You're not wrong; we've seen Amazon try to wriggle out of their bad press by simply hiring armies of posters to tweet and blog positive propaganda, rather than actually fixing issues. Sunlight isn't enough, but I still think at least it's one step in the right direction. Better that Amazon has a poor work reputation than no one know about its abuses.
It's Amazon's signature style to make the bad press go away without addressing the underlying issue that generated the bad press to begin with. Their culture is to hand everyone a pager and pull them in to fix the "problem" through just-in-time heroics rather than spend the money to build a system that's resilient to suckage in the first place. And "fixing" means tediously swatting down specific instances that are made public.
1. Allow 20,000 bads to happen through systemic enshittification
2. Get called out on 20 of the bads
3. Hurry up and have some poor sap manually "fix" the bads being highlighted in the public forum
4. "We've fixed every bad we've been informed of!"
Hacker News posters are the most hyperbolically negative folks on Amazon that it's almost funny. I always groan when clicking on Amazon-related comments because I know it's just going to be people complaining about god-knows-what. And yet, the company thrives.
This ongoing spat can't be good in the long term for Amazon's image. Wouldn't it of been easier if Amazon had been a bit humble and say: "Yes, things are not perfect, we will try and make it better for our employees." Rather than fighting it out in public with a newspaper.
Amazon has been facing extreme pressure to do this (strikes, political action), they did the right thing finally, but some cynicism is warranted. We can praise AND criticize — there's nothing wrong with that.
Please do assuming that the original poster is acting in bad faith. I have seen a lot of reporting about disfavored organizations, and it is often unfair. I do not know if this reporter has done a good job or not but I have seen a fair number of anti-Amazon articles which basically attack Amazon for being successful.
The other problem with the article is it does not point out some obvious problems Amazon has. First, Amazon is expensive, and people can and do go else ware. Second, Amazon's retail side is mediocre. Amazon's retail web page is basically a product search engine. Outside of search, Amazon does very little work to help people find products they are interested in. Amazon also does almost no curation. This is why it is often hard to distinguish between good non-fiction books and books which spread disinformation. Third, a lot of Amazon initiatives have failed. Examples include Alexa (a giant money pit), the Fire Phone, Amazon's video game division (over a billion and basically only produced 1 moderate hit), Prime Video (a mediocre streaming competitor), etc. I have also heard Amazon has been destroying Twitch.
My main point is, the article paints Amazon as an unstoppable machine when in fact it is very fallible. It does some great things (AWS), some good things (Kindle), some OK things, and sometimes some very bad things.
This article is both too cynical and yet not cynical enough.
Of course Amazon is doing good not out of the goodness of it's heart but for good PR. This is true of literally every large corporation.
But that doesn't mean the good they do isn't good.
The way they are "neutralizing" them with ex inmates and vulnerable students is they're making a special effort to hire ex-inmates and underprivileged students.
Not quite a sign of the market correcting this, but rather a possibility of the market correcting it. It all depends on whether Amazon's fears motivate them to improve their behaviour, or whether market forces make said improvements unnecessary or they find alternative solutions that are better aligned with their own interests but do not actually improve the wellbeing of their workers.
I'm genuinely surprised by how bad Amazon is at this. I had assumed a super rich and tech savvy company would be better at manipulating digital conversations than Amazon appears to be.
Maybe this isn't too important to Amazon and they aren't sending their A-team or putting a lot of resources into the effort. Maybe it is important and they are just getting started and will improve over time.
While Amazon's tweets seem lame it is hard for me to imagine what effective pro-Amazon messaging on twitter would look like. They have to overcome the problem that complaining about your job or a company's demanding work practices is natural, defending a company is rather less natural.
Speaking of Amazon trying to downplay its wrongs, I recall there was a post here that counted Amazon PR team at 400-odd people. But I could not find it. Are they so effective or have I Mandela'd myself and this did not happen?
Additionally, giving a company bad press is usually good business for the press. Especially in a place like Seattle, where Amazon is not thought of highly in the first place.
Motivate them to be mindful of the shoulders they stand on. The bad PR is that this at-a-glance anti-Amazon post is at the top of a popular tech forum.
Amazon has always had neutral PR and amazing customer service. They realized early on that they don't have to please the entire world, and acting "woke" won't actually get and retain customers. I'd say the approach has worked out for them pretty well.
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