Tag: Jeff Bezos

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

“Alexa, Thank My Driver”

Photo: Wicked Monday | Unsplash

“Alexa, thank my driver.”

These words rubbed me the wrong way last week when Amazon announced a campaign to allow customers the opportunity to say “thank you” and send a $5 tip to their delivery driver. Not that giving thanks is a bad idea. We should all show more gratitude more often. It’s just that coming from one of the most profitable companies in the U.S. — and on the heels of reports of a lawsuit launched against it, for withholding employee tips of all things, in addition to impending layoffs which include jobs in its Alexa division — it sounds like a bit of a joke.

For the 12 months ending in September 2022, Amazon exceeded $502 billion in revenue and $11 billion in net income. Billion. In a society where instant gratification has become the norm, and where with a few mouse clicks or screen taps, we can have just about anything we’d ever need or want delivered to our front doors in a matter of hours or days, the irony of asking a robot to say thank you to the humans doing all that work does not escape me.

According to Amazon’s announcement: “Starting December 7, any time a customer says, ‘Alexa, thank my driver,’ the driver who delivered their most recent package will be notified of the customer’s appreciation. And, in celebration of this new feature, with each ‘thank you’ received from customers, drivers will also receive an additional $5, at no cost to the customer. We’ll be doing this for the first 1 million ‘thank yous’ received. And, the five drivers who receive the most customer ‘thank yous’ during the promotional period, will also be rewarded with $10,000 and an additional $10,000 to their charity of choice.”

Okay, sounds good. But what’s $5 million to Amazon — a corporation that netted $33.3 billion in profits in 2021? While this year thus far has shaped up to be the first in recent past that the company has shown a decline in profits (2021 showed a 56.41 percent increase from 2020; 2020 an 84.08 percent increase over 2019), that amount is but a drop of water in the ocean.

According to ZipRecruiter, the average national salary for Amazon delivery drivers is $43,794, depending on location, with an average of $41,050 per year in Tennessee. There are also a slew of Amazon Flex drivers — a program that launched in 2015 as the uptick of services like Uber, Lyft, and the like saw more people using their own cars to make extra cash. Those Flex workers are independent contractors who do not receive reimbursement for gas, mileage, parking fees, etc. — and who, Amazon reports, earn $18 to $25 an hour, again depending on location and how quickly they complete their deliveries. Not bad for an hourly rate, but factor in gas, vehicle wear and tear, and physical demands, and you’ve gotta wonder what that balances out to. Of course, people choose to work at Amazon and could seek employment elsewhere at any time. But that’s not the point. Folks who work in the warehouses and in shipping and delivery are among the most integral parts of the business. Do consumers need to log on to an app or ask an electronic device to ensure they’re appreciated or properly compensated?

The “thank my driver” campaign hit its limit just one day after the launch, with Amazon announcing December 8th, “We have received more than 1 million ‘thank yous’ concluding the promotion offering $5 per ‘thank you’ to eligible drivers. You can still share your appreciation by saying, ‘Alexa, thank my driver.’ We are thankful for the enthusiastic response to the promotion and the appreciation shown to drivers.”

So yes, of course, continue to thank your driver. (Although I’m curious if they’re being inundated with constant, now-annoying notifications.) Maybe put a little care package out with snacks or a gift card. But this whole thing reeks of a PR stunt to show Amazon as a company that cares for its workforce. And maybe it does. It could be a great place to work; I wouldn’t know. But I do know that its founder, Jeff Bezos, is reported to be the fourth-wealthiest person in the world, and that doesn’t happen without a certain level of smarts — and, I dare say, greed.

While we’re in the spirit of gratitude, if the opportunity arises, be sure to express thanks to your other delivery drivers, postal workers, restaurant servers, retail associates, and everyone else who keeps the ships afloat, especially this time of year. And consider stopping in a locally owned shop for some of your holiday gifting needs this season. They could use the support much more than Amazon.

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Opinion The Last Word

American Oligarchs

Photo: Systemniy | Dreamstime.com

Forbes did its first ranking of our country’s richest people in 1981. The top of the list was a shipping magnate named Daniel L. Ludwig with a fortune of more than $2 billion.

I discovered that fact in a thought-provoking New York Times article by Willy Staley about the impact our current crop of multi-billionaires is having on our society.

Adjusted for inflation, that $2 billion would be around $5.8 billion in today’s dollars. That sum made Ludwig the richest man in the United States. Today $5.8 billion would put someone in a seven-way tie for number 182 on the list.

Most people know someone they consider rich. Maybe it is someone with a business they’ll sell for several million dollars when they get ready to retire. Or a professional athlete who makes millions a year. When people talk about “the rich” in terms of the wealth-hoarding oligarchs who control industries and media companies and buy politicians, this isn’t who we’re talking about.

