They never do.

This is the system working as designed. I’m not sure how anyone missed that.

And while tariffs were in place Amazon was passing on those savings, or lack thereof, to customers. So they mostly didn’t see any losses from paying the tariffs. Then they get refunded, and then it’s less that the government actually paid Amazon anything, they just gave them a reason to charge people extra in shipping, for no good reason.

Whether those costs were rendered in the shipping cost on Amazon, or by simply marking up the prices so that they could account for those extra costs, doesn’t really matter.

Consumers ended up paying this bill. The 650M “refund” was just the government exempting them from costs that the government should not have collected from them in the first place.

I see what you’re driving at, but all employment is exploitative. There’s always a measure of the work that any low-level employee does that they will not get compensation for, that’s how business operates. That’s profit.

Whether someone is able to work at a position full-time or not, isn’t really the point I’m making here. Long gone are the days of the minimum wage being a living wage, no matter how much we try, we’ll never catch up to the inflation that’s happened since the minimum wage was set. Companies won’t let it happen. As minimum wages go up, so will prices, and you’ll always be in a never-ending cat-and-mouse game of raising wages, vs raising prices. The two will never be at the same ratio of earnings again. Minimum wage earners will never have the same buying power that they did when the minimum wage was put in place.

Our buying power will continue to be eroded away, in small amounts, forever. Minimum wage positions will always be, by definition, more exploitative than other positions, but all jobs are going to continue to exploit the work that people do. That’s capitalism in a nutshell though. I’m not proposing a better system, just stating facts. That fact makes a lot of what you’re driving towards, apply to a much broader group of people than just the exploited minimum wage, impoverished workers. The lowest earners will always need to be supplemented by something, whether that’s a food bank, food stamps, rent control, government programs to reduce costs, taxes, or other fees associated with living, or by the income of another person. I don’t think Minimum wage earners will ever be able to be financially independent, even if they could have been at one point or another.

By cutting any job, you’re shrinking the pool of jobs available for entry level workers. A pool that’s continually shrinking already. I will happily do whatever I can to reduce how much that’s shrinking as often as I can.

I’m going to disagree with you there.

If your cashier’s are not making a living wage, then maybe the minimum wage should be increased?

Where I am, if a minimum wage worker worked 40 hours a week consistently, they would go home with the equivalent of $26k USD. The US Federal minimum wage at 40hrs/week will net you $15k USD.

The job isn’t always for the impoverished, and if it were, and you were to eliminate it, you just put people who are already impoverished into homelessness because they no longer have any viable means of employment.

The people leaving the job is a net positive because they should be, in theory, moving on to better paying positions. Freeing up jobs for people who need the work and can’t find it elsewhere.

It’s better than working in an Amazon warehouse.

Also, I worked at grocery stores a lot when I was a younger person and I was never a cashier, but I knew most of them and I was able to go back there years and years after I left and see the same faces at the tills. A lot of wives with empty nests helping to save up for retirement, or simply to do something during the day while their kids are off at school or whatever…

A lot of people working to help pay their way through college or university.

There were a lot of people working at those jobs for years and years because they needed something to help make ends meet until they could graduate, retire, find a job in their field, pay off their mortgage… Whatever it was.

You having this opinion indicates to me that you haven’t worked at a major retailer, or you’ve never worked as a cashier. I’m not sure which and bluntly I don’t really care. My lived experience disagrees with your pessimistic world view.

This is why I try to avoid self checkout. If I’m getting like 2 things and there’s already a line, sure, maybe… But if the lines are short, even if I only have a couple of things, I’ll visit a real cashier.

Not because I need help with it, and not because I want to “stick it to the man” or anything. I want to be part of the metric that continues to justify that a cashier is still a position to keep, and pay someone for. I do it so that there will still be cashier’s in the future, and someone can put food on their table because I didn’t choose to do free labor for the 0.1%.

I know, I know. I’m so selfish, I should tHiNk oF ThE sHaReHoLdErS…

“United we stand” < has always been true.

They’ve done everything they can to divide us against eachother, on race, on what brands we wear, what teams we cheer for, what geopolitical land we happen to be on top of, the color of our skin, and the “class” of jobs we hold… To name a few.

The problem is that many people idolize the ultra wealthy, and nobody ever got wealthy by helping their neighbor. Those “celebrities” have long since stopped caring about who they stood on the backs of and exploited to gain their wealth. They don’t care about you. They won’t help you when you fall. They don’t want you to be supportive of your neighbor. They want you to be aggressively individualistic to the point of being “us vs them” where “us” is more of “me” and “them” is anyone who isn’t me.

It’s never that way. It should never be that way. United we stand.

I’ve just been continually dissociated since COVID started.