UK thing? My sense is that while Amazon does have warehouses in different parts of the US, including about an hour from me in Delaware,* an enormous percentage of their shipping is done by air. It really is a big country.
Plus, of course, many people who are buying "from Amazon" are really buying from one of the small businesses linked up with them, who certainly don't have their own warehouses and generally do seem to be shipping by air.
*I almost always choose Super Saver Shipping, which they bill as taking 5-8 days. It usually takes 4-5 days.
The groceries point is an interesting one, and it hasn't occurred to me because I don't think I know anyone who buys groceries online.
The letter-writer in 95 is living in rural Idaho.
I think they do quite a lot of fast shipping from local warehouses, at least near cities -- even if something's getting to you in two days, that doesn't necessarily mean it got to you by air. But it really is a 'devil in the details' problem -- it's close enough call that you 'd have to gather real data on Amazon's shipping rather than figure it out from general principles. (Well, not for me. I mostly shop on foot, so ordering stuff is less green than my normal shopping. But anyone who has to drive, it's a real problem.)
I generally buy my books used from one the third party sellers listed on Amazon.* Increasingly, they use a system called "fulfillment by Amazon," which I think means that they just sent all their used books to the Amazon warehouse and Amazon takes care of the rest.
In any case, when you order from third parties, often the book was clearly packed by hand by some guy using whatever was around the house. But if you do fulfillment by Amazon, it comes in Amazon packaging.
*Whenever I do this, I remember that Powel's is unionized, and worry that Kraab is looking down on me.
98.2 may not be true even w/r/t you personally given energy costs of transporting and storing goods in NYC. As for air shipping, I think just in time systems mean that a huge amount of in store retail is air shipped. As always, these things are complicated, which is why outside of a Zoe IOC organized campaign hoping that tinkering around with your consumerism will do anything is misguided.
I mostly shop on foot, so ordering stuff is less green than my normal shopping.
I always tick the "Delivery By Trained Llama" option when ordering from Amazon. It takes a bit longer but the carbon footprint is tiny.
You clearly have failed to account for the massive carbon impact of llama-training.
Never mind all those llama transport flights from Peru.
"fulfillment by Amazon,"
That's a worse name for a tablet computer than Fire.
Ugh, 40 got it exactly right. I didn't see them yesterday but they're showing up today. Did you know our Country [sic] is a wonderful place to be because of our soldiers?
104: Sounds more like a perfume or cologne.
102, 103: sorry, typo. I should have written "Delivery by Trained Lama". My Amazon orders arrive at my doorstep wrapped in yellow silk and exuding a faint but definite odour of yak butter. They sometimes take up to four months to get there, but, you know, I have learned to accept this with serenity. After all, what is human time in the face of Eternity?
Amazon accumulates a backlog of those orders, and every four months they hand them off to a lama contractor who ships them by air.
This thread just reminded me to order a birthday present for my wife. Ordered online, from a place about a hundred miles away, and delivered to work; probably about as efficient as non-bulk-commodity ground transport can be, since it'll be in a big truck with a lot of other packages (from the vendor to the shipper's distribution center, and then the different set of packages from the distribution center to my office). And then I'll carry it home on the subway. Since I'm doing this later than I should, I paid an extra $8 so it will arrive by Friday. I don't think this is actually going to change any of the transportation logistics; it's just going to put it further up in the queue that already exists.
Joey's friend from [redacted], [redacted], lives with his grandpa, who works the night shift at a post office distribution hub. The grandpa has mentioned repeatedly that he loathes every moment of his job.
110: I got a back-stage look at a big P.O. hub 'way back when. 'Twas nightmarish then, probably running faster now.
Just imagine all the mail you have to eat.
works the night shift at a post office distribution hub. The grandpa has mentioned repeatedly that he loathes every moment of his job.
In The Sorting Office. Very much worth reading, among other reason it has some very interesting stuff about Deutsche Post.
Amazon accumulates a backlog of those orders, and every four months they hand them off to a lama contractor who ships them by air yogic flying.
To cut emissions they slow their breathing.
That article in 113 is quite informative. You'd think the Dutch could do better. I doubt we'll do better, once you urbanites have killed the USPS as we know it.
