> The number of packages that Amazon ships itself per employee each year has also steadily increased since at least 2015 to about 3,870 from about 175...
onlyrealcuzzo · 3h ago
That's impressive growth, to be sure.
But shipping about 0.5 packages per employee per day is not impressive to start...
It's no wonder Amazon didn't make money for a very long time.
davey48016 · 2h ago
It says "ships themselves". I interpreted that as meaning through their own delivery service versus UPS/USPS, and I thought those third party shipments were still picked up at Amazon warehouses. Meaning this could have much more to do with Amazon building out their delivery service than with warehouse efficiency.
I'm also under the impression that most of the Amazon delivery drivers are contractors, and wouldn't count in "per employee" metrics.
joules77 · 4h ago
Amazon is also on the cusp of becoming the largest company by revenue.
dogleash · 4h ago
What a meaningless metric. Number of discrete robots is not a measurement of productivity, labor, task throughput or anything like that.
Also the regular yada yada that non-robot automation offset people, non-automated tools also reduce number of people needed.
bryanlarsen · 3h ago
There are hundreds of computers in every car. We all know that this number has little correlation with human replacement.
Robot is a term with such a wide range of capabilities that a simple count is meaningless. Just like a tiny 4 bit micro that monitors a single sensor isn't comparable to a computer running a large LLM.
m463 · 2h ago
I wonder if there are more shelves than humans?
pydry · 4h ago
It's not supposed to be scientifically meaningful it's a reprinted press release that is supposed to spin a narrative that makes Amazon workers feel insecure about their jobs and investors feel confident that those wages will shortly be converted into dividends.
You can tell what the Wall Street Journal's true feelings are about automation by reading an article about retirement and dividing the number of times they use the term "AI" by the number of times they use the phrase "demographic/retirement crisis" e.g. in https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/blackrock-larry-fink-a...
baggachipz · 3h ago
"Robots don't take bathroom breaks, so you shouldn't either. If you're lucky, we'll let you work for a little while more until we can replace you with something cheaper. Now, back to work!"
malfist · 4h ago
If Jassy had his way, Amazon's sole employee would be him and he'd be rent seeking everything down the line with robots and AI.
He has no vision beyond what is best for him personally. Other people aren't humans.
rybosworld · 4h ago
This mindset is more common than not among executives.
I think there's a non-zero chance of 95% unemployment within the next 20 years.
MangoToupe · 3h ago
> I think there's a non-zero chance of 95% unemployment within the next 20 years.
I can't imagine this would last long with the social instability that would follow.
That also seems like a gross overestimate for many industries. Many supply chains are nowhere near able to be automated to the extent this ratio would imply.
diggan · 4h ago
> non-zero chance of 95% unemployment within the next 20 years
With that said, there is probably also a non-zero chance that something like that wouldn't be negative but something positive instead. I suppose that'd be the ideal scenario.
hshdhdhj4444 · 4h ago
U.S. productivity has increased massively over the last half century and yet much of the increased productivity has ended up in the hands of a select few.
This is being accelerated by the bill passed the senate literally today.
Is there any reason to believe we will drastically reverse the trend?
Kon5ole · 1h ago
>much of the increased productivity has ended up in the hands of a select few.
I do agree that wealth is not distributed particularly fairly but I don't understand the idea that it's mostly going to a select few. There are almost 20 million more jobs in the US now than there were 20 years ago, that's a lot of productivity right there.
Amazon employs 1.4 million people. Bezos has spent maybe the equivalent to a couple of weeks worth of Amazon payroll so far in his life. His yacht was the equivalent of a few days, his wedding maybe one hour. That money didn't come from Amazon either, it came from people wanting to own Amazon.
Leaving aside whether that's fair or not, surely it means that most of the productivity and money is going to the employees?
What am I missing here? How was this better before, what has changed recently that makes this such a big talking point now?
RichEO · 1h ago
What you’re missing, in your relentless focus on mostly abstract economic measurements, is that the measures of individual success and happiness are going down. People on average, are less able to afford to buy homes, raise children and pay for health care.