We live in an oligarchy. Most Americans would agree with that fact, and agree it is a problem. From the left to the QAnon folks who believe the world is ruled by ultra-wealthy, demon-worshiping pedophile cannibals yet also insist the rich should have lower taxes and less regulation of their business dealings.

Historically, we’ve generally avoided using the word “oligarch” to describe America’s ultra-rich. That changed as the war in Ukraine caused condemnation of Russian oligarchs, and people noticed how men here like Jeff Bezos, Charles Koch, Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch, and Peter Thiel perfectly fit the definition as well.

They didn’t become oligarchs through hard work. No one does. They needed a lot of family wealth and connections before they ever worked a day in their lives. A large pile of money easily turns into a larger pile of money. Our tax laws have been rewritten over the past 40 years to help bigger and bigger piles of money shift to be possessed by an increasingly small number of people.

Any attempt to rein in our billionaires gets denounced as socialism, but we have had capitalism with much higher taxation of the ultra-rich. That is how we created a large middle-class in this country, which didn’t exist before the New Deal and has been steadily losing ground since the early ’80s when the Forbes list was topped by a guy with $2 billion.

The beauty of a high tax rate for top earners was that it didn’t even require government to redistribute wealth. Anything you make over your first $500,000 in annual income will be taxed at 90 percent? Might as well spend those additional profits on hiring more people and giving them more pay and better benefits and working conditions. If inflation means there is too much money chasing too few goods, worry about the people who have more money than they know what to do with, not the people who are struggling.

I don’t envy our oligarchs. They don’t seem to be leading happy lives. When I think of people who seem genuinely happy, to me, they are people who seem grateful they have enough, not people who always want more. We’ve created a society where most people feel like they need more, whether they have nothing or everything. The result has been skyrocketing rates of depression, suicide, addiction, and overdoses.

Oligarchs are natural enemies of democracy. A clear majority of Americans want things like universal health insurance. Our ruling class doesn’t want that, and has made sure we don’t get it. Universal health insurance allows normal people to leave big companies to start their own businesses.

Unfortunately the elite have mastered the reverse psychology of telling people, “Here is what the elite don’t want you to think …” They control both sides of the argument. They tell people “the elite” are teachers, professors, beat journalists, and scientists. They get to frame corporate media like CNN as “the left” and the far-right as the alternative. They love giving money to centrist Democrats. They can always count on them to advance right-wing economics when Democrats are in power, while giving Republicans a chance to say, “Look what the radical socialists are doing to you.”

Our oligarchs don’t want young people learning about the amount of racism embedded in our society since our country’s founding. Racism was and still is a valuable tool for keeping poor white workers in their place. The Old South was a terrible place for white workers. But racism was so effective that impoverished white Southerners got duped into dying for plantation owners in the Civil War. Men who never owned an inch of land were willing to waste their lives to protect the fortunes of aristocrats who looked down on them. So don’t be surprised that someone buried in debt today will take five minutes to dash out a tweet in defense of whichever billionaire is currently masquerading as their champion against the elite.

Craig David Meek is a Memphis writer, barbecue connoisseur, and the author of Memphis Barbecue: A Succulent History of Smoke, Sauce & Soul.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Democracy, If We Can Keep It

Former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once famously said, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” If Brandeis is correct, we no longer have a democracy in the U.S., or, at best, we are damn close to losing it.

An economic report released this week by the Oxfam organization concluded that income inequality has reached unprecedented levels. To illustrate, Oxfam noted that three Americans — Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett — hold a total of $263 billion in wealth, which is equal to the holdings of the lower 50 percent of the American population at large, or 160 million people.

So, to reiterate: Three guys have as much money as the total amount of wealth held by 50 percent of American citizens. Worldwide, the figures are just as staggering. Oxfam reported that 42 people now own as much wealth as the bottom 3.7 billion people living on the planet.

The U.S. governing bodies — the House and Senate — are mostly run by millionaires who became millionaires by doing the bidding of billionaires via special interest lobbies and corporate donations. The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision — which decreed, essentially, that corporations are people with the right to “free speech,” meaning they have the right to contribute unlimited funds to political advertising — has polluted and corrupted the electoral process to an astonishing degree in just eight years.

The Trump presidency has stepped it up another notch by appointing billionaires to most key cabinet positions. And almost without exception, they are serving the very corporations they are supposed to be regulating. Millions of acres of our National Parks are being sold off to mining, oil, and lumber interests. Off-shore drilling rights are being granted near the beaches, coral reefs, and fishing grounds of our coastal states. Banking and financial investment regulations are being loosened. Environmental laws are being repealed or rolled back or ignored. Public school funding is being curtailed, as money gets funneled into for-profit “educational” institutions. Health care is becoming a luxury the poor and working-class can’t afford.