Today's ProPublica link describes the dangerous job of cell phone tower climbing:
Since 2003, tower climbing has ranked among the most dangerous jobs in America, compiling an average annual death rate more than 10 times [4] that of construction work. Almost 100 climbers have been killed on the job, 50 of them on cell sites.....
An analysis of cell tower deaths [5] by ProPublica and PBS "Frontline" showed that tight timetables and financial pressure often led workers to take fatal shortcuts or to work under unsafe conditions.
"We've had a number of situations where we think that accidents were caused by companies trying to meet deadlines and ... cutting corners on safety in order to meet those deadlines," said Jordan Barab, OSHA's deputy administrator.
But Barab said it's difficult for the agency to hold cell companies responsible for safety violations involving subcontractors.
The use of subcontractors and temporary employees has been on the rise for several decades as businesses have sought flexibility, relief from union requirements, and savings.
An analysis [8] of labor statistics by the Government Accountability Office found that the number of workers employed by contractors jumped nearly 25 percent from 1995 to 2005 and the total number of "contingent" workers - including contractors, temporary employees, self-employed workers, part-time workers and day laborers - totaled more than 40 million.
For context, the entire US population -- including retirees, babies, and schoolchildren -- is about 310 million. Forty million is a lot of people.
The trend toward subcontracting has changed the American workplace in ways unanticipated by the authors of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, said Judson MacLaury, who served as the Department of Labor's historian from 1972 to 2006.
"Subcontracting was not a factor in the development of the Act," he said. "It only became an issue for OSHA itself when it became an enforcement problem."
The shift toward subcontracting has been most noticeable in high-risk industries such as oil and gas [9], trucking [10], nuclear waste removal [11] and home-building. Though workplace injuries and deaths have decreased over OSHA's 40-year lifespan, subcontract workers face greater risks than traditional employees, studies have shown. Contractors were injured or killed in eight of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health's 10 worst workplace accidents [12] of 2010. In six of the accidents, no full-time employees died, only contractors.
See also this interesting article about the way in which cutbacks at USPS have affected the magazine industry (for the record, I'm quite fond of the USPS, personally, and use them anytime I have to ship something):
Meanwhile, publishers must decide how to deal with slower and less-consistent delivery. William Falk, editor-in-chief of The Week magazine, took the bold step of printing an editor's letter addressing the problem in his February 3 issue. Of the magazine's 535,000 subscribers, about 100,000 of them got a letter, in zip codes with the most complaints. In the note, Falk placed the blame for late deliveries directly on the postal service. "The Week magazine prints every Wednesday night at exactly the same time--every week, without fail," the letter read. "We then pay a very substantial fee to have copies trucked to 70 postal distribution facilities around the country every Thursday morning. This is an investment The Week has made in order to speed delivery of your copy to a postal facility in your area." According to the USPS's delivery standards, the letter continued, readers should expect to receive their copies on Friday or Saturday, but that, "to our dismay, that consistent delivery has eroded...."
In an interview, Falk explained that he had heard from readers who, after getting their copies of The Week on Friday or Saturday for years, were now getting it on Monday or Tuesday, or even later. For a weekly magazine, one specifically designed to summarize and contextualize the previous week's news, that delay makes a huge difference to the magazine's relevance. "Saturday really is a good day for us to arrive for people, because we have cultural content that helps them plan their weekend... and it's the chance to look back at the week that's just occurred," said Falk. "We don't really know what we'll do if they end Saturday delivery--we've talked about it, but we haven't made a decision yet."
I'm guessing that for whatever reason their decision will not be "start lobbying Congress to allow the USPS to do its job again".
I'm guessing that for whatever reason their decision will not be "start lobbying Congress to allow the USPS to do its job again".
It's less clear than you might think. The subject of the article was a major summit between the USPS (represented by the postmaster general) and a number of people from the magazine industry. So they want to figure out a way to work together and both in business.
It doesn't mention lobbying Congress, but it is clear that magazines, as an industry, have a lot to lose from the proposed cutbacks, and I would assume they would like to see cutbacks avoided, and have let people know that.
Since old people vote and don't have computers to read magazines on a computer like a regular human, I suppose elected officials will listen for a while.
On the OP, a guaranteed income would solve a lot of problems normally addressed by regulation by making employment voluntary.
Can someone remove the friend's name from 110, and the phrase "down the street"? Thanks.
90
I don't know if there's much to do about jobs like this except find some way to give workers bargaining power. ...
