Amazon: the shittiest, most ghastly company on earth

[eti]

https://youtu.be/mxqz2g05MTI

 

[richnormand]

Just like this one too.

https://resource-recycling.com/e-scrap/2020/10/08/the-details-on-apples-lawsuit-against-geep-canada/

What sort of non sustainable society are we getting to ...

[Miti]

Color me surprised!
The solution is simple. Don’t buy from Amazon. I don’t.
As for Apple, I’m still using an IPhone 7 Plus.

[james_s]

I'm still using my iPhone SE, it's the second smartphone I've owned and my second iPhone. I think I got the first one back in 2010. Not many complaints, although I sure liked the UI in iOS 6 better than anything that has come after.

[Ed.Kloonk]

https://youtu.be/mxqz2g05MTI

 

I wonder how much of this can be taken seriously, though, when you look at who funded this hit piece and their tendency to exaggerate, just a little bit. 

[Brumby]

Certainly, Amazon's business model can be criticised, but first let me ask:  Where did all that product come from?

Answer: From internet sales wannabes who have some capital they pour into inventory, without having a GOOD idea of their market and sales potential.  As a result, they over-buy.

This then leads to Amazon warehouses getting filled with product, a significant amount of which does not move.  Since they cannot just add space at a whim, they have to have a rational process for making room for product that does not have this legacy.  Charging for storage is the obvious method - it's been used for absolute ages.  It then comes down to the "merchant" to decide if they want to pay up in the hope their products sell or cut their losses.

Some merchants will do this as a planned strategy - buy cheap and get as much out of a product before getting out - while others (those less experienced and, likely, greedy and/or more hopeful) get caught out and are forced to make that decision.


Yes, Amazon has provided the platform for this to happen - but they can hardly be blamed for what is actually being destroyed.

Oh, and giving the stuff away in anything more than token amounts is a sure way to undermine the market of those merchants that might have a chance.

[T3sl4co1l]

Put another way, the waste has already occurred, long before the titular event: someone decided to throw the dice on some capital, and at that moment it's a write-off, either it sells and turns a profit or it's money spent.  Period, doesn't matter what happens to it after that.

If you want to solve waste, regulate the business practice.

I don't see that such regulations even need to be restrictive.  Indeed they ought to be profitable.  Don't make things you aren't going to sell, only stock what you need -- lean manufacturing probably helps a lot, and this is already practice in many markets.  The problem arises in part, in trying to make too much profit too soon: making an initial investment and expecting immediate payoffs (i.e. having product manufactured, and placing it on the marketplace), versus a slower burn with lower best-case rewards, probably the same average outcome, and less materiel wasted.

Tim

[eti]

Fervent greed overrides sanity

[richnormand]

@eti
You might be interested in those then:

[aix]

I really don't get the economics of this, especially for higher-valued items.  Rather than destroying the stock, would it not be advantageous for whomever owns it to sell it at a deep discount?  Or is that harder to do than it sounds?

[vk6zgo]

Just like this one too.

https://resource-recycling.com/e-scrap/2020/10/08/the-details-on-apples-lawsuit-against-geep-canada/

What sort of non sustainable society are we getting to ...

Apple are very ready to sue at a moment's notice.

They even tried it with Woolworths Australia, who had a logo supposedly symbolising "fresh fruit & vegetables", in the form of a stylised "W" in the form of an apple, with the parts of the letter looking like a peeled apple skin.

Of course "they were dreaming" -----taking on a major Australian company in Australia.
They went away "with their tail between their legs!"

Interestingly the "Apple" symbol turned sideways, looks like a three quarter rear image of Olaf the snowman from "Frozen"------maybe they should take on Disney, too?

I never worked out why Apple weren't sued by "Apple" records, whose logo predates the computer company.

[johnboxall]

I never worked out why Apple weren't sued by "Apple" records, whose logo predates the computer company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer

[vk6zgo]

I never worked out why Apple weren't sued by "Apple" records, whose logo predates the computer company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer

Obviously I am "out of touch"!

[dmills]

The first of the Macs to have built a in dac for actually plying audio as opposed to beeps, had a start up chime the filename for which was sosume, SoSueMe.

Yea there was a lawsuit back in the day.
 

[voltsandjolts]

Industrial scale manufacturing has always been bad news for the environment, because all products are put there at the end of their useful life. In more or less damaging ways. My mind boggles just at the volume of cleaning chemicals that go down the drain and straight to local water courses or the sea. Every supermarket on the planet has shelves full of chemicals labelled damaging to aquatic life, and that's exactly where it ends up!

Anyway, I digress.

Amazon is simply another player, helping us along our fast track to environmental destruction.
On the plus side, at least some folks are getting rich along the way

[Raj]

Industrial scale manufacturing has always been bad news for the environment, because all products are put there at the end of their useful life. In more or less damaging ways. My mind boggles just at the volume of cleaning chemicals that go down the drain and straight out to local water courses or rivers. Every supermarket on the planet has shelves full of chemicals labelled damaging to aquatic life, and that's exactly where it ends up!

Anyway, I digress.

Amazon is simply another player, helping us along our fast track to environmental destruction.
On the plus side, at least some folks are getting rich along the way

Reminds me of a tv show, with a person yelling something along the lines of, "these chemicals are messing up with frog's brains"   . 

