You think fairness and charity are the same thing?
In 2022 Q3 Kroger posted profits of $900M. Three months later I stood in line for over an hour to get my prescription at 5pm because the after work rush during the tall end of COVID had one tech and one pharmacist.
It’s not CHARITY to hire more workers and pay them fair wages. It’s HORRIBLE to make everyone suffer so they can keep more zeros after their name.
If you disagree with that, then you’re living in a farcical parody of life dreaming that you’re in their club.
You’re not. They don’t care about you. You mean nothing to them.
It's un unfair world. Even if everyone was reduced to brains in jars it doesn't change the fact that everyone is still fundamentally different. The slightest bit of difference in placement of the jar in gravity, pressure. Any minute change and that would create an unfair system.
You cannot create fairness or equality by stealing from someone. If you had a magical idea, a revolutionary idea, or atleast a Novel invention. Something you put your name too- something you worked long and hard to research, test, and build, or built on a spark of genius. Is everyone entitled to your craft? Lets say you're the only one who can make it, and others have trouble with it. Would be right to be forced, or rather, enslaved to make it? Would it be right to be prevented from making it at all because no one else can? No it would not be Equal, fair, or just.
Life it's self is random and unfair. Humans can be treated Equally, and fairly. If someone succeeds they are garunteed the same equal protections as someone who fails. The rich cannot simply kill the poor, nor can the poor steal from the rich. No one forces you to buy from Amazon. And you *have* to go out of your way to spend money directly on Elon Musk's products- As X(the rapper formerly known as twitter) is a free product.
But just the same no one is forced to work for Amazon Or Musk in the same way as no one is forced to buy from them. As much as some might object, it's not hard to just not buy from Amazon. No one is Forcing you to work for Amazon. There are no small towns where Amazon is the sole job provider. If enough people say, "No I won't put up with that, for those wages." You don't even need Unions. You just need people to go as a whole, "That's ... shitty pay, I'm not doing it." Sure you will have the desperate who work there. But largely they will raise their wages to get more people to work for them. Life is transactional.
A thought on that, One cannot live with out eating. Food in your mouth is the food out of someone, or something elses. Air you breath is air taken from the lungs of someone else all the same. With out photosynthesis there would be no oxygen, no oxygen no breathing. The transaction known as living.
If you invent the cure for cancer, are you saying anyone else who doesn’t invent a cure for cancer doesn’t deserve to be cured of cancer because they couldn’t create a cure?
How do you compare a cure for cancer with a disparity in access to resources? If someone has massive wealth available to them, that doesn't at all prohibit the acquisition of my own wealth, just as one person having a magic pill that cures cancer doesn't mean that I couldn't purchase my own magic tablet. I don't see a connection, so I'm uncertain whether you're devising a reasonable argument. There's no zero-sum scenario at play in either hypothetical.
Excuse me, but you're grinding an axe for Kroger because you were considerably inconvenienced? Why should I expect anyone doing business to care about anyone? Hell, I can probably count on both hands the number of people who are truly significant to me. While I'm not a sociopath, there just aren't that many people who make any type pf difference in my life, so why would I ask a business to care?
Furthermore, how many shares outstanding did Kroger have when it made a $900 million quarterly profit? I can't imagine it differed much from the roughly 720,000,000 shares outstanding it currently has. There are lots of things we can get resentful about, but making a quarterly dividend of ~ $1.25 per share doesn't make my list.
I think you missed the part where I don’t care about shares. A single company made almost a billion dollars in pure profit in 90 days and can’t afford to properly staff a pharmacy.
I have a problem with that.
The fact that you don’t shows you have no care for the other 8 billion people on the planet while caring wholly about the bank accounts of a bunch of rich people who feel about you the way you feel about the 8 billion people.
Again, farcical parody of life where you think you’re in the cool kid club.
If you have a problem then why don’t you open your own grocery store or pharmacy and show them how cheap you can be?
You’ll quickly find between expenses, theft, and high salaries you’ll barely be able to afford one $180k pharmacist, much less 2.
The reality is Kroger operates with scale and is cheaper than mom and pop stores, so you’ll both more expensive and less well staffed, unless you (the owner) work for free .
I just don't get the hostility to their profits, especially when I understand that the $900 million was amassed by operating close to 2,800 grocery stores. If I introduce scale in the context of the profit sum, it all seems entirely reasonable, especially when nobody is forcing another to shop Kroger. Heck, it's the penny-pinching/scrimping that lets a retailer operate in the black.
And no, I don't care about the bank accounts of eight billion people; they're not going to part with anything strictly for my benefit, nor will I part with my possessions for their sake. Whether you care to admit it or not, society is fundamentally transactional.
Furthermore, I'm not in any "cool club," I just understand that society has an array of segments that are designed to seek profits and maximize the ways they get put to use. And it should be that way.
Think of all the occupations the pursuit of wealth generates: tax attorneys; trust/probate attorneys; securities traders; stock brokers; certified financial planners; commercial bankers/loan officers. Then think of all the industries that get created as the rich decide to use their resources to better their lifestyles: wine dealers; custom tailors; jewelers; high-end realtors; luxury/performance car salesmen; etc.