Your open borders plan should really help the bargaining position of unskilled workers.
126: Migration really doesn't affect Iowa (which is my guess as to where the facility in the OP-linked article is located). Their Right-to-Work laws have much more to do with their workers lack of bargaining power.
Iowa isn't a secret. People in other countries know it is there.
126: Wait, is James in favor of unions?
Is James in favor of right-to-work laws? They're kind of a libertarian-ish thing, for some kinds of libertarians, but I haven't been able to determine what kind of libertarian sentiments James harbors.
I have no idea about Iowa's role in shipping packages, but certainly migration has had a profound effect on Iowa's meatpacking industry.
127
Migration really doesn't affect Iowa (which is my guess as to where the facility in the OP-linked article is located). ...
This is not actually true. See here :
POSTVILLE, Iowa -- A raid at a northeastern Iowa meat processing plant this week was the largest in U.S. history, federal authorities said.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials say 390 people were arrested on immigration charges after Monday's raid at Agriprocessors Inc. in Postville. The facility is the world's largest kosher meatpacking plant.
Wikipedia has more about Agriprocessors :
... Sholom Rubashkin as the highest ranking day-to-day corporate officer was charged with federal financial fraud and sentenced to 27 years in prison in June 2010.
and
In May 2011, Sholom Rubashkin used political connections to seek a rehearing and reduction of his sentence; among others, Reps. Anthony Weiner and Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) lobbied for a review of the case; Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL Rep.) lobbied US Attorney General Eric Holder personally on Rubashkin's behalf; and Rep. Yvette Clark (D-NY) argued that her constituents in Brooklyn, the Rubashkin family base, deemed the punishment too harsh and feared a hike in the price of kosher food.[54]
Nice to see the Democrats sticking up for the little guy.
129
126: Wait, is James in favor of unions?
I am against open borders. A reduced suppy of unskilled labor would improve the bargaining position of unskilled laborers independent of unionization.
As for unions I am generally against them with a few exceptions. For example I support the baseball player's union.
As for unions I am generally against them with a few exceptions.
Why?
134
Why?
I am generally against monopolies.
For example I support the baseball player's union.
Yes, unions are fine as long as their membership consists exclusively of people in the 1%. For my part, I am a huge fan of the Hedge Fund Manager's Union.
James, other people here know a lot more than I do about the labor movement, but you understand that unions arise in order to counter what one might call a monopoly on the part of capital, right?
The collective action problem that labor faces is hugely different than that faced by management, just on the basis of the larger number of individuals involved.
A union might become a monopoly if it could control all labor, but capital can just look for a different field in which to invest itself if a given industry becomes unionized.
137
James, other people here know a lot more than I do about the labor movement, but you understand that unions arise in order to counter what one might call a monopoly on the part of capital, right?
Capital doesn't have a monopoly as long as there are many independent capitalists (ie entities with money to invest).
126: Your open borders plan should really help the bargaining position of unskilled workers.
Quite right. The situation that currently obtains is one in which capital is fully mobile (with the odd, aberrant exception, such as North Korea) and labor is almost completely immobile -- at least from a legal perspective. If borders were as porous to labor as they are to capital, workers -- both individually and collectively -- would have a great deal more bargaining power, since they (or at least a significant plurality of them) could always decamp for wherever wages and working conditions were better.
Independent capitalists can go see a lawyer, pay a few thousand dollars, and create a combined capital structure called a corporation. Why shouldn't labor have a similar mechanism?
137: Capital doesn't have a monopoly as long as there are many independent capitalists (ie entities with money to invest).
Ah, but here I think we have a category error. The claim is not that any given capitalist enterprise is a monopoly, obviously that would be absurd. Rather, it is capital itself that is a monopoly on economic activity, much as the state has a monopoly on violence. Merely because there are a number of states, and some of them are in competition with each other for resources, prestige or what have you, does not imply that the overall force of the state lacks a monopoly on violence. Within a capitalist economic system, even the presence of anti-capitalist elements (barter, collectives, hermits, etc.) doesn't preclude us from saying that capitalism effectively monopolizes economic activity, since ultimately those elements must still interface with the rest of the system in order to perpetuate themselves.
If borders were as porous to labor as they are to capital, workers -- both individually and collectively -- would have a great deal more bargaining power, since they (or at least a significant plurality of them) could always decamp for wherever wages and working conditions were better.
