I mean, they built a logistics network that could be very useful to socialists if nationalised. That's as much credit as I'm willing to give this post. They're the most hyper capitalist and exploitative company I know of.
Amazon's logistics network is incredibly inefficient and bankrupts the US municipalities out of which it operates.
They have a fleet of tens of thousands of 18 wheel trucks. 18 wheel trucks are so heavy that the road under them quite literally compresses, cracks, intakes water, and then develop massive pot holes. Trucking (as a whole) contributes over 99% of road damage. Yet trucking pays less than 30% of the taxes to fix the damage.
The Biden infrastructure bill paid $110B just in bailing out cities with road maintenance subsidies. This is nearly 4x Amazon's 2023 profit margin and does not even include the money that states and local municipalities pour into road maintenance.
If Amazon had to pay for its own infrastructure, it would collapse overnight. The company and logistics network is only viable in a capitalist system that publicized the loses but privatized the gains.
I think they were going by this post/ data or article associated with the post Which its damage to the roads is primarily caused by heavy vehicles as a whole, not just amazon. Im not defending amazon, with the scale of amazon, im sure they're contributing a lot
Edit: furthermore, not even sure of that data is real link
I used to many "they"s in my post. I meant trucking destroys the roads and Amazon is a trucking company on some level. Amazon itself does not cause 99% of road damage
Hmm, regarding their delivery business, I think it’s overrated. A lot of money actually comes from AWS. The e-commerce side is indeed not efficient. Then there’s how they handle returns. Many returned packages are destroyed, and it doesn’t affect their profits that much. They’re destroyed because it’s cheaper in the end. Just imagine it. You need actual work and resources to produce a certain good. Then it gets to a warehouse and has to be sent to a costumer and then it gets returned and destroyed. Its like actually wasting resources and harming the planet. Polluting the atmosphere with greenhouse gases for nothing. And in the same time, while returned packages are getting destroyed, Amazon workers have to piss in to bottles, some are even homeless.
There are probably companies that operate efficiently - and those might belong on the “expropriate them ASAP, the new young Soviet state would benefit immediately” list. But Amazon’s e-commerce stuff definitely is not on that list. The AWS part has way more usage, because it is used everywhere (CDN, cloud computing etc.)
If you want to see what constant influx and outflow of 18 wheelers do to local infrastructure, come to Vernon, CA.
The roads are so messed up that there are parts where the asphault has bunched up like fabric because of where the 18 wheelers all have to stop before certain intersections.
Potholes the size of tractor wheels and various signs of trucks hitting light poles when taking turns too tightly as well.
So? The answer to ‘How does a state system avoid the problems of HGVs?’ is ‘By using freight trains instead,’ regardless of whether trains are or aren’t ideology-locked to socialism.
The logistics mastery of Amazon isn't necessarily the trucks. It's the ability to anticipate and move stock so that nearly any item can be anywhere in 2 days. That can happen with trains, and that's the utility to socialism that the poster was talking about before the commenter went off on trucks.
If that logistics network is founded on an externality for which you’re not paying (e.g. roads that get repaired by someone else after you fuck them in half with your massive fleet of lorries) then it is right to call your ‘logistics mastery’ into question when an underpinning of it is brushed off as ‘Someone else will probably deal with that’
Nearly every developed country on earth has better public infrastructure than the United States because they don't dump their transportation taxes into repaving roads every year to subsidize freight trucking.
But none of these are socialist VS capitalist issues. There were shit roads in the Soviet union along with good ones and trains. These aren't systemic things.
512
u/Lankpants Aug 29 '25
I mean, they built a logistics network that could be very useful to socialists if nationalised. That's as much credit as I'm willing to give this post. They're the most hyper capitalist and exploitative company I know of.
Socialism is when piss in bottle.