Kon5ole · 21m ago
I assure you I have no relentless focus on anything but trying to understand what's going on! There are many problems for sure but I don't understand how they can be solved with faulty explanations!
Many people seem convinced that the problems in society are caused by billionaires hoarding money, when they clearly aren't hoarding any relevant amounts of money. The problems with housing, healthcare and such are very obviously caused by other things (Home mortgages being a huge cornerstone of the entire economy for one, millions are placed in a situation where cheaper housing would be a catastrophe - including banks).
Maybe our parents, who were able to buy a house for like 5 years of a worker's salary, were just the luckiest generation? It sure hasn't been that easy to get a home before or after at any time in history.
Right now is one of the runner ups though, but we're comparing the situation with the best ever.
danjc · 4h ago
That would be bad for anyone selling stuff
Henchman21 · 4h ago
“Executive” is another word for “sociopath” so this is unsurprising.
HardCodedBias · 2h ago
Have you worked with him?
I had the privilege of working with him for a little over a year.
He was respectful, analytical, and only thought about what is best for Amazon and Amazon's customers.
I don't think his own aggrandizement or what's best for him enters into the calculus of his day-to-day work one itoa.
He's an untiring as well. I realized I had gone far beyond my peter principle when I was working with him.
malfist · 2h ago
I have worked with him.
He's a robber baron, not a captain of industry.
Don't have to look much past his "gobble gobble" email to see that, nor his announcement of RTO the day after an all hands where remote work was touted as the future.
HardCodedBias · 1h ago
"his announcement of RTO"
At least he walks the walk. He was in the office 100% of the time.
dfxm12 · 4h ago
Yes, he is a capitalist. This is the logical result of capitalism.
isoprophlex · 4h ago
Is amazon a net benefit to humanity? Is extreme disintermediation in general a beneficial thing, where there is only the consumers left, paying rent-like tithes into one big pocket, without an economic ecosystem in between?
IAmBroom · 3h ago
Looking just at their physical-item distribution model, I'd imagine it's far more carbon-efficient than physically shopping.
Case 1: I drive to the store to get a widget. There is a low chance Store-1 doesn't have it, and I have to keep shopping. Regardless, I am driving about 30 minutes total, conservatively.
Case 2: I order a widget from Amazon. The Amazon driver organizes their stops to minimize travel time, and it's undoubtedly less than 30 minutes driving from the previous stop.
Both cases require transport of goods from factory to the final storage location (shopfront or Amazon warehouse), so the difference there is negligible.
david-gpu · 3h ago
I broadly agree, but the assumption that people drive for 30 minutes to on average to buy an item sounds like a stretch. When I don't buy online I simply walk or ride a bike to the store. On the other hand, I live in an urban setting.
scarface_74 · 3h ago
Because most people ride bikes and walk to the store despite all of the huge parking lots filled with cars.
david-gpu · 2h ago
Most people in most of the cities around the world get around by walking, transit or cycling. Car-centric development is a pretty recent and relatively localized phenomenon.
scarface_74 · 2h ago
As is Amazon
92% of the people in the US have access to at least one vehicle
None of the statistics you presented support your last statement. Perhaps try traveling abroad some day.
MangoToupe · 3h ago
Of course, the productivity gains are largely drained by the shareholders, so we only collectively get part of expected benefits of a centrally-planned economy.
cynicalsecurity · 2h ago
Centrally-planned economy was a disaster.
Capitalism might not be perfect, but communism did not function at all. You can have the best of both worlds in socio-capitalist system.
Let Amazon automate everything. Does anyone here really want to do the manual labour in their warehouses?
MangoToupe · 2h ago
Amazon is a centrally-planned economy. You do not need to fix prices to achieve this.
Henchman21 · 4h ago
I’m sure that when more than half of us are unemployed that we’ll just sit quietly and know our place.