This is kind of the great European dream, but it doesn't quite work. Labour is inherently sticky in a way that capital isn't; there's nothing except for legal obstacles stopping me from selling my shares in a British company and buying some in a Latvian company RIGHT NOW, but I can't read the news that there are good jobs to be had in Riga and leave tomorrow to make my fortune. I don't speak Latvian, I have a house here, I have social connections, I have (hypothetical) kids in school, moving is a significant cost, etc.
Hell, in the US there are no legal or linguistic barriers to moving from one end of the country to another, but people still don't uproot themselves all that often.
142
Independent capitalists can go see a lawyer, pay a few thousand dollars, and create a combined capital structure called a corporation. Why shouldn't labor have a similar mechanism?
No particular reason as long as the workers don't think this gives them a property right in whatever jobs they happen to be occupying. So workers could form groups and negotiate collectively but no one would be forced to deal with them if another group of workers was willing to offer better terms.
138
The collective action problem that labor faces is hugely different than that faced by management, just on the basis of the larger number of individuals involved.
This is true which is why antitrust laws are needed to (among other things) protect workers from collusive arrangements among companies.
Failing to understand inherent asymmetries between capital and labour - not just the stickiness in 144, but also things like collective action problems that go beyond very basic classroom economics - means that you end up basing your political beliefs on a kind of idealised world of perfectly spherical workers and frictionless rigid entrepreneurs colliding elastically and forming freely-negotiated contracts in a vacuum, with no resemblance to reality at all, and recommending policies that are either useless or more often actually harmful to people in the actually existing world.
Like the mythical French philosopher, people of this kind look at the existing achievements of the trade union movement - which are immense and worthwhile and have improved the lives of millions of people - and say "this may be all very well in practice but it would never work in theory".
James, why do you support the baseball players union?
145: So they can form a group so long as they do so under conditions where group formation isn't possible. Have you read Mancur Olson? He's an economist, so it won't taint your brain.
As for air shipping, I think just in time systems mean that a huge amount of in store retail is air shipped.
Domestic air cargo accounts for 0.3% of freight ton miles in the U.S. If you exclude the traditional bulk modes (rail, barge, pipeline) to focus on merchandise trade, it's still only 1.1% of freight ton miles. For international trade, air cargo is well under 1% by weight (though it's a much higher share by value). There is no time advantage to domestic air cargo until the length of haul exceeds 1,000 miles or so. Even so-called air shipments often move overland by truck; UPS Second-Day Air, for example, is mostly a truck product.
Environmentally, I wonder if online ordering is inferior to buying stuff locally, given that we're mostly talking about stuff that isn't manufactured locally. The shipping is the same total distance from factory to home, and the last ten miles are (for most customers) in a fully packed commercial vehicle rather than a single-occupant family car.
Yes, exactly. And that's before you get to the distorted land use patterns occasioned by big-box retail (which is, we should all be clear, the principal alternative here; i.e. not small independent neighborhood shops). I say slap a carbon tax on fossil fuels and let the market sort it out.
The thing people forget is just how ridiculously cheap it is to move stuff by sea. Look up container rates and be amazed. I estimate I could move my flat - not the contents and furniture, but the whole flat, in one piece - to Australia by ship for less than it would cost me to fly there first-class.
I estimate I could move my flat - not the contents and furniture, but the whole flat, in one piece - to Australia by ship for less than it would cost me to fly there first-class.
Only if your flat is small enough to fit inside a standard shipping container. It's the containerization that makes it so cheap.
151.last: I've wondered if at some future time when energy costs rise for driving and the online shopping experience becomes more "realistic" that the local big boxes will increasingly serve as local warehousing points enabled for same-day delivery. "Get your order in by 10 and get it by 2."
I was about to order Cascade Complete tabs from Amazon through subscribe and save. The main reason is that I never have any reason to go to Shaw's. I always go to Market Basket, and they don't carry it. Plus it's $5 cheaper from Amazon. Now I feel guilty.
||
I am learning that the establishment of US economic hegemony in the immediate post-WWII collapse conditions could have much to teach us about our current Shock Therapy.
Yes, America had a huge advantage in productive capacity, but remember, in order to sell you must have a buyer, with dollars, and managing effective demand was an amazing and sometimes brutal project. Positive current account deficits in European and Asian rebuilding countries required forms of imposed "austerity" and labor co-option etc.
