Thousands Show Up For Jobs at Amazon Warehouses in US Cities (apnews.com)

Thousands of people showed up Wednesday for a chance to pack and ship products to Amazon customers, as the e-commerce company held a giant job fair at nearly a dozen U.S. warehouses. From a report on Associated Press: Although the wages offered will make it hard for some to make ends meet, many of the candidates were excited by the prospect of health insurance and other benefits, as well as advancement opportunities. It's common for Amazon to ramp up its shipping center staff in August to prepare for holiday shopping. But the magnitude of its current hiring spree underscores Amazon's growth when traditional retailers are closing stores -- and blaming Amazon for a shift to buying goods online. Amazon said it received "a record-breaking 20,000 applications" and hired thousands of people on the spot, and will hire more in the coming days. That number represented fewer than half of the 50,000 people it had said it planned to hire.

Comments

Re: Health benefits?

[ScentCone]

Really? Our carrier says that no, without the Obamacare mandates requiring them to insure us against the costs of things that will never happen (we're not going to be having babies, for example), that no - they would not have quadrupled our premiums and quintupled our deductibles. The impact of Obamacare has been absolutely crushing, and pulls so much more of some family's monthly cash flow out of their pockets and into insurance they can't actually use, that they are now stuck paying for healthcare they can't have, and failing to meet other expenses while they're at it. Yeah, "Affordable" Health Care act indeed. Liberals are too afraid to simply call it what it is: a huge new tax on some people, to subsidize welfare-style care given to other people while reducing the care that the people actually footing the bill can get for themselves.

But no, it wasn't a massive screw up. It's exactly what the Democrats wanted: fantastically higher prices and denial of services for a group of people they don't care about, and new entitlements to those that they assume will vote for them. The only screw up was how blatantly they lied about the ACA's consequences (you can keep your doctor and your plan! insurance will go down by $2500 per family! your insurance will only cost about as your mobile phone bill each month! it won't add to the deficit! ... and all of the other bald-faced lies they knew they were telling, and without which they wouldn't have been able to ram it through their political gamesmanship with a fifth of the country's economy on a 100% partisan basis).