At the pace its going Amazon.com will probably dominate the world one day...
Many people love Amazon.com. Shoppers, readers, and stockholders alike revere this ever expanding company as the permanent future of shopping. However, behind the scenes of Amazon, an enormous undertaking is constantly underway. Amazon warehouses all over the world employ millions of people, working different 10 hr shifts, 24hrs a day, 365 days a year. This great labor force is what allows customers to enjoy two-day shipping on things like adult coloring books, sadly but not surprising the top selling books at Amazon in the US.
I was one of those workers for three months after finding a job listing on Craigslist. It said a mass hiring event was going on at Amazon. I was in such a rush to get a summer job that I applied to the staffing agency Amazon uses called Integrity Staffing Solutions. With a little imagination, I quickly answered and passed their generic, "agreeable employee test," filling in bubbles to transparent screening statements such as, “I enjoy fast paced thankless work” or “ I tend to dislike people.”
The next step was to pop on down to a local strip mall where the Integrity handles its new solutions. If you qualify for the job, meaning you have at least a GED, can pass a mouth squab drug test (you need to only stop doing drugs for 12hrs), and a background check, you’re on the Integrity team no questions asked!
While I waiting a long testimonial video played on repeat as three overworked office employees tried to process my application on a failing dell xpieron. A gang of strangely optimistic geeks sitting behind hideous green screen color treatments described their physical pain, soreness from constant bending over, and walking over 13miles a day. It kept emphasizing that this was hard work. I wondered if this was a technique to ward off the faint of heart, as a skinny grandma told us, “I lost 12 pounds working at Amazon!” “Finally a company that actually has Integrity,” said the narrator.
I realized on my first day that Integrity, the company, really stands for the exact opposite of integrity. Using an outside contracting agency is a sly way to get rid of employees that Amazon doesn’t really want after a 6 month trial period. Also, it allows them to have a slew of full-time workers not on the health care plan. High performing new recruits can get on Amazon's official payroll if they survive the first six months. After some hilarious sexual harassment education videos from 1999. I was off to train on the job for the position of a "picker."
Picking is one of the strangest and most hated jobs at Amazon by warehouse veterans. I was warned to try and switch out of it as soon as possible. However being an Integrity staff member prohibits you from switch positions or shifts. Pickers run around a three story 300 X 300-yard warehouse collecting items from what I can only describe as a random product library on steroids. When you order something on Amazon the journey of your item begins in a long row of shelving organized into alphabetical and numerical sections. It is then picked by a sad gofer with a Motorola scanner and placed in a little cart with bins on it. When a bin is full with a random assortment of stuff the picker takes it to one of the nearby conveyor belts that divide the shelves on each floor. The items then go to be packed and shipped. Most positions in the warehouse use the scanners to verify each step of the product's journey but in addition, it sends pickers their next coordinates and the GPS tracks pickers every move. Each worker can be found on a map read out and analyzed for productivity. At first, I was told to try to get as many items as I could quickly and safely as a little diminishing blue bar on the scanner indicated a recommended pace. Once I got the hang of sorting through often messy shelves and bins like a frantic junkie, I would sprint walk 100 yards to the next location. Sometimes picking was turned into a competition for prizes. Who ever picked the most items in a certain time period would win an Amazon gift card. Suddenly, I would notice even middle age women sprinting from aisle to aisle hoping to get an extra bit of money.
It was revealed after my training that in order to meet the standard pace you must complete two picks per minute or 1 pick every thirty seconds. This is fine sometimes but not every pick is created equally. The items in the shelves at Amazon are organized at random and checked in a shelf based on available space. Not to mention the hilarity of combinations you see when you throw all the products Amazon sells into one area in a store. Virtually everything from sex toys to bibles could be found in any one shelf. Say I was on first, floor in an area full of only books and I was supposed to pick the Book of 101 Vaginas, ( a real item of just close up photos of vaginas) and the next book The Benevolent Deeds of Vladimir Putin (a book with just blank pages) is right next to it, I could easily pick up 120 items per hour. But let’s say I was in an isle that is overfilled with large unmarked boxes often with multiple bar codes. Reasonably, that would take a little longer to scan. Then I was sent to the other side of the warehouse to search for a small plush toy. Located on the floor the bin is otherwise full giant veiny dildos. The dildos hide item, but alas I find the tiny hand of a talking snowman toy and pull it out only to desperately search to scan the little bar code before the blue bar indicating my expected time to pick runs out.
That was my job as a picker for 10 hours a day. Pickers were all different people from the elderly to young, though people who were overweight tended to do stationary jobs such as stocking or packing. Any picker decent enough not to be fired within their first month will become proficient in these needle in hay stack scenarios over time, some more than others. If one of the many variables threw me off and I took longer than thirty seconds between picks to often, I was deemed off pace and a productivity analyzer with a Kindle Fire tablet tracked me down to find out if any “barriers” keeping me from reaching my full potential. However, there is no real advantage to pointing out that the current circumstances that slowed me down because Amazon has one rate and it’s the same no matter what. No exceptions or logic, pick 120 units per hour.