From Among Empires
The ECA plan proposed elimination of the earlier bilateral calculations and establishment of a central pool in which all credits and debits would be merged. It would assign each country a quota in its own currency, depending upon its previous level of European trade. If a debtor country's debit from the EPU climbed above its allocated quota by more than an agreed-upon "swing," it must start repayment in gold or dollars. London feared both the limits of the quota and the potential call upon British reserves. If, in contrast, a creditor country found itself making advances beyond a swing, it would receive gold or dollars from the American "conditional aid" made available to EPU creditor participants as an inducement to lend.
Maybe these intricate currency games always go on inside Empires. Certainly variations were engineered in the Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton eras and more recently. I think maybe you only need to follow the money exchange and interest rates to see who is conquering and establishing political dominance.
Charles S. Maier much better than Tony Judt, that lousy neo-liberal Cold-Warrior. I think maybe you only need to follow the money exchange and interest rates to see who is conquering and establishing political dominance.
|>
||
The next sentences to 156 are important
Norway, Denmark, and Britain feared the consequences for their social spending, and Chancellor Cripps denounced the policy as a conspiracy between the Bank of Belgium and the U.S. Treasury to force the British Labour Party to dismantle its welfare state.
This is in the late 40s to early 50s. This is what the United States always was, is, and always will be, the number one world enemy of fairness, equality, and social justice.
|>
The 1940s were just a kinder time when there was no other possible example of unfairness or justice.
bob, we expect a higher standard of trolling from you. Just coming right out and saying "I prefer Hitler to Roosevelt" is pretty shoddy stuff. Try harder. Go for a walk, watch some Sailor Moon, then come back and have another crack at it.
153: I was imagining moving it in several adjoining ISO containers. Which I suppose you can't really do. Sorry.
The US didn't have to do anything to establish military and economic dominance post-WW2 'cause everyone else had done it for us.
|| I just had a friend moderately and reasonably chide me over some backlog which is affecting a club we both volunteer with. This is entirely due to my procrastination, which is partly caused by my feeling like shit all the time from this frigging back pain.* I had set aside tonight for working on it (yesterday got as far as "dumping all the papers from a bunch of containers out on the table"). Now though after emailing her back (I hadn't even seen her message for days) to acknowledge I'm at fault & say what I'm going to do about it, I feel so rotten& guilty I don't know if I can start on the bloody stuff. Gah. (*partly, because I have natural tendencies anyway, but usually I would have got caught up at some point). |>
162: Guilt about being behind on something is often the main reason I fall even further behind. It hurts to think that I screwed the project up, so I put the whole thing out of my mind.
This is not a productive coping strategy.
Guilt about being behind on something is often the main reason I fall even further behind
The big place I run into that dynamic is with correspondences. I'll feel guilty for not contacting somebody and then, as rob says, not want to think about it so I just never get back to them.
162 describes way, way too much of my life, back pain included. Is there a way you can just pass it off on someone else or will you really be able to do it? I hate being in that situation so much, and it's one of the reasons I no longer take on much.
Oh, I can do it. The hateful part will be contacting a bunch of people with not-quite-lies to apologise. I put off the "walking to the bank on my lunch break" part for so long that it's now the least of my problems. I resist even more strongly havIng to explain the state of things to sOmeone else.
Anyway I will do something on it tonight even if only for 5 mins.
Bob, remind us how Europe "dismantled its welfare state" in the 1940s? We built the fucking thing in the 1940s. Also, what is a "positive current account deficit"? Do you mean a surplus?
I was told there would be no math.
168. Bob is quoting somebody saying that Stafford Cripps said the US Treasury was trying to make him demolish the welfare state, not that he did. May well be true, or Cripps may have been delusional; probably both.
And the point isn't history, or at least directly.
The best tool of political and economic analysis ever is "cui bono?"
I don't know who is doing it or quite how it is done, but watch who rises from the ashes of the Euro.
Best fucking Empire ever, god damn us to hell.
171.1: Did you mean "directly" or "correctly"?
162: I'm in almost the exact same position, although back pain has kinda been the least of my problems just recently. I'm going to try to do the three main things tonight/tomorrow morning, then see where I'm at, and probably focus on other objects of procrastination for the rest of the week. Sigh.