What’s that you say? People with nothing left to lose tend to put the heads of Capitalists on pikes for all to see? Well
maybe you should have thought of that before pillaging the commons and treating people like slaves? But “fiduciary duty to shareholder value” you say? You made that shit up in the 1950s and have been pushing it like it were true ever since. Saying a thing doesn’t make it true.
quantadev · 4h ago
Counting robots is like counting circuits in a piece of electronics: It's Meaningless.
However what would be interesting is if they ever have a situation where the number of humanoid robot employees outnumbers human employees. Once someone is able to run an entire large corporation with no humans at all it will be a big milestone I guess.
But there's no real driving force for this to happen, because the humanoid form factor is not necessarily ideal for most kinds of industrial applications. And a lot of the "Automation" will be AI Agents, which have no form factor at all, being purely knowledge based.
WillAdams · 3h ago
It is an interesting contrast to "lights out manufacturing" --- there are a lot of CNC companies where day shift runs short jobs, and then loads up pallets of materials and stages empty pallets for finished parts, loads the programs and sets quantities and so forth, then presses "Start", and turns out the lights to leave --- there might be a skeleton crew to deal with any issues which arise, often not.
turnsout · 4h ago
How's that UBI coming? Oh, totally off the table you say? Well, the people will surely find something better to do than rising up.
zdragnar · 4h ago
The cotton and wool mills may not have been great for the Luddites, but everyone else benefitted. Using terms someone else used in a sibling thread, they were a "net benefit for humanity".
monocasa · 4h ago
I don't think the parent is making the argument that this level of automation can't be a net benefit for humanity, just that if it results in nearly the entire middle class and down being laid off at the same time with no recompense, that's an almost perfect storm for revolution, violent or not.
david-gpu · 3h ago
As long as people working in a warehouse identify with the middle class, inequality will continue. There is very little class conscience in the US, from what I can see. They sooner identify as "poor" than as "working class".
monocasa · 3h ago
The middle class is on the chopping block too. The lower class will honestly probably last longer than the median of the middle class, like paralegals, etc.
Standing in the same bread line creates an awful lot of solidarity.
rwmj · 2h ago
Social carers for the elderly might be the last people employed.
merth · 4h ago
> net benefit for humanity
Some people might argue that wealth concentrated in the top 1% is a net benefit if you look at it as one big pool of resources. But will the remaining 99% actually see any of that benefit? Or will the 1% simply tighten their grip, keeping the rest dependent on their “generosity”?
pstuart · 3h ago
No worries! It's gonna trickle down to us and we'll be happy owning nothing /s
exe34 · 3h ago
Thinking "there will always be something else for everybody to do" because "there's always been something else for everybody to do" is like the dinosaurs thinking "we've always been fine after a meteor strike".
GuinansEyebrows · 2h ago
that depends on how important it is to people to be able to continuously overbuy cheap, poorly-made, low-quality disposable textile goods.
> The number of packages that Amazon ships itself per employee each year has also steadily increased since at least 2015 to about 3,870 from about 175...
But shipping about 0.5 packages per employee per day is not impressive to start...
It's no wonder Amazon didn't make money for a very long time.
I'm also under the impression that most of the Amazon delivery drivers are contractors, and wouldn't count in "per employee" metrics.
Also the regular yada yada that non-robot automation offset people, non-automated tools also reduce number of people needed.
Robot is a term with such a wide range of capabilities that a simple count is meaningless. Just like a tiny 4 bit micro that monitors a single sensor isn't comparable to a computer running a large LLM.
You can tell what the Wall Street Journal's true feelings are about automation by reading an article about retirement and dividing the number of times they use the term "AI" by the number of times they use the phrase "demographic/retirement crisis" e.g. in https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/blackrock-larry-fink-a...
He has no vision beyond what is best for him personally. Other people aren't humans.
I think there's a non-zero chance of 95% unemployment within the next 20 years.
I can't imagine this would last long with the social instability that would follow.
That also seems like a gross overestimate for many industries. Many supply chains are nowhere near able to be automated to the extent this ratio would imply.
