Is Amazon a corrupt company?

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Where I attended college 15-18 hours of class time was considered full-time. Gave us plenty of time to work at the post office or UPS and pay for tuition and books. Worked at a factory in the summers.
 
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Unless I witness for myself a company behaving badly, I wouldn’t put a lot of faith in something “I heard.”
 
Every company is run by human beings, and so every company has corruption. But then, so is every government, every church, and every other organization in the world.

If you are going to boycott all corruption, you’re going to have to have yourself put into a coma, because even if you become a hermit, you’ll still be around yourself.
 
I worked for Amazon, in a warehouse and I didn’t feel that I was badly paid or treated. They paid about the same or slightly more than other warehouse jobs I’d had in the same area.

We were expected to work quickly and meet a quota, which is standard at any warehouse I’ve worked. We were given breaks and lunch time. If you were a consistent worker they would eventually hire you for full time (nearly all employees begin working there via a temp agency) and you’d get better pay and better benefits.

Since they they have increased wages across the board, so that’s even better. Like any job I’ve ever had, some people liked it, others didn’t. There were good managers and not so good managers. I worked hard and stayed busy, no doubt about that. I worked in a few different jobs there and some were more stressful than others. Outbound could get pretty hairy when you were trying to get the rush orders out on time. And we handled so much merchandise that finding a place to put it all could be a royal headache.
 
You might be surprised to find out the current rates of tuition, but besides that, McDonalds can’t really work around a college student’s schedule. If a student has one class in the morning and one in the afternoon, it’s not as if they can go in and work in between. McDonalds needs people who will be there for their meal-time rushes. In addition, a college student’s schedule changes from semester to semester. The post office has a pile of mail that has to be processed. It doesn’t matter as much to them if it is processed at 9AM or 10AM, as long as it’s processed that day. Lunchtime is lunchtime though and McDonalds can’t run entirely on students coming and going in between classes. They have to have a full-time day staff that they can depend on to be there for the entire shift.
 
Why? They still have part time employees, they just can’t run entirely on part time employees, as many people seem to suggest they do. They also have full-time employees who are part-time students, but that doesn’t fit in with the rhetoric that McDonalds is only for children living with their parents, trying to raise money for comic books, and so they only should expect to make $5 an hour.
 
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Maybe its just the Amazon in my area that’s corrupt because my brother made it sound like they give no break times which is mandatory in jobs and look for ways to fire someone and have harsh deadlines.
 
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What they probably do (given what I have seen at other chains) is have shift managers and maybe one or two other people through the day, and a bunch of people come in for a short time during the rush periods.

Restaurants have very tight labor margins so they everything they can to reduce labor.

There are plenty of mothers who want a part-time job, or others, to keep a MacDonalds running.
 
Trying to figure out what is “corrupt” about providing an online shopping and logistics venue for suppliers and buyers to engage in voluntary exchange of goods and services.
 
edjlopez23 said:
I’m wondering if I should boycott it or not.
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While I agree with aforementioned sentiments that we shouldn’t spread ourselves too thin with boycotts, I do boycott Amazon, in particular. Its unethical practices are endemic in much of the corporate world, but it’s such a behemoth that it feels personally unsettling to me to support the corruption on such a large scale.
 
What they actually do is have a team that comes in for food prep around 4AM. That group stays until the lunch rush is over. A second group comes in whenever the dining room opens and stays until the night crew comes in between 4 and 5 PM. The night crew has a group of part-timers that stay until the dinner rush is over and a handful of others who close the store. The food-prep group and the store closers are generally full-time employees. The second group that comes in for breakfast are often also full-time employees, though they can be divided up by days if the store has enough part-timers that can work that shift.
 
I did. And so far there have been no instances of corruption even mentioned. There were questions about whether they treat their employees nicely, but again, no accusations of actual or perceived corruption. So my statement followed along on those lines.

By the way, I noticed although you made an accusation of unethical practices which you did not enumerate, that all of the people who actually have worked for Amazon who commented above said it was a fair place to work.
 
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As someone who worked both for a small bookstore, specializing in rare OP books, and finders service, as well as two of the major (at the time) national book chains, Amazon certainly had an impact on how the book business works, in my eyes. Borders disappeared (not sure if any Waldens are around), one of the local BAM stores closed, another was shifted to a basically used bookstore, with lots of non-book offerings, and with trade in credit, as the small group of stores I worked for in the used and rare book business imploded, and several local used book stores disappeared. I was out of the business for some years before Amazon impacted both aspects of book retail, but I saw that coming. The internet, of which Amazon was the exemplar, was too big and efficient, opening to customers the wider world of used books, with one stop shopping, through Amaazon’s portal.

I finally went to using Amazon for my own used book needs, though I gritted my teeth. Functionally, it was a good idea, but I missed the local stores.
 
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“Corruption” may not be the best words to use, but between their tax evasion and willingness to treat their employees like livestock, I do find many of their practices unethical.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
In USA, the large chain bookshops are actually the ones that went out of business because of Amazon. “Little local bookshops” often have a specialty clientele, or they offer things that Amazon can’t, such as book readings, local events etc. The people who shop at such bookshops often do not use Amazon. Usually when I’ve seen a “little local bookshop” go out of business, it’s because the owner decided to retire or move on, and/or because it was very poorly managed or the landlord raised the rent or some factor other than Amazon. Many “little local bookshops” also sell their books mail order on the Amazon secondary marketplace, so Amazon is helping their business, not hurting it
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This has been my experience also. Borders went out of Business, Walden books is now gone. We are left with Barnes & Noble and Books a Million (I think?). Barnes and Noble monopolizes the textbook area, although Amazon is catching up. I do expect to see Barnes and NOble lose even more brick and mortar stores than it already has.

But the small local independents are not hurting because of Amazon since as TisBearself mentions they work with Amazon to sell their merchandise.
 
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