Today I received a friendly email from my friends at Amazon Prime — currently $139/year — telling me the ad free nature of Amazon Prime Video was going to change.
There will now be “limited” ads on its movie and TV offerings, unless I want to pay — drumroll please — an additional $2.99/month = $36/year. Boom! Continue reading
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has launched an investigation into the appearance of eight nooses at an Amazon work site in Windsor, Connecticut. Key the threatening background music, please.
The noose is, of course, interpreted as a symbol of racial hatred harkening back to the horrific lynching of black persons with a knotted noose.
Amazon has a warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama that employs 6,000 workers. The workers have petitioned for a vote to establish a union (a unit of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union), something that Amazon does not want to happen.
Amazon last had a union vote in 2014 in which there were some alleged “irregularities.”
Due to the presence of the COVID19 pandemic, the workers are being allowed by the National Labor Relations Board to use “mail in” voting.
You will recall we had a recent election, a Presidential election if my memory serves me well, in which the same justification was used to allow a massive “mail in” vote.
You may have heard of this fellow, Jeffrey Preston Bezos — started a company called Amazon which has had a nice run.
His ownership in Amazon has made him the richest person in American and the world — some $200,000,000,000 from Amazon alone. This is after coughing up 25% of his shares to part company from his wife, MacKenzie.
MacKenzie Bezos replacement Lauren Sanchez looking adoringly at her new guy wearing sunglasses indoors. A very expensive relationship as it cost Jeff 25% of his Amazon shares. Uncouth persons might say it was the most expensive shot of leg in the history of mankind, but I am not that uncouth person, so we will leave that right there.
MacKenzie with her Amazon stock is the third richest person in America after one of the Walton Women.
Let me start with the bottom line, Walmart is launching its “Walmart +” subscription service for $98/year that will deliver the following benefits:
1. Unlimited free “same day” grocery and merchandise delivery
2. Limited free Express 2-hour delivery
3. Discounts on gas at its Walmart gas stations (usually already the cheapest gas in town, always use them when traveling, I think this is worth $0.40/gallon
4. Early access to new products and deals
5. Access to a Walmart + credit card
6. Free access to CAMP, the Walmart entertainment platform — yawn
Amazon, the Bully of the Boardwalk when it comes to eCommerce, sells things on its powerful website for third parties. They also sell their own private label products.
As you can imagine, there is a lot of data captured thereby. Take a second and imagine what data such an assignment might generate — popularity of product, names of buyers, pricing info?
So, there has been a persistent “rumor” that Amazon has been using this third party data to decide what items to make for its own account. Act surprised to learn that Amazon makes its own private label offerings — 158,000 such products at last count. Wow!
Immediately, your ethical alarms begin to signal. The red light goes on, it twirls, the siren sounds.
When asked by the US Congress, Amazon gave this answer:
“Well, no, of course, we don’t use third party data to determine what things we might private label, make for our account, but, but, but we might use something we call ‘aggregated data.'”
Big Red Car here on a rainy day along the Houston coast. They are saying Houston might get TWO FEET of rain. Wow!
So, Amazon has been holding a hiring extravaganza. They held a multi-city job fair on 17 September 2019 in Arlington, Boston, Nashville, Dallas, Chicago, and Seattle. This is where the job fair is being held, but the jobs are all over the country.
Young lady pointed out to me that the “a” and the “z” on the logo are connected by the arrow ’cause Amazon will sell you whatever the heck you want from A >>>> Z. OK?
You will note that they did not hold a job fair in Long Island City because the local Dem politicians ran Amazon and its proposed HQ2 off. That ended up with places like Austin By God Texas and the places noted above getting more of the hiring tasking.
You may credit the savant Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for that move. Well played, AOC. Who needs those stinking jobs, eh?
Yeah, I did that. Ran off those 25,000 Long Island City Amazon jobs. Me. Green New Deal rules! (Notice I have my “smart girl” glasses on.)
Corporate welfare, Big Red Car? Huh?
Big Red Car here on a sunny, cold Texas day. Ahhh, winter is here at 41F at dawn, but 65F now. Winter is hard in the ATX, y’all.
So, the Interwebs are all aghast at the gargantuan incentives provided to Amazon (richest guy in the world, Jeff Bezos, at your service) by New York and Virginia to get half of the new HQ2.
The gainsayers and the naysayers are in full throated-uproar, but nobody is really keeping score on these things, are they?
Let’s go back and explore a recent deal — the Tesla SolarCity Buffalo, New York incentivized transaction.
Oh, my, what have I done now? Solar City? Rooftop solar panels? Was that me?
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