When I first started I was observed for a safety and quality check.I was to use a ladder for high up shelves, always look where I was going, and report errors or hazards, which were fairly common. About a month later a "coach" came by and basically said scrap all that, go as fast as you can, it's all that matters. Another day I was off pace because I had to use the bathroom, so while I was picking a sweaty nervous man found me. He said he was also there to help me reach the productivity goals. He gave me a handwritten list of recommendations including a sleep schedule, epsom salt baths, and cheap pre workout supplement found at Walmart that was chock full of caffeine and other legal stimulants. He said I should try it to feel more energized at work, noting that it works for him much better than the Monster and Red Bull which are sold in the lunchroom.
There is definitely 2 categories of workers at Amazon, those who are so disinterested and bored by their job they look like they are in some type of trance and those who work high-speed all day trying to get a promotion within the company. These pawns are always sweating and full of desperation, driven by fear and pre- work power. The latter will not normally acknowledge other lifeforms for fear that it might affect their numbers.
A Q&A message board by the entrance is the only forum you have to connect you to the Warehouse unless you actively seek out a manager before your shift. I won’t forget that one of the questions was “Are we allowed to talk?” short answer was not really, we have to make those numbers! I worked there for 3 months and I didn't really meet people who I worked with except one guy in my training group and another guy I ran into while picking who was on my old high-school football team. After months with barely any social interaction and two frantic fifteen-minute brakes that include 5 minutes of walking back forth out of the work zones, and a half hour lunch, I kept to small talk mostly.
A few months on as a picker I realized that Amazon Warehouse jobs were not for me. It was a steady job and it worked out as a summer gig, but the sheer boredom and lack of human contact were sometimes overwhelming. I don’t think I would ever choose to work there again despite the $12.50/hr ($9.30 after tax) or the free Gatorade alternative call Squincher (it's got what plants crave.) Amazon Warehouses just have a grinding high productivity culture that I just don't fit in with.
For example, every shift begins with a gym class stretch routine while the shift manager proudly announces the amount of stuff they’ve shipped that day. Sometimes there is a safety tip game in which you can win a shirt or something that says the Amazon "work hard, have fun, and make history.”
Amazon actually takes a loss every on the huge expenditure that is Prime, therefore they pay no taxes by design. In the state I was employed, DE, Amazon receives tens of millions in "corporate well-fare," for being job creators. It's absurd to me that Amazon employee's state income taxes basically go right back into Amazon, especially since Amazon would likely have built their warehouse there anyway based on the area's proximity to major cities. It turns out this "corporate well-fare," may just be a bribe to delay the coming automatization that will displace all of these jobs. In 2013 Amazon started replacing pick departments with little orange Roomba like bots carrying shelves with items and delivering them conveyors with out humans. These were not yet a part of my department but an ominous banner displaying them hung in front of the TSA like security station that checks to make sure you didn’t steal anything on you way out. I wondered if many of my fellow employees even knew that those orange robots were going to phase them out soon. I had to find an obscure YouTube video of a CNN news report to learn of them myself. Automatization is coming and it will benefit companies like Amazon which have an extremely high turn over rate for redundant human micro-tasks. Goodbye Guberment subsidized jobs.
The only person I found who had stayed since the opening of that place in 2012, was graying man with a pony tail working as a stocker, opposite of the pickers. He said it used to better back then. "When they opened this warehouse it was a nice place to work, they gave out free snacks and coffee, now you have to pay for those."
Read more about the price of convenience here by @thecryptofiend
https://steemit.com/technology/@thecryptofiend/is-amazon-too-big-monopolies-and-the-price-of-convenience
Interesting look behind a service that many people are beginning to take for granted!
Thanks for sharing this dark-side-of-the-moon-story.
I follow you; steem on.
Amazing Article @quattrophoto
thanks, lol it seems drones are a preferable species to humans in corporations.
interesting story, thanks !
upvoted and resteemed
Interesting, I worked in a similar warehouse, though everything there was stocked according to location instead of at random. I can see how that would make a huge difference!
Yeah, its crazy they lose thousands of items in the labyrinth due to human error. Apparently, it would take them years to go through and audit all the shelves.
That was an awesome read! Thank you for sharing this! I feel like this needs much more exposure so I will follow along and re-steem!
Thanks Jaay! You know after I tell people this story, they still love to shop Amazon! I myself still do as a last resort. Just know your favorite product could be next to some bizzare things on the shelf.
Haha thats one of those things that I love to hate - its really a mixed bag. We all love the convenience it provides, but its horrific how they get there.
I am damn sure that the robots will be alone in that warehouse someday soon... hearing the stuff about taxes was really disheartening though
Thanks for the story, Love the 'Idiocracy' reference... lol.....
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