They shouldn’t but they do, because the billionaires and corporations have bought the government. That is to say they’ve bribed the officials in the government, though for a while now there are no laws or enforcement mechanisms in place to prevent this kind of corruption.

Lobbying the government is very profitable, far more so than any kind of positive innovation that capitalism is allegedly supposed to promote. It’s why governments criminalize this kind of influence from business interests or wealth. Usually companies just pass laws so that smaller rival businesses cannot compete, but they can also pass laws to give companies huge subsidies, no-bid contracts and tax cuts.

Financialization, it turns out, is even more profitable, which is using financial shenanigans like private equity to turn a reputable business into a giant ponzi scheme. The financial bros are long gone when the massive loan burden of the company is due. It leaves huge sinkholes in the economy, including Toys R Us, which is now a bunch of abandoned warehouses and unused giant outlets.

Currently, our ultra-wealthy, most of whom got rich through financialization, are trying to do the same thing with the US, itself, getting elected officials to pass huge budgets giving them no-bid contracts where they can charge grossly inflated prices. In the meantime, all this is incurs a huge amount of national debt.

Since Trump is doing everything in his power to isolate the US from the rest of the world (he wanted to do this since the beginning of his first term), when the bond market collapses, there won’t be anyone in the world willing to help us out, and the US will be reduced, like Toys R Us to husks of storefronts.

And then, our ultrawealthy can buy up US land for a song, and turn it into quarries, oilfields and data centers as far as the eye can see, though they seem completely oblivious about how they’re going to keep the workforce alive to run them.

Like, you hear people say that fast food would become prohibitively expensive if we raise the minimum wage

You don’t even have to scale this to countries. Cities with a higher min wage have proven better results.

Fast food is a crazy example they point to. You’ll spend 12-15 dollars a person easily at fast food places these days, and they serve hundreds of customer an hour. Giving the entire staff a $15/hr raise would be an extra 2-4% to the cost of a meal.

If you have 5 employees working the shop and average 100 meals an hour, you’re looking at an extra $0.75 per meal to give each employee and additional $15/hour - which is a life-changing raise at a cost customers wouldn’t even notice.

All you have to say is Scandinavia. Any corporatist concern trolling can be countered by a policy in a Scandinavian country.

Yea I’m gonna need a source for all that.

It’s actually devastating to society. The whole Amazon delivery mindset is a plague that affects so many people now.

A customer buys a used piece of equipment off ebay, mind you something big enough to go on a skid, and within the day they buy it; “Is it shipped yet? I need the tracking number. When will it be here?” I hate these morons.

This mentality bleeds into repair work as well, which I got tired of, I’m just going to do something else for work. One cunt I meant customer told me she needs this fixed yesterday. I intentionally took my time. Same goes for the idiots that call me and ask if I can come out right now, or “can you come in at 4AM before we open to fix this machine?” Like yeah, I’m going to go to the shop, pick up tools and parts at 2AM, then drive an an hour to your restaurant so I can make pretty much minimum wage—(taxes, fuel, insurance, wear and tear on my car, billing, inventory, part shopping, etc, all the invisible expenses) and then of course having to justify why I charge so much to fix something in minutes. Yeah like the over a decade of experience was just given to me on a flash stick that shoved up my yass and I learned everything instantly.

It wasn’t like this when I first started doing this kind of a job. People were more relaxed. I’m keeping doing repair work to a minimum, and I work on a lot of really expensive equipment. And there’s a severe shortage of people that do what I do. Part of it is the expenses, part of it is everyone’s Amazon like mentality. And don’t forget the “why does this cost so much more for the same work you did two years ago.” Sigh. Trade work was fun but the last few years I can’t be bothered anymore. Sorry for the rant.

Amazon actually does have that option for deliveries. It’s typically labeled either “Amazon Day” (where they try to group orders into fewer deliveries / boxes, though it’s pretty mixed on that), or No Rush (where it might be a week out and they give you a dollar credit for something as an incentive).

Though that’s usually more “in the next week or so” than “next month”

Not to mention that theres almost always enough order volume for a bulk same-day delivery. Id imagine theres enough orders for 30+ deliveries in a 4 block radius on any given day

Obviously as think link is an image of a tweet, I don’t have the original article to reference.

But it says “average household delivery costs,” so it’s quite likely that it doesn’t just include Amazon or other online ordering.

In order to make their point as persuasive as possible, they likely fudged the numbers and included all deliveries. Saying things like, “Well, UPS would save money by contracting the last mile, as well, so the fact that this stops them from doing that is a cost for New Yorkers.”

Anything that makes the number larger and has any sort of stupid excuse would be enough. If the number is larger, they can scare people and make it more likely that they get their way.

Other than groceries, I do almost all of my shopping online and delivered.

Soap, deodorant, toothpaste all that kinda thing. Household cleaners. Cat food, litter, supplies. Clothes, shoes, etc.

I work a shitload of hours (also online, from home) and I live miles from the nearest town.

EX: If I want to drive through and get a McGross burger and a diet coke, it’s a 30 minute round trip. The closest non-grocery stores are a 30 min drive away, or an hour round trip plus shopping time.

Or I can do three clicks and someone brings me the same shit within a few days. 99.5% of the time, that is sufficient.

My online orders dropped off to basically nothing since the tariffs began. Now I buy EVERYTHING from brick and mortar just like the good old days.

And I’m never going back to the online shopping horse shit either. At least with stores you can shoplift guilt free with zero carbon footprint.

I’m not even American, but even I order tons of stuff (not from Amazon*). Basically anything other than groceries.

Oil, filters, belts for my cars? Twice as expensive in person. Other parts? Not in stock at those stores and still more expensive - it’ll get here by next workday afternoon (sometimes same day), so it’s still faster than online, but I have to visit the store twice or call ahead and in general, mistakes happen more easily when I’m not the one looking at parts catalogues.

Computer parts? The big chain may have some stuff in stock and its prices are fair, but the closest store to me is 70 km away since I no longer live in any of the major cities. The other electronics stores don’t really sell desktop parts and the things they do sell (thumb drives, cables) are overpriced compared to online stores.

Hell, when my kid was young enough to get formula, I ordered that online in bulk to get a discount compared to buying in person.

Usually get most of my shit delivered to a package locker rather than to my door, but I’d guesstimate about ~30-40 orders a year. If I didn’t get free delivery on half of them (online car parts store has free parcel locker delivery starting 50€ cart and free home delivery starting 70€) that would easily be 150€ in delivery costs a year. The question is what kinda math Amazon be using here because they could just claim that Mamdani’s going to 5x the cost of delivery and then even a modest amount of deliveries like mine would balloon to a huge amount of “extra” cost.

* Had to make an exception this year, this was like the 3rd time I’ve ordered from Amazon in my life. Needed two special tools for my car. VW/Audi of course would’ve charged me a grand total for the originals. Local online retailers had one of the knockoffs for just under 100€ but nobody had the other one. Aliexpress showed a month long delivery time from China and prices even slightly higher than Amazon. Amazon got me both tools for 60€ delivered in under a week. Not complex tools whatsoever, but fabricating shit at home is a pain if you don’t have a welder. I should learn to weld.

USA Amazon user. A lot. But I have better financials than many.

Example: Cat litter that we prefer comes in 25lb boxes. Why lug that when it can come to your door? I don’t think my spouse could even lift it due to an injury. But I feed the Bezos machine and I’m not proud of it.

I’ve gotten spoiled by grocery delivery, but usually stick to the $25 minimum as best as possible and find that in the end I’m spending far less than wandering the grocery store.