With that said, there is probably also a non-zero chance that something like that wouldn't be negative but something positive instead. I suppose that'd be the ideal scenario.
This is being accelerated by the bill passed the senate literally today.
Is there any reason to believe we will drastically reverse the trend?
I do agree that wealth is not distributed particularly fairly but I don't understand the idea that it's mostly going to a select few. There are almost 20 million more jobs in the US now than there were 20 years ago, that's a lot of productivity right there.
Amazon employs 1.4 million people. Bezos has spent maybe the equivalent to a couple of weeks worth of Amazon payroll so far in his life. His yacht was the equivalent of a few days, his wedding maybe one hour. That money didn't come from Amazon either, it came from people wanting to own Amazon.
Leaving aside whether that's fair or not, surely it means that most of the productivity and money is going to the employees?
What am I missing here? How was this better before, what has changed recently that makes this such a big talking point now?
Many people seem convinced that the problems in society are caused by billionaires hoarding money, when they clearly aren't hoarding any relevant amounts of money. The problems with housing, healthcare and such are very obviously caused by other things (Home mortgages being a huge cornerstone of the entire economy for one, millions are placed in a situation where cheaper housing would be a catastrophe - including banks).
Maybe our parents, who were able to buy a house for like 5 years of a worker's salary, were just the luckiest generation? It sure hasn't been that easy to get a home before or after at any time in history.
Right now is one of the runner ups though, but we're comparing the situation with the best ever.
I had the privilege of working with him for a little over a year.
He was respectful, analytical, and only thought about what is best for Amazon and Amazon's customers.
I don't think his own aggrandizement or what's best for him enters into the calculus of his day-to-day work one itoa.
He's an untiring as well. I realized I had gone far beyond my peter principle when I was working with him.
He's a robber baron, not a captain of industry.
Don't have to look much past his "gobble gobble" email to see that, nor his announcement of RTO the day after an all hands where remote work was touted as the future.
At least he walks the walk. He was in the office 100% of the time.
Case 1: I drive to the store to get a widget. There is a low chance Store-1 doesn't have it, and I have to keep shopping. Regardless, I am driving about 30 minutes total, conservatively.
Case 2: I order a widget from Amazon. The Amazon driver organizes their stops to minimize travel time, and it's undoubtedly less than 30 minutes driving from the previous stop.
Both cases require transport of goods from factory to the final storage location (shopfront or Amazon warehouse), so the difference there is negligible.
92% of the people in the US have access to at least one vehicle
https://www.fool.com/money/research/car-ownership-statistics...
And this is worldwide
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/vehicles-per-capita-by-coun...
The average driver in the US drives 40 miles per day
https://www.kbb.com/car-advice/average-miles-driven-per-year...
No most people don’t walk to the store
Capitalism might not be perfect, but communism did not function at all. You can have the best of both worlds in socio-capitalist system.
Let Amazon automate everything. Does anyone here really want to do the manual labour in their warehouses?
What’s that you say? People with nothing left to lose tend to put the heads of Capitalists on pikes for all to see? Well maybe you should have thought of that before pillaging the commons and treating people like slaves? But “fiduciary duty to shareholder value” you say? You made that shit up in the 1950s and have been pushing it like it were true ever since. Saying a thing doesn’t make it true.
However what would be interesting is if they ever have a situation where the number of humanoid robot employees outnumbers human employees. Once someone is able to run an entire large corporation with no humans at all it will be a big milestone I guess.
But there's no real driving force for this to happen, because the humanoid form factor is not necessarily ideal for most kinds of industrial applications. And a lot of the "Automation" will be AI Agents, which have no form factor at all, being purely knowledge based.
Standing in the same bread line creates an awful lot of solidarity.
Some people might argue that wealth concentrated in the top 1% is a net benefit if you look at it as one big pool of resources. But will the remaining 99% actually see any of that benefit? Or will the 1% simply tighten their grip, keeping the rest dependent on their “generosity”?