149
James, why do you support the baseball players union?
Because baseball owners are exempt from antitrust law (for no good reason) allowing them to engage in all sorts of collusive arangements (like drafting players) which should be totally illegal so it is only fair for the players to collude in turn.
I mocked the voice o' the people and my air conditioner froze. Save me Comrade Stalin-lite.
So here we are, Natilo, Moby and James, left to our own devices in an otherwise abandoned blog. It's like some horrible episode of The Twilight Zone, except boring instead of weird. Nightmarish.
Is this a forlorn thread? Topic: we are moving the bookshop, in toto (of course), and it's a lot of work.
Meanwhile we've determined that a local "free books!" non-profit -- a place which houses and provides tens of thousands of books, free, to anyone who walks in the door -- and to which we've been giving a fair amount of what we consider dross, is not necessarily giving its donated books away for free, but is selling a not insignificant number of them. We knew this before, and it's justifiable to a certain extent -- they do need to meet overhead expenses -- but probably not to this extent. Don't know how I feel about this, ethically.
Other topic: my co-worker's friend died last night, and I feel badly for my co-worker about it.
http://www.myspace.com/music/player?sid=77215153&ac=now
NMM
http://www.myspace.com/music/player?sid=37970532&ac=now
177: That is sad about coworker's friend.
The economics of used books are so weird right now. I mean, maybe they always were, but it was different before. I went out selling my dross a couple of weeks ago. The first place I went gave me $10 in store credit for 3 books. The second gave me $2 cash for 4 books. The third gave me a quarter for one. At that point, I still had about 15 pounds of books, so I took them over to the Women's Prison Book Project to donate. They were happy to have them, although, as hardcovers (mostly) they'll just be sold to raise money for postage rather than be sent to women & transgendered prisoners. Plus there's the penny sellers on Amazon vs. the exorbitant amounts charged for out-of-print English childrens' books.
One nice thing is that the best local used bookstore is now stocking a lot of perennial favorite new books, including a solid selection of P.G. Wodehouse. So that is good.
178: That is also sad. Grew up listening to him all the time on APHC. Hell of a run though.
I went out selling my dross a couple of weeks ago. The first place I went gave me $10 in store credit for 3 books. The second gave me $2 cash for 4 books. The third gave me a quarter for one.
That's not really a reflection on the economics of used books, since it depends entirely on what the books were.
Donating dross is a fine and good thing to do; what's changed is, yes, the 'penny' sellers on Amazon. I wouldn't sell a book online for a penny or 50 cents or $2.49 or $3.75 if you paid me. The labor, materials, and storage cost just isn't worth it. Apparently volume selling at those prices works out (it's still a mystery how it does), and volume sellers who do that are shifting consumer expectations about price points. Is there a name for that phenomenon in the economics literature? We lay people just call it a downward price spiral.
the exorbitant amounts charged for out-of-print English childrens' books.
Example?
177:Are they selling all their children's books? Because the children's book section at that place is consistently really poor, as compared with the rest of the place, which I love.
180 is why I never buy digital books, and rarely new books of any kind. Even when something is available digitally, it is always so much cheaper to get a 30 year old paperback!
I'm sad that there aren't enough deal-vultures like me to prop up prices on the used book market, even though it's to my short-term benefit.
182: volume selling at those prices works out (it's still a mystery how it does)
They take a loss on each unit, but make it up on volume, obviously.
but make it up on volume, obviously. outrageous shipping markups, no?
183: I haven't noticed them selling the children's books, because that's not an area I look at. They do sell the most obviously popular books and very pretty, nicely produced books, in gardening and interior decorating and architecture, and, like, collectors' books on beautiful jewelry or silverware and so on. They also sell more academic books. They advertise in and get donations from rather tony neighborhoods (donations to a non-profit are tax-deductible), and have put some of those donations up at auction in NYC, for very good realized prices. Okay, maybe, they do have expenses to meet. And do you want to just stick things like that in the free books area? Maybe not.
What bothers me most, probably, is seeing things like nursing books for sale. And teacher training books. And just plain old cookbooks. Those are the kinds of things people on limited incomes are interested in.
186 was my understanding. The book is a penny, the S&H is $4.99, and then it's sent by some mailing format that costs $3.
Topic: we are moving the bookshop, in toto (of course), and it's a lot of work.
