Rent and maybe a steak: How Amazon workers will spend that $15 an hour
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
SAN MARCOS, Texas — Workers at Amazon’s fulfillment center here arrived at work Tuesday to a different company — one that had just bumped its the minimum hourly wage to $15 per hour.
“What’s not to like?” said Debbie Newby, 60, as she waited in a bus shelter in the Amazon parking lot for her husband to pick her up.
Newby, who started with Amazon in October 2016, said she is a “Tier 3” worker, so she was already making more than the national minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. But she also considers herself “one of the lucky ones” because she has Amazon stock. New employees received three shares, but that will end with the $15 an hour minimum wage they will now be offered.
“More people wanted money now,” Newby said. “With the stock, you have to be with them two years to reap that reward.”
She said her pay will go up to $16.50 an hour because there were wage increases across the board.
Amazon’s move Tuesday drew strong praise from Sanders and other advocates for raising the national minimum wage.
“Amazon is such a huge presence,” said Paul Sonn, state policy director at the National Employment Law Project, a labor advocacy group. “It puts pressure on other low-wage chains, especially Walmart, to join them.”
“It’s also significant for Amazon to say they’ll push for long-overdue actions on the federal minimum wage,” Sonn said.
Kerry Dobbs, 69, said it was a “good, good raise,” bringing him to $13.65 an hour doing inventory control.
Another worker, Calvin Howell, 53, said the $15 minimum wage “will make a big impact on our lives” in the short term, which could in turn improve the community of San Marcos, a city of around 61,000 between Austin and San Antonio.
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Now that Jeff Bezos does this, How will this change the way other big businesses treat their employees? What will it mean to employee morale and lives? In the competitive world of retail, will this affect the bottom line or improve the brand?
One of the biggest complaints by customers at brick and mortar stores is sales people who don't know their jobs or the products they're selling. If you have to buy the product blind because the sales person can't answer your questions you might as well buy it online. Better pay means better employees even if they're the same employees, they care more about their Jobs, the Company, and the Customers. Better paid Employees work longer at the company instead of using the job as a "just for now" stepping stone, long term employees become experts at their jobs requiring less oversight. Many times the cost of training new employees in a place with a high turnover can cost as much or more than just paying employees more so they'll stay longer. When you hire new employees you always end up with a certain % of hires that need to be fired, they're Lazy, steal, do a sloppy job, they often call in sick or are late and that costs money so once you have an employee who shows up, works hard, and doesn't rob you blind it's worth paying them more to retain that type of employee. Of course all this hinges on whether you can afford to pay them more and no doubt Amazon can easily.
Which is why I do so much of my shopping on line. I found a website that "styles" me. I've gone to Dillard's looking for help and sales people aren't very helpful
Being on the cutting edge of fashion, I'm quite concerned with service. I have my personal tailor, shopper, styler. It's expensive but well worth it to keep me on the front page of the fashion section of the papers.
Finding the perfect T shirt to go with my Tommy Bahama shorts is a chore and one that I don't want to make a fashion faux pas on.
I'm wearing brown with black today. Are the Fashion Police coming after me?
OMG, the Fashion Police will have you in the slammer if they see that combo....
I'm going with Tessy on this one.
I totally agree with you. One of my biggest complaints is that brick and mortar stores is that sales people don't know their jobs or the products they're selling. Also, Amazon makes it so easy. I think there is something to be said about retention of employees, so overall I think that this will be a good thing for them.
Me too!
You should be okay as long as you don't wear white shoes after Labor Day. If you do and get busted, I will send a cake with a file in it.
So you ladies are disputing the word of a fashion icon...SAD....
I like red velvet. You're a good friend. But you'd be a better friend if you had to be busted out with me.
You?
You own a road kill cafe. Why would I take your advice on fashion?
I do and it's also a bait shop. Plus I have an Italian middle name, so there. That's as high as you can go on the fashion ladder.
You're on a roll this morning.
it's also a bait shop
Hopefully you never have gotten an order switched.
Well...there was this one time I ordered a hamburger and it wiggled off my plate
$15 per hour after taxes puts a person barely above poverty level where I live. fast food places here post their starting wages on their marquees to attract new hires. current rate is $11 per hour. around the ski areas it's over $20 per with a housing subsidy or else the franchise owner himself is flipping burgers for 18 hours a day.
I was thinking the same thing. 15 bucks an hour is probably pretty good in rural Texas but in Seattle you'd have to live in your car.
