Chasing Clicks Through Ad Money, Media does PR for Amazon While Ignoring Human Costs of ‘Prime Day Deals’
Chasing Clicks Through Ad Money, Media does PR for Amazon While Ignoring Human Costs of ‘Prime Day Deals’
This year, like every year, Amazon workers’ attempts to draw attention to their exploitative conditions were largely drowned out by hundreds of fawning PR press releases thinly disguised as articles about how “consumers” could “take advantage” of “amazing deals” offered by Amazon on “Prime Day.”
Interesting article. It’s hard to avoid Amazon as they have made things so convenient. I can’t stand going to big box stores when I can just order something online. And Amazon has made that process super simple. I guess I should just make a better effort to purchase elsewhere and not solely Amazon.
As an ex amazon warehouse worker , it was a mixed bag . Some locations are known for being terrible , but for the most part was a well paying job in the right locations . I just think its dumb they made a holiday of their own to sell more stuff right in the middle of the slowest part of the year , I remember 2019s prime day , they highered a ton of Temps to cover this one week , volume was high for a few weeks , and then went back to the lull . The thing they don't mention , prime day from my experience seemed to pull in less and less volume every year , last years wasent evin realy an increase in packages . With ups going on strike , the volume may go up , but amazon has made more than a few blunders in the past few years that have hobbled it , they expanded to a bunch of new stations that had to be shuttered within years . My location put a bunch of money into renovations , expanded the warehouse over 2 years , then abruptly last year shut down . Was a legacy site too .
I avoid Amazon like the plague. Doubly so for Prime Day.
Pay your fucking employees Amazon!
The media is broken. There's an expectation for underpaid writers to keep pumping out engaging stories to fuel the 24 hour news cycle and generate advertising revenue, much like the expectation on Amazon workers to hit excessive package quota. The result is that every company's PR person just has to email news outlets a "media release" and some jourmalist will lift it nearly word for word to make their article count for the month. Just copying and pasting chunks out of literal intentional advertising and passing it off as a genuine investigation.
And they don't have to tell you how much of each article is directly from those companies either.
Any time you see a vaguely positive or neutral news item about a person or company, you should assume it is written entirely by that person or company. Especially when the article title refuses to inform you about the article's content. Things like "People can't stop taking about this viral new product that only costs $10 at RetailerName!" And "PersonName's shock transformation revealed".