To operate in what I like to call the meatspace of warehouses and supermarkets and shipping and physical stores requires hundreds of thousands of employees. These are not highly paid coders, engineers and product managers, but instead are stock clerks and cashiers and drivers. Last year, Amazon passed 500,000 employees (it now has about 566,000, according to data compiled by Bloomberg). Compare that with Alphabet Inc.'s (Google) 80,000 as of the end of 2017, Apple Inc.'s 100,000 and Facebook. Inc.'s 25,000.
The pay scale is vastly different as well, mainly because of the kind of employees each company has.
Apple’s average salary, according to data research firm Paysa, was $100,733. That includes lots of retail workers at Apple’s stores (though obviously not the low-paid workers at contractors like Taiwan-based FoxConn Technology Co., which do a lot of the assembly work on Apple's products). At Google, which has no retail workers, the average employee salary is $190,854. At Facebook the average is $203,894.
As we can see, Amazon is a tech outlier. Its investors have given it a pass for generating little or no net income during much of the 21 years since it went public. The same isn't true of its big tech peers, all of whom are enormously profitable. I wonder how much longer customers like me will continue to look the other way.
This column was provided by Bloomberg News.