Comment by justonceokay
8 hours ago
I’m in an interesting place. Here in Seattle I am two blocks from one of the largest Amazon Fresh stores. It was built on the former location of a local grocer. The construction was almost complete before Covid hit, but Amazon shuttered the store during that time. As a result there was no groceries in my neighborhood from 2018-2023.
Now it seems Amazon is going to leave us a grocery desert yet again.
They were piloting smart carts at the location. The cart scans your items so checking out you just push the cart through a scanner that weighs it. But this invention was like a microcosm of Amazon’s whole fuckup with groceries. The problem with the store wasn’t that I couldn’t check out fast enough, it’s that it was a shit grocery store. They had popular products but they were missing all the unpopular, low margin products you need to actually cook (baking powder, shortening, tomato paste, soy sauce…). They only hire non-union jobs program people at the registers because Amazon believes that cashier is a sub-human role.
The previous store had an owner who would wander the aisles and chat with customers. The new store has Europeans with clipboards who watch you as you shop.
"non-union jobs program people at the registers because Amazon believes that cashier is a sub-human role."
What grocery stores still have union workers?
The UFCW claims they represent at least 800,000 grocery workers across the US.
I had a job as a union worker in a supermarket, and am glad that's still available to others.
https://www.ufcw.org/actions/campaign/albertsons-and-safeway...
My brother has worked as a stocker for King Kullen in New York for 20 years and is a union worker.
In the Seattle area where the poster is from, pretty much all the grocery stores are unionized. Workers at big stores like Safeway, Fred Meyer, QFC, and Albertsons, and local stores PCC, Uwajimaya are represented by UFCW3000. https://ufcw3000.org/shop-union
Additionally, Teamsters 174 organizes a lot of the grocery freight workers. https://teamsters174.net/warehouse-and-grocery/
Jewel-Osco: https://www.local881ufcw.org/about-us/#local-881 Meijer and Kroger: https://ufcw951.org/about/
Most grocery stores in the US are still heavily union. I don't think the unions ever left the grocery stores.
Literally all the grocery stores in my Northeast US city are unionized.
Not to be rude but there’s 4 Amazon Fresh locations in the greater Seattle area and each of them is next to multiple other large/small grocery options.
For instance, the one in north Seattle (Shoreline) is within eyesight of a Safeway, a Sprouts, two international markets and a chef wholesaler.
The other three locations are similarly crowded with options.
What food desert are you referring to?
Jackson St location is the only walkable option in its neighborhood. It wasn't very good (terrible selection, stocking issues, slowly increasing locked section) but it was convenient.
It's literally highlighted on the map you sent: https://postimg.cc/Cn8BGP4S
There's no walkable grocery store in that area. My friend lives in the area and uses a wheelchair, and Amazon Fresh was the only actual grocery store she could go to.
As much as I'm hoping they do, I would be very surprised if they open a Whole Foods in that area.
I wouldn’t describe central district as crowded with options…
> What food desert are you referring to?
His food desert that doesn’t exist.
Food deserts do exist, but Seattle's Central District is not one of them. This US government tool used to literally be called the "Food Desert Locator" until the current administration re-named it to "Food Access Research Atlas"
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-access-research-...
It's really the suburban areas of Seattle that develop food deserts, likely due to restrictive zoning for commercial properties and minimum lot-size requirements that make sure that every grocery store is a long SUV ride away from the cu-de-sac neighborhood.
If the term Food Desert offends you, I can gladly switch to calling it Food Apartheid instead.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/may/15/food-aparthe...
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So now you are off worse than before?
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> They only hire non-union jobs program people at the registers because Amazon believes that cashier is a sub-human role.
The implication being that humans who aren't in a union are "sub-human" in your opinion? If so, that's pretty messed up man.
A giant, multinational, multi-trillion-dollar corporation that will only bargain with individual people living paycheck-to-paycheck? Huh, what a weird power imbalance!
Surely it doesn't have anything to do with their documented history of treating their blue-collar workforce like utter garbage.
I think Amazon are largely shitheads to their low level workers (and still assholes even to mid-level workers), and I am in no way defending them. I'm in fact sickened by them. I will never work for Amazon.
But the implication above was that the non-union employee is the "sub-human" option. I find that attitude pretty gross too. Humans are human whether they are union members or not.
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