[WilliamEdward]

It is ridiculous that you've boiled it down to those two options. The 3rd is cutting executive salary and paying low wage workers. Also amazon is not cheap compared to my local competitor and aliexpress, people buy from amazon because of convenience.

And amazon makes profit on non-AWS products as well, don't be silly. I can literally google their financial statements to prove this.

[mmsimanga]

I am often amazed at how executive pay is overlooked in these debates. I have no qualms with founders making a pretty penny from taking the risk of starting the company. Most executives appointed once company has gained momentum don't deserve the huge pay they get. Don't get me wrong they deserve to be well paid but not as much as we are paying them. I have been in companies where people said to be "absolutely" critical leave announced and company continues to function without missing a beat.

[zpeti]

I am often amazed at how good HN readers are at valuing labour of both workers and executives.

[makomk]

The fundamental problem with this solution is a simple, numeric one: there are very few executives and a lot of low-wage workers, so large-sounding pay decreases for the former can only fund tiny pay increases for the latter.

[WilliamEdward]

If your execs earn a billion dollars a year collectively, and you have 200000 employees, you can distribute 2500 dollars to them all and the execs would still earn more than the low wage workers. So if simple arithmetic is your thing, there you go.

Amazon has around 570000 employees, and 22 executives. One of those executives actually earns a lot more than 1 billion dollars. Nevertheless, with just 2 billion dollars you can give a decent pay raise to every single one of those employees. Some don't need it as much as others, but whatever.