Amazon burns through workers so quickly, they'll run out of people to employ

Many years ago (2000s), and between graduating HS and starting uni I took at a job at warehouse that paid $18/hr after training and certs, $13/hr to start. That place was a butchershop chewing through guys young and old. It was a vicious cycle of working there, workmens comp, and back again. And I met more than a few guys who treated the job as temporary with workmens comp as the career objective.

They'll run out of people to employ who will accept X conditions for Y dollars, sure. Then they will have to adjust either X or Y.

&quot;They&#x27;ll run out of people to employ&quot; is pure clickbait nonsense.<p>If they ever faced a labor shortage at <i>current</i> wages, they&#x27;d just <i>raise wages</i>. That&#x27;s how it works.<p>But as they increase automation, they also might not even ever hit that shortage at current wages anyways.<p>(None of this is a comment on working conditions and whether they&#x27;re good or bad... just that the idea of &quot;running out of people&quot; is utterly silly.)

A couple Google searches show that Amazon is the second largest employer with somewhere between 900k-1.3m employees depending on source, and an average tenure of one year. Completely back-of-the-napkin here, but seems like they&#x27;d burn through a million workers a year. Google also says we have ~10m unemployed people in the US. I would guess they could over-fish the labor pool at those numbers over a number of years.

I wonder how many people won&#x27;t work for Amazon [ever] because of privacy re: “Amazon knows everything I&#x27;ve ever bought or thought about buying. Zero chance I’m applying.” That&#x27;s why I won&#x27;t apply to Amazon. My shopping carts repeatedly make me look like a terrorist. I wonder if a significant number of people don&#x27;t apply for similar reasons. If so, I wonder if Amazon has taken this into account. They may have even less people to employ than they think.

Isn&#x27;t this just.... inflation? Amazon is worth N Billion dollars, rent is expensive, food is expensive and workers are thinking that maybe working one of the worst jobs available to them isn&#x27;t worth $15h.

Discussion of the same story but linked to a business insider article: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27524637" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27524637</a>

Amazon is trying to automate the shit jobs as fast as they can. But robotics and AI are only advancing so fast.

That might be a big part of the business context behind the &quot;We are going to be Earth’s Best Employer…&quot; statements in the 2020 Letter to Shareholders.

What is the churn in other retail or warehouse jobs?

As an Amazon employee, some of the software teams are absolutely horrific. Hire to fire, long hours, huge work load, lots of employees on visa worrier they will be fired at any time etc.<p>On the other hand, really interesting high scale software problems, some really smart people, good teams