No, Stoners: Amazon is not your friend, though they are currently lobbying to legalize weed.
Filed under “other news,” apparently Amazon is lobbying the United States federal government to legalize weed as part of a greater companywide “legalization push,” according to Lucas Ropek with Gizmodo.
In an announcement on Tuesday, Amazon SVP of human resources Beth Galetti announced that it is reaffirming its commitment to not screening job applicants for marijuana, or marijuana-related products, and also supports two pieces of federal legislation aimed at legalizing cannabis across the United States.
According to Gizmodo, the first law is the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act of 2021, or also known as “MORE” because acronyms are rad. This act would remove cannabis from the federal controlled list of substances, as well as create investment programs for communities that have been disproportionately impacted by marijuana legislation.
The second is the Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act which would regulate weed, and provide funds to state governments to expunge the criminal records of state level cannabis convictions.
And while it is pretty cool that marijuana advocates have an ally in the form of a major blue-chip corporation, folks, let’s be honest: this is fucking Amazon we are talking about. In what universe would a company like Amazon even support such a measure—much less put themselves on the ideological firing line—if there wasn’t the available potential to address an ulterior motive, or opportunity waiting in the wings? I mean, for fucks sake, this is the company that didn’t pay its taxes so that its first-attempt-drawing-at-lex-luther-looking CEO could vault himself 56 miles into the sky and call himself a fucking astronaut.
In no league, ballpark, world, universe or dimension are these the “good guys,” and I’m afraid marijuana advocacy doesn’t change a thing to anybody with even a slight modicum of know-how as to where and how a company like Amazon would benefit.
Of course, because Amazon sells shit—and lots of it—the first assumption would be that they would try and corner the entire cannabis market. While a company like that may certainly have the ambition—and definitely has the resources—to pull off such a move in the event of federal legalization, I don’t think that it would be in Amazon’s best operational interest to incorporate such a large market into its online retail division which has been the bread and butter of its business model. Selling weed isn’t the same as streaming, or even making smart speakers. There are actual cradle to grave logistics that are involved that extend far beyond delivery, and I simply don’t think Amazon would want to endure the level of costs associated with getting into the marketplace, and then trying to gobble it up the way that it has with so many others.
The bigger problem with Amazon trying to be a weed delivery service is that the market for marijuana is so large, that it would encumber its current workforce which already faces a 150% attrition rate.
Put another way, the people that you see working in the warehouses and driving the blue vans for Amazon this year simply won’t be around next year. In fact, they likely won’t be around 8 months from now, and this is a fact that even Amazon executives openly admit in interviews. This is to say that Amazon is such a bad employer, it loses almost 2x as many employees per year than almost any other company in a similar market segment, of a similar scale, and needs around 5% of the American workforce to apply every year in order to stay functioning. That means at its current pace, Amazon would need 50% of the workforce to apply for its postings across the next 10 years.
I don’t give a fuck who you are, who you work for, or what you have run: that shit is unsustainable.
Which brings us back to Amazon’s pro-legalization stance. Much of Amazon’s reported churn rate was before the coronavirus pandemic, and there is little reason to suggest that it hasn’t gotten worse. Back then, Amazon workers would traditionally commit to a drug test as a condition of being hired. Thus, is it much of a surprise that the company going through employees like underwear is also looking to lower the barrier of entry for new employees to be hired?
No. Not at all. In fact, it is a position that is glaringly transparent to almost anyone who is even remotely aware of these numbers. Keep in mind, however, that this doesn’t mean that their support isn’t welcome. The fact of the matter is that the American normalization movement needs as many supporters as it can get, particularly those that attach themselves to laws that have a reformative affect that produces lasting change. All I’m saying is that looking past all of the fanfare, press releases, corporate measures, and public support: we shouldn’t confuse ourselves into thinking that all of a sudden these are the good guys. (via Gizmodo)
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