[GlennSprigg]

@eti
You might be interested in those then:

Yep!!  I saw those videos just the other day.  They embedded Tracking Devices in a lot of RETURNS, to see where
they went. Most ended up in Destruction warehouses, as it's cheaper than bothering to process the stuff!!!
Some people have the right idea.... buy it bulk & next to nothing, and re-sell it!!!

[james_s]

I refuse to do business with any company I find out is destroying perfectly good stuff just to keep it out of the hands of someone else. They really ought to tax that heavily to incentivize selling or donating anything usable to charity. Anything other than turning it into landfill. The cost we pay for goods does not cover the true cost to the environment.

[T3sl4co1l]

Guess you'll starve then.  Supermarkets do the same thing...  At least there's a chance they mark down or donate old items?

Tim

[Cerebus]

https://youtu.be/mxqz2g05MTI

 

I wonder how much of this can be taken seriously, though, when you look at who funded this hit piece and their tendency to exaggerate, just a little bit. 

So who do you think "funded this hit piece"? ITV News is an independent news organisation providing news to a number of TV companies, they don't even have the moral hazard of having advertisers for customers like the TV companies themselves, or newspapers or magazines for that matter.

[Circlotron]

I never worked out why Apple weren't sued by "Apple" records, whose logo predates the computer company.

The court probably thought they were comparing apples with apples...
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/compare%20apples%20and%2Fto%2Fwith%20apples

[Rick Law]

I really don't get the economics of this, especially for higher-valued items.  Rather than destroying the stock, would it not be advantageous for whomever owns it to sell it at a deep discount?  Or is that harder to do than it sounds?

The destruction like likely the cost of selling, fulfillment, plus book keeping exceeded the profit of the sale.  So rather than throwing good money after bad, the wise choice for the seller might well be just path of minimum additional lost.

This point was raised in earlier reply, but it is good to repeat it: One should keep in mind that Amazon did not take any part in creating those "stuff" which ended up being destroyed.  They merely provided a channel to sell stuff.  While I don't particularly like Amazon the company, or Jeff Bezos the person; I think blaming them for such destruction is a bit unfair.

[T3sl4co1l]

The destruction like likely the cost of selling, fulfillment, plus book keeping exceeded the profit of the sale.  So rather than throwing good money after bad, the wise choice for the seller might well be just path of minimum additional lost.

This point was raised in earlier reply, but it is good to repeat it: One should keep in mind that Amazon did not take any part in creating those "stuff" which ended up being destroyed.  They merely provided a channel to sell stuff.  While I don't particularly like Amazon the company, or Jeff Bezos the person; I think blaming them for such destruction is a bit unfair.

They aren't the only one to blame, but they certainly can be blamed.  For example, they could instate policies that are less wasteful, more lenient to suppliers, or incorporate carbon credits or energy cost or some other environmental factor into their policies / fee structures; something besides the purely financial motive that we can assume they are using.

Likewise, we can blame the suppliers for ordering in excess of what they were actually able to sell; they should've done better market research.  This doesn't even need to be a supplier problem, as they can do everything right and still get shafted by Amazon -- how many Amazon Basics clone products have displaced their original sellers?

Or we can go higher up and blame the government for not creating and enforcing such policies -- and indeed this would be the most effective one, as Amazon is simply using an industry-standard process.  This is absolutely a case where greater government regulation/oversight yields a freer market for all.

It's a big operation, with many players involved, and it makes sense to have continuous (or at least finely divided) amounts of blame, no need to pin it on one lone actor.

Tim

[james_s]

Guess you'll starve then.  Supermarkets do the same thing...  At least there's a chance they mark down or donate old items?

Tim

When food is rotting there is not much else you can do with it unfortunately, it's perishable. They do try to distribute it though, a while back I volunteered with a bunch of my coworkers at an organization that collects all the expired and about to expire food from Costco, sorts through it and then donates some of it to food banks and sells other stuff at deeply discounted prices at market that sells low cost food to low income people. The stuff that would not survive the process was composted which turns it back into highly fertile soil. My mom has a friend who belongs to another organization that does a similar thing with supermarket foods, they end up with so much excess that I end up with all kinds of random food for free, it's far from perfect but at least they're trying. They don't destroy perfectly good stock just to keep it out of someone else's hands.

[Rick Law]

The destruction like likely the cost of selling, fulfillment, plus book keeping exceeded the profit of the sale.  So rather than throwing good money after bad, the wise choice for the seller might well be just path of minimum additional lost.

This point was raised in earlier reply, but it is good to repeat it: One should keep in mind that Amazon did not take any part in creating those "stuff" which ended up being destroyed.  They merely provided a channel to sell stuff.  While I don't particularly like Amazon the company, or Jeff Bezos the person; I think blaming them for such destruction is a bit unfair.

They aren't the only one to blame, but they certainly can be blamed.  For example, they could instate policies that are less wasteful, more lenient to suppliers, or incorporate carbon credits or energy cost or some other environmental factor into their policies / fee structures; something besides the purely financial motive that we can assume they are using.
...
...

Amazon often is grouped with companies like Google, Apple, and the likes.  But Amazon isn't exactly a high profit company.  Amazon's on-line sales and fulfilment operates on much thinner margin than say Google's ad sale and Apple's HW/SW (apps) lines.  They don't have as much room to maneuver as you imagined.

This is probably shocking to many: Apple made more profit in three months than Amazon has generated during its lifetime!

^{https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/11/apple-made-more-profit-in-three-months-than-amazon-has-generated-during-its-lifetime.html}