It's like if someone stole $1000 worth of merchandise from a store and the only punishment is a $1000 fine... and you get to keep what you stole.
Why be law abiding when you could break the law and potentially make more money? You'd have to be stupid to be law abiding in a system like that.
No, it's not like that at all. The fine was for two specific locations and it was for not disclosing specific quotas in writing. Drawing analogies to a person stealing from a store doesn't make sense.
The fine was likely calculated to offset any potential gains they may have made by failing to disclose quotas, whatever that may be. So again, your analogy about getting to keep what you stole doesn't make sense.
Basically none of these analogies or proportionality arguments in this thread make sense at all. I suspect half of the reason is that nobody read past the headline far enough to realize that it was for two specific locations, not for Amazon the entire giant business. The people trying to use Amazon's total earnings across all business units across all locations as part of their argument are extremely misleading.
Similarly people referencing Amazon's total earnings aren't necessarily trying to be misleading about how many locations this occurred at or ignorant of more than just the article's headline (some are though, this is always true in a large discussion). Typically said people are just frustrated with all the above and would like to see much higher fines in this kind of scenario so the overall business cares more.
I'm not saying you should necessarily agree with those stances or conclusions, I don't completely myself, but it should take a bit more than what you wrote to brush everyone off wholesale like that.
There is zero chance Amazon was saving more than $1mm at these two warehouses from hiding quotas since the law went into effect. We’re already at 5x+ (most likely 10x+) benefit before considering damages.
You stole $1000 and if you are caught, your fine is $10.
You stole $1000 from me and now you have to pay $10 to someone else.
If their revenue was $100M from breaking the law, but the margins were only 1%, then they profited $1M.
So a $5.9M fine would have been almost 6x the benefit.
It's like if someone stole $1000 worth of merchandise from a store and the only punishment is a $1000 fine... and you get to keep what you stole.