Why are you comparing 12 weeks with the entire 2017 revenue? You'd have a better argument that this is peanuts for them if you'd make a fair and clear comparison.
> Why are you comparing 12 weeks with the entire 2017 revenue?
They aren't. They're comparing to revenue per hour. It doesn't matter what period of time you calculate revenue per hour with, you always get the same number.
Just trying to put some reasonable bounds on this estimate. I assumed 12 weeks is "the holiday shopping season" where Amazon has a lot of extra workers who would benefit. And I guessed 250k of them getting $3 raises. You could also guess at the total cost in other ways, many of which would be superior.
The overall goal of these lazy estimates is to understand how significant a cost this is for a company like Amazon. Could activists have hoped for more? Are other companies, for whom the costs would be felt quite differently, likely to offer something similar?
Think of it like this, 12 weeks of extra labour cost is offset by 17.7 revenue hours, you could also say 1 weeks extra labour cost is the equivalent of just under 1.5 revenue hours.
I'm not making the argument that this is peanuts. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I'm just trying to get some perspective on the scale here, relative to other things vying for the time and attention of Amazon's management.