When a significant portion of your shareholder value depends on minimizing cost, especially employee cost, as opposed to unquestioned value that can't be had elsewhere, you're at some risk.
If the accusations here are accurate and at all typical of attitudes, and other accounts of bullying publishers (depending on your interpretation), and their at-a-distance treatment of their warehouse employees, then their value may not be as solid as they and others think.
I've been reading recently that Walmart sales are suffering, in part because the shopping experience has degraded due to strict corporate limits on employment. Sales are down, which means, all things equal in a recovering and not absolutely horrible economy, that those sales have gone elsewhere.
That could happen to Amazon too. Anecdote of one, I rarely buy from Amazon anymore, even less often than my going to Walmart. In Amazon's case, stories like this make me queasy whenever I buy there. My greatest interaction with them at the moment is to browse and read reviews, and I then use that information to buy elsewhere. They're a great recommendation service, and free.
The shopping experience has definitely degraded, and it's clearly a manpower issue. For the last year or so they've become quite bad at keeping product on the shelf. In my current lifestyle, I make a monthly trip and it's guaranteed at least one of my staples won't be there, or in inadequate quantities.
And they know it, the cashiers are no longer asking if I could "find everything I needed", and a memo touching upon this has gone public within the last few days.
Amazon still has my business because they're still playing straight with me as a customer, and that's vanishingly rare (outside of small companies that tend to have fragility issues). But I pay attention to stories like this because the potential for losing their customer first culture is there.
If the accusations here are accurate and at all typical of attitudes, and other accounts of bullying publishers (depending on your interpretation), and their at-a-distance treatment of their warehouse employees, then their value may not be as solid as they and others think.
I've been reading recently that Walmart sales are suffering, in part because the shopping experience has degraded due to strict corporate limits on employment. Sales are down, which means, all things equal in a recovering and not absolutely horrible economy, that those sales have gone elsewhere.
That could happen to Amazon too. Anecdote of one, I rarely buy from Amazon anymore, even less often than my going to Walmart. In Amazon's case, stories like this make me queasy whenever I buy there. My greatest interaction with them at the moment is to browse and read reviews, and I then use that information to buy elsewhere. They're a great recommendation service, and free.