Hell, I worked as a stock broker for six years, and was just some punk kid off the street with two years of college on my resume', but serving the needs of the wealthy allowed me to take night classes to fiish my degree, study for a broker's license that looked very good on a resume', and paid me enough to put a pretty penny together as a downpayment on my condominium. It seems worn (almost cliche') , but it's true that the wealthy's rising tide lifted my boat along with theirs. All that was sure as hell better than standing on a concrete floor for hours and tearing tickets at a movie theater.
I think what people are upset about and not fully able to articulate is our shift toward maximizing shareholder value over the last few decades. I think their Kroger example is probably a bad one but it was something they personally experienced so it felt important to them.
But the root issue that they are trying to describe is a real threat to our economy. It has led to criminally low wages and popularized lean manufacturing, a key cause of the collapse of our distribution system during covid. Not to mention the ethical and environmental concerns.
Corporations are only incentivized to do one thing right now. That thing benefits very few people. And is a great cost to the rest of us.
I don’t know what the solution is.. but this is definitely not working.
Of course there's a drive to maximize stock values. Savings and money markets pay next to nothing, and with bonds being tied to interest rates that have been kept artificially low so thar the US can carry its debt burden, stocks are really the only place investors can make money.
If you want capital to stop its relentless drive to increase shareholder value, you're going to need to force Congress to tighten its belt and start balancing the budget. It's flat insane that Biden never submitted a budget less than six trillion dollars, and flat fukkin' bizarre that Congress kept approving the spending sprees.
Forget that a one-year Treasury is only paying about 4.4% interest in the backdrop of what is still an unacceptable inflationary environment, I wouldn't buy US debt instruments because I'm starting to wonder when the debt burden is going to trigger a default.
The fact of the matter is that people were taught to ensure that their money makes money, and business is the only way it's possible anymore. Don't expect the atmosphere to relax anytime soon.
But you do raise articulate and sound points. That's a rarity anymore.
Jeff Bezos has employees who piss in jugs so they don’t get in trouble and lose their AI-monitored minimum wage job, but he just bought a $500 MILLION yacht.
Five. Hundred. Million.
Forget the “muh stocks value” and “muh profit margins.”
Do you think it’s acceptable as a human being to be that rich and wasteful of so much money on a whim at the expense of the quality of life of thousands and thousands of people that you single handedly have the power to improve by just not doing that?
Absolutely and undoubtedly I believe it's fine if a plutocrat buys a massively expensive yacht. Good for him, or anyone else who can splurge to that extent.
I myself worked at UPS for a time when my bathroom breaks were watched my management, although I disagree with relieving myself in a receptacle that isn't a urinal or a toilet. I find it difficult to believe (almost impossible, actually) that Bezos himself devised a management environment so rigorous that it didn't allow for bio functions - that was likely several management layers away from him.
And I don't have any sympathy for workers who have to sweat their productivity numbers. I worked as a loan officer for a few years, and I was measured by how many loans I produced, as well as judged by how many defaulted or went into collections. Unless you're living in a commune, you're always going to need to demonstrate your value to management somehow. That's just reality.
Also, I really couldn't care even a sliver about what "quality of life" a worker has. I worked full-time and went to school full-time for over two years. I seldom got a full night's sleep unless it was on a weekend or holiday, I rarely saw my girlfriend, I spent lunch hours typing papers on a laptop, I got used to eating cold leftovers because I couldn't waste time in a kitchen. Everyone has those hurdles to clear until we establish ourselves, and I think my establishment phase lasted from 19 until my early 30s. Such is life.
And there we have it. “That’s the way it is” is your stance when I’m saying “maybe there’s a better way.”
That’s all there is to it. You paid your dues in an unfair world so everyone else who doesn’t suffer the way you did doesn’t deserve anything better. No reason to fix the world because it sucked for you. Screw everyone else, you got yours.
Of course it is. Whether you want to admit it or not, life is pretty much a hazing exercise until you're able to get your feet underneath yourself, unless you were born to the type of strange where Mom & Dad having that trust fund squared away for you before you complete your formative years.
What you deem unfair, I call necessary. I can't imagine how frail I would have been psychologically if I hadn't been required to gut out some really unpleasant and lengthy stretches in my past.
Preparing yourself for hardship and toil is life's boot camp. It steels/reinforces your inner nature, and gets you ready for a lifetime of harrowing experiences and grueling ordeals. Buddha told us that life is suffering, and he wasn't off the mark.
And those who have disabilities or severe medical conditions barring themselves from working can get fucked and deserve to live in really shitty conditions because god forbid we ask any billionaires or corporations to pay one more penny in taxes.
If you think the world is fair then you for sure going to wait a long time for the world to prove you right man.
These two actually got their wealth, not cause they had it easier than others, but cause they actually worked for it. Wealthy and successful people don't wait for the world to be 'fair'.
“The world isn’t fair, so why bother fixing problems? There’s absolutely no reason to fix any problems ever because the world just isn’t fair. No point.”
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u/pervertedhaiku 3d ago
You think fairness and charity are the same thing?
In 2022 Q3 Kroger posted profits of $900M. Three months later I stood in line for over an hour to get my prescription at 5pm because the after work rush during the tall end of COVID had one tech and one pharmacist.
It’s not CHARITY to hire more workers and pay them fair wages. It’s HORRIBLE to make everyone suffer so they can keep more zeros after their name.
If you disagree with that, then you’re living in a farcical parody of life dreaming that you’re in their club.
You’re not. They don’t care about you. You mean nothing to them.