All in the name of greed. All in the pursuit of accumulating more money by those who already have more than most of us would see if we lived 10 lifetimes.

We’ve been here before in our history, most recently in 2007-2008, when the subprime mortgage crisis nearly destroyed the economy. The Wall Street cowboys thought the Ponzi-scheme housing bubble they’d created would never burst. But it did, and fabled financial institutions, including Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, Citibank, and AIG went down in flames. The U.S. automobile industry went on life support. The government threw $700 billion at the banks to bail them out, and poured another $800 billion stimulus into the economy. It worked, eventually, but a lot of folks got burned; a lot of folks lost everything.

Now, here we are, 10 years later, and it’s party time again. Regulations? We don’t need no steenking regulations! The economy is booming! Unemployment is low. The stock market is hitting another all-time high every week. What could go wrong?

Maybe nothing. Maybe we just soar and soar into the great wide open, as the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting screwed by the trickle-down myth. But karma is a bitch, and the universe has a way of correcting imbalances. So do democracies, if they can survive long enough to vote the money-changers out of the temple.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Amazon Land

CREDIT: REUTERS/Joshua Roberts

I love Amazon.

I love automating my recurring purchases so a seven-pound bag of cat food appears on my doorstep on the first day of every month. I love adding items to my wishlist, getting eerily accurate recommendations, and never having to wait more than two days for a package. I love AmazonBasics and Amazon Video. I love having a record of every single item I’ve ordered since 2002. “Same, girl,” say the people who profit off my personal data. I grudgingly love how easy it is for me to buy crap 24 hours a day.

However, I do not love the beauty pageant that is the bidding process for Amazon’s second headquarters. Watching city leaders trip over each other to offer up their communities — as if that company isn’t powerful enough already — depresses me.

Since the company announced it was looking for a home for its HQ2, 238 contestants have entered the Thirstiest City in North America Contest. Fifty-four states, provinces, territories, and districts clicked Add to Wishlist. Of the 50 United States, only Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Vermont, and Arkansas opted out. Marketing firms across the continent have billed untold hours to help chambers of commerce, convention boards, and city governments prostrate themselves before CEO Jeff Bezos with viral videos and PR stunts. As if the city with the cleverest hashtag is going to win, instead of the one that coughs up the biggest tax bribe, I mean break.

Shame and sense fly out the window when there are “up to 50,000 high-paying jobs” on the table. It’s so brazen — so transparently capitalistic — I wonder if it’s all a big prank. Will there be consolation prizes? Or will the desperate runner-up cities be shamed for putting so many eggs in one shopping cart?

I get it. The infusion of new jobs and the direct and indirect investment will transform the city Amazon chooses for its HQ2. Can you imagine if Memphis was the one? I cannot. I understand the motivation. The optics would be worse if our city and county mayors said “Nah, we’re good with this.” At best, it’s a long shot. And I’m not sure it would help the people who need it. The idea of 50,000 jobs sounds incredible. The idea of 50,000 jobs with an average annual salary over $100,000 sounds even better. Or it would, if we could secure a promise that Memphis residents would be the ones hired and trained to do them. Otherwise, rents would go up, tax rates would climb (somebody’s got to pay that $60 million incentive), and we’d be stuck wondering how all these blessings haven’t made a dent in the poverty rate. Please, prove me wrong.

REUTERS/Joshua Roberts

Jeff Bezos

Little Rock placed a full-page ad in The Washington Post announcing its withdrawal from the HQ2 incentives arms race. Like Memphis, the city doesn’t meet the mass transit requirement outlined in the request for proposals, among a few other deal-breakers. The disruption would not be worth the sacrifice, the ad explains. San Antonio dropped out too, because as Mayor Ron Nirenberg and Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff said in an open letter, “blindly giving away the farm isn’t our style.”

I wish Memphis could be that self-aware. The enthusiasm and pride are always nice to see, but no amount of fun facts can change the important reality that this city needs to love itself a little more before it can get a suitor like Amazon’s attention.

In the meantime, I hope having an itemized list of the types of characteristics companies are seeking will inspire some action. We’ve long known what the city needs, but those deficiencies are harder to ignore when they’re spelled out. Designating $10 million for public transit, airport infrastructure improvements, and workforce development in its Amazon resolution is an admission on the Memphis City Council’s part that those should be priorities, no matter what.

Instead of joining a free-for-all to woo a particular name, make Memphis a place where a company would want to invest. Embrace and nurture the people who are already here running their hustles and feeling a little insulted by city council offering 10 percent of the city’s budget to a billionaire. Who knows, the next Jeff Bezos might already be here among us. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Jen Clarke is an unapologetic Memphian and digital marketing specialist.