I hear that containerized shipping is the way to go.
186: For used books on Amazon, a typical shipping markup is $3.99. Assuming a penny seller, that's a total price of $4.00.
Subtracting the $3.75 at which parsimon would never sell, that's just $0.25 for shipping, which isn't particularly much.
And I have in fact bought books for less than $4 including shipping - good books too, in good condition. (Most recently, The Witling and Tatja Grimm's World.)
188: Right. The S&H is $3.99, in fact, and the mailing with the bulk discount gotten from the shipping provider plus the totally shitty packaging amounts to maybe 90 cents. I still wouldn't sell a book for that little, and god help their workers.
Meanwhile people (consumers) are starting to think that they should be able to buy books online for a penny or $3.50. It rather pisses me off.
Somehow textbooks are always expensive, though.
Textbook-shipping must be unionized or something.
I bought an ethernet cable connector from a third party, through Amazon, for 88 cents, including shipping. When it arrived, it was clear that it had been mailed all the way from Hong Kong. This does not strike me as a particularly sustainable business model.
195: Nobody has managed to figure out how it can possibly work. Short of labor malfeasance.
Holy cow. Looks like the price has since dropped to 62 cents. Probably to compete with these guys selling a similar product for 55 cents.
I'm sure labor malfeasance is a given. But is international airmail really that cheap?
Malfeasance might have been the wrong word, since it sounds as though the laborers themselves are up to no good.
197: In the first link, I can't really figure out why Amazon shows that as "New from $0.01". The cheapest there is from $0.61.
Maybe Amazon is having one of its computational freakouts, which is not unusual on their part. Maybe everyone rushed to buy that one-cent coupler with free shipping.
Is this all not absurd in the extreme? Look, if you have one of those couplers lying around the house (I do), and you don't need it, put it up on freecycle or something. This is just an embarrassment.
Ten bucks with free in-store pickup at Best Buy!
Why would anybody go with Amazon?
201.last: Apparently they're poverty stricken.
HDMI cable: only $113 with in-store pickup!
Why would anybody pay two dollars for an identically functioning cable on Amazon?
For a while I was buying electronics batteries direct from HK on eBay at 1/40 price including shipping costs as the local pharmacy that carried them, which sold only $5 singles.
With books, I am afraid that the number of people with an interest in physical books is dropping quickly.
200: In the first link, I can't really figure out why Amazon shows that as "New from $0.01". The cheapest there is from $0.61.
The one cent ones are with $4.99 shipping, sent from California. Amazon lists them by total cost - price plus shipping - so the $0.61/free shipping versions show up first on the list.
One of the reasons Best Buy is in so much trouble (and Circuit City is dead) is that they are still trying to use laptops and so on as loss leaders and make up the difference with one or two hundred percent markup on cables and accessories.
Er, "hundred" should be "thousand"
I will note that the notion of what counts as a "markup" is relative. I have no idea if Best Buy's prices constitute a markup -- maybe they do -- but Blandings first mentioned "outrageous shipping markups" in 186. I can tell you that where book shipping is concerned, there's not much of a markup. It works out about evenly: half the books we ship are under $3.99, and another half are over. So people can calm down on that front. Shipping rates on an ethernet connector are probably cheaper, what with it being so dinky, so I don't know about that.
Also, obviously, one's idea of a fair or reasonable or market price is relative. Which is more to the point.
I meant markup over wholesale price, which is close to (but probably slightly lower than, in most cases) the prices seen on Amazon.
On reflection, since I work in the resale world of used items, not in a world where wholesale has a lot a meaning, I shouldn't try to say much at all about the selling of widgets.
As for Amazon, they're ... okay, I think I should shut up.
NMM to Doc Watson. Even when as a teenager I hated my parents' bluegrass music, I had to respect.
213 -- 178 and 179 above have a couple of tunes.
If the link works; does for me, but might not for you. The one in 178 is a duet with Bill Monroe. I'm too depressed by the Frontline broadcast on Yemen, though, for badinage. See y'all tomorrow.
I'm vaguely determined to work diligently tomorrow.
I'm developing a blog crush on Freddie deBoer.
Those are great, CC. I hadn't clicked on the links before posting.
Those are great, CC. I hadn't clicked on the links before posting.
Regarding Doc Watson I've been thinking about this gorgeous performance (video).