With Walmart trucking things were worse. If we delivered a product and it arrived not well, you had limited options on checking the reasons why. Several times we wanted to pull the temp recorder and just by doing that Walmart charged us around $1000 if we lost. On several occasions our own temp recorders were taken off of our product and were lost when we challenged their rejection of product, and in this case we lost. Even though the product shipped pristine. When our temp recorders were found on the product it showed that it did not ship under the terms of the agreement. In this case we won.
Again, to challenge this with Walmart I had to call or email more times then I could count. I always felt they purposely made it difficult.
One thing is to squeeze profits out of people, but it's another to say you cannot sell your services to anyone but me, is it not, unless there is some kind of contractual clause committing you to them, but given their size that still might be concerning?
For what little benefit do they gain by playing these low level wage tricks?
In this case, the bank (WFB) had a payment card revenue-share agreement with the company, the commercial card version of cash back.
Yes.
For what little benefit do they gain by playing these low level wage tricks?
The money from those who give up, and a year's worth of interest on millions of dollars from those who don't give up.
I wonder if this might be illegal even if it's not antitrust worthy.
Besides, what is Walmart going to do when AmazonTrucking is the only trucking company left?
I hope it isn't true. Amazon is not walmarts enemy: they should focus on low prices and growth using new technology. Their ceo said they reached employment peak [1]
Truckers and delivery people dont hate each other or have any competitive spirit among each other. Pay me to make a delivery. End of story.
The ups and FedEx guy(s) and i all bitch about the same thing: why cant these healthy lazy people go to the store. Day after day the same people get packages. What do they do all day, shop$!! Its so funny it could make a screenplay.
Truckers dont care either.
[1] http://abcnews.go.com/amp/Business/wireStory/walmart-traditi...
My point was that delivery people dont give each other the finger - we could care less. We talk shop amd know each other by name. I really doubt a trucker hauling today to a Amazon site and tomorrow to a walmart site cares.
After years of delivering stuff people can buy we get jaded- and that is what we all complain about. (to ourselves)
One example. Woman gets Fresh. Weekly. As carrier is lugging 4 green totes her adult son watches. The carrier is a 59 year old woman. After the last tote, the carrier says to the woman, "i know now why you order online- your son won't help you with the groceries."
Imo Amazon is smarter and more nimble and if Wal-Mart starts this stuff it may backfire
Look - if iy wasn't for Amazon people would not expect to get anything on line, and thus walmarts revenue in online would not be as much. (The pie is huge because of Prime)
At what point does the DOJ step in? Isn't this anticompetitive behavior? I've heard that Reagan-era deregulation changed a lot of the relevant law, but I'm not clear on how. Is Walmart doing this with the expectation of impunity because there's no longer a crime to charge them with, or because they see themselves as immune to prosecution?
*A argument, not one that would hold in court. IANAL.
EDIT: It seems I misunderstood Amazon's lack of Chromecast support. I hadn't thought of trying to buy Chromecast through Amazon before. I own three of them and bought all through the Google store.
Walmart seem really damned insecure about themselves. This isn't the first petty BS they've come out with regarding Amazon.
> Restraint of trade means any activity which tends to limit trade, sales and transportation in interstate commerce or has a substantial impact on interstate commerce.
But really, Wal-mart needs to get over themselves and do what they need to do to adapt, rather than being the bully they've always been.
It isn't like they refuse technology, they have a pretty decent technology team as far as I can tell.
Disclaimer: Some of the workers that got laid off in that department were friends of mine.
And I can say that the number of persons laid off in that even were <500.
Disclaimer: My mum was laid off in the event.
That is the only play it has ever had... It has bullied its suppliers since almost day 1, Certainly since Sam Walton died...
This is just an expansion of the bully tactics to other areas of the business beyond the Buyers, but it is not a new tactic. They used this tactic to great success to kill off a lot of competition in the Brick/Mortor Retail space.
At least they are letting Lore handle online business for now.
UPS and Fedex, I highly doubt either would agree to it, but it is not impossible to see one of them go with Walmart and One go with Amazon but highly unlikely
Did I mention how terrible AMZL is at their job? I spend the better part of a day tracking down a package marked as "delivered."
They are doomed, of course, just a matter of how long it will take until they become irrelevant. And it's not like they couldn't study history or didn't have time or money to invest in whatever would have been required to mount a better defence, but in the end, hubris and misplaced confidence is going to claim another foolish company.
+1. Not much you can say about Sears that you can't also say about WalMart.
Walmart is the largest company in the world by revenue (by far), at over 4.5X what Amazon pulls in. They have almost 5000 locations in the US and an extra 4000 worldwide.
They've spent the last few decades engaged in ruthless competition with small, local business, and for many, now represent the only game in town. They also have tons of exclusive arrangements with suppliers, logistics, and shipping.
I'm not a huge fan of Walmart, but they definitely are positioned to weather quite a few storms. There's no doubt that they've been slow to move to the online space, but when they really focus on it, I think we'll see a very interesting fight with them and Amazon.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/un...
I'll try and find the NPR link. But like someone else has already linked to 3 article, this isn't a special one off case.
If you're going to upset at how Walmart treats blue collar workers, a similar amount of anger should be aimed at Amazon.
My ex-wife has worked for Amazon Fulfillment for almost 5 years (in Texas - not exactly known as a "worker friendly" place when it comes to having laws protecting the working class from abuse) in multiple facilities (both replenishment and fulfillment) and hasn't witnessed workers being systematically mistreated, obvious safety issues going unreported and unaddressed, etc. She makes almost twice minimum wage with medical benefits, stock, 401k matching, 1.5x + 8 hours holiday pay compensation during crunch time, etc. All of that paid to someone that has only a high-school equivalence certificate.
She used to work at Walmart and would unequivocally tell you that Amazon Fulfillment has been the better of the two companies to work for.
There are pretty much only two only MAJOR retailers with good labor reputations. One is Costco, and that's only because they can run their business with a fraction of the employee-to-square-footage ratio that most retailers need. The other is Whole Foods... which has been getting worse for years, and will probably accelerate down that path now that they're owned by Amazon.
It's a race to the bottom. There are no good guys.
Today a store that used to have 5 cashiers needs 1 to monitor 5 self checkout stations.
Amazon and others are working on eliminating that final job...
They are also working on ways to fill the shelves with no human involvement, and robot shopping assistance that you can ask for help
we are probably less than 10 years away from the first retail store with no human employees, or at most 1 or 2 to monitor the robots
http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/life-and-deat...
http://www.businessinsider.com/brutal-conditions-in-amazons-...
"Competition is for losers." - Peter Thiel
""Competition is for losers." - Peter Thiel." -Michael Scott.
More seriously, I hate this quote, for so many reasons. Sure, it's great if you can do something no one else is doing and do it so well that no one can really compete with you. But there are plenty of people who compete with others and the world is often a better place as a result. It feels like people lose sight of the goals: not just becoming really wealthy, but perhaps serving the public?
In the long term, truckers are best served by having competition in the marketplace. If there is only one big customer on the market then they have little chance of getting fair rates.
Oh, wait. We have a "pro business" Administration and Congress.
So, the big boys get to throw their weight around.
bah
P.S. These "big boys" should have to compete for truckers' services. Just like everyone else. On an ongoing bases... not some one-time commitment extorted solely to their advantage.