$15 per hour is a newer roof on the trailer, maybe even some store bought meat and hard liquor, from Texas to the Atlantic south of the Mason Dixon line. Probably even be able to afford some rubbers at the gas station for the next family reunion.
20 bucks an hour? Damn! I think I'm moving to Colorado.
But do they keep that wage during the summer?
sorry, only during ski season and with 12 room mates, you need to lock up your weed.
I can't deal with one roommate some days. I think I'll stay put
It’s just a sign of the times. Inflation is here and with the low unemployment rate wages are rising everywhere. Our savings purchasing power is being chipped away with banks interest rates and short term treasuries still far lower than the rate of inflation. The Feds target rate for inflation is two percent but we’ve blown past that and are already at three percent annually. The rising wages will also fuel the inflation and we will now be paying more for everything as the higher wages will be passed on to the consumer.
As will the effects of the tariffs...
When it comes to reaping the benefits of the windfall from last year's tax cuts, it's better to be a shareholder than a wage earner, new data suggest.
Although dozens of companies announced extra pay for workers after the December tax overhaul slashed the corporate tax rate to 21 percent from 35 percent, those headline-grabbing moves are proving to be more of an exception than the rule. Eighty-six percent of the CEOs, chief financial officers and other top executives at 152 corporations said they would not raise salaries because of the tax cut, according to global consultancy Korn Ferry.
Nine of 10 companies also said they do not plan to offer employees one-time bonuses related to the deal.
Shortly before signing the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act into law in December, President Donald Trump cited his economic advisers in predicting that the bill "would likely give the typical American household a $4,000 pay raise.
I didn't see a $4,000 pay raise.....more bullshit from the bullshitter in chief
I didn't see it, either. But I've got one lil gnat constantly telling me that I can always give him my measly 70 dollars a month.
And I say oh hell no because that at least buys one carton of smokes a month!
Health insurance where I work always goes up every time raises come out.
only a fraction of corporations receiving the tax cut have raised their employees wages. this is a brilliant marketing move by Bezos prior to the start of the xmas buying season. hopefully somebody will publish the hourly rates of all retailers before they start hiring for it. I believe the average consumer will take that into consideration when making their buying decisions.
If you own a good company or part of it, its always better to own the company than work for it!
A while back I read this fascinating book-- about how millionaires made their money (this was long ago, when. believe it or not, a million dollars was actually a significant amount of money!):
The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America's Wealthy
The bestselling The Millionaire Next Door identifies seven common traits that show up again and again among those who have accumulated wealth. Most of the truly wealthy in this country don't live in Beverly Hills or on Park Avenue-they live next door. This new edition, the first since 1998, includes a new foreword for the twenty-first century by Dr. Thomas J. Stanley.
If anyone wants to know the secrets of America's wealthiest people, I'll save you the trouble of reading it -- the one trait most of them have in common? They son't work for anyone else-- rather, they own their own business!
When are millionaires and billionaires going to wake up and realize that creating a strong middle class with buying power is a win-win situation.
They fork over what amounts to a pittance and every business out there can reap the benefits of higher sales.
What business doesn't want to see new customers, buying a steak, eating out at a restaurant, buying clothes, buying shoes, buying new appliances, new cars, opening savings accounts.
The non-stop wealth vacuum cleaner sucking cash funneled to the top only, has been doing nothing but tearing down the middle class, suppressing wages, and thinking they can squeeze profits from the masses and millions of people who keep having less and less and less to buy things with.
It is like a crash waiting to happen and the American people are breaking under the weight of the wealth the top 2% hoard under the delusion they cannot lose what they have. Ask the millionaires and the companies that buckled under the economic crash in 2008, it wasn't just the middle class or poor that got hit, many wealthy people can be put in a position to lose everything, by their own design and their own greed and their own short sighted views.
And apparently that's what many of them are seeing:
U.S. consumer confidence races to near 18-year high
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. consumer confidence surged to near an 18-year high in August, as households remained upbeat on the labor market, pointing to strong consumer spending that should help to sustain the economy for the remainder of the year.
The Conference Board said its consumer confidence index jumped 5.5 points to 133.4 this month, the highest reading since October 2000. Consumers’ assessment of both current business and labor market conditions improved further in August.
Many consumers said they planned to buy a house or other big-ticket items in the months ahead. The survey’s so-called labor market differential, derived from data about respondents who think jobs are hard to get and those who think jobs are plentiful, rose to 30.0 in August from 28.0 in the prior month.
Have you checked your IRA lately-- how's it been doing the last few months-- or year?