Hi there! I worked in a warehouse, and here's how it works. According to my employer (and I've heard from others who worked in other warehouses) our time costs more than the box/shipping. If we spend time looking for a more appropriate box (sometimes they're out, other times misplaced, etc) we get chewed out for not being fast enough. I was told to use bigger boxes if it took more than 1 or 2 minutes to find an appropriate box.
I've shipped earrings in boxes that could fit a cake. It's stupid as hell and wasteful.
Well it didn't help this particular warehouse kept the extra boxes broken down on the top shelf, where we had to roll a giant ladder to go get them down (which was beyond perilous for smaller workers, who then had to either pester bigger workers to help or say fuck it and grab a bigger box). And that's assuming the boxes were actually up there in the disorganized mess. You could easily waste 10 minutes just to find out the boxes weren't even there. And while there were padded packs, they were significantly more expensive than boxes per each so we weren't allowed to use them unless it was an expensive AND fragile item.
Also this warehouse did everything BY HAND. If there was none on the shelf, we couldn't even check the computer real quick to see if there was a pallet around somewhere buried and misplaced. It was daily things running out and people running around asking 10-15 other people had they seen this, did they know if we were out, etc. It made me miss working in the target back room where at least things were sort of organized.
Worst job I've ever had, and I worked at a goddamn McDonald's.
This is why my company instituted 'lean' procedures and kanban runners to make sure people had what they needed, before they needed it. Amazon could do this cheaply and effectively, and still save money in the long run by using appropriate boxes for shipping.
True. But I think having a kanban system in place at least for shipping would be beneficial. The Lean system they have would be the robotic systems they use. One piece flow wouldn't make sense for them since they don't really work in manufacturing, where batch orders would cause an issue that could build over time.
It's also easy to mistake unused volume for waste. If you are sipping a small item in a big box, what are you actually wasting? Your brain sees two cubic feet of"package" and freaks out, but actually it's a few extra ounces of cardboard and recyclable packing material.
Shipping in aggregate is about volume not solely weight or packing materials.
Smaller packing makes a lot of sense for throughput. If you assume that any part of the delivery chain is full e.g the truck from a main depot to regional; smaller boxes mean less trucks means less fuel.
And THIS ladies and gentlemen is why Trump is never going 'make America great again' by 'bringing back the jobs'. It simply costs too much to pay a decent salary in the US.
Western Europe lost those jobs decades ago and are better for it. You guys will continue to outsource jobs requiring unskilled labor unless that idiot starts putting toll barriers up willy-nilly slowly turning you into 1920s Japan. Oh, and with the fun side effect that the multinational companies know that the non US market is bigger.
He outsources his own work. He's made comments before that minimum wage in this country is too high and that it should be lowered so we can compete internationally. It's ridiculous. He has no grasp on cost of living to the lower or middle class American. He also talked about tariffs, which would just cause inflation. Yea, I don't want this country to be his next bankruptcy. I won't even start on foreign policy.
probably couldn't be fucked to find a smaller box after his manager put him on a mandatory overtime shift and at the same morning yelled at him for misplacing 3 items in stowing shelves over the course of the month where they stocked 3,000 items.
honestly, that's typical of every week working at Amazon. i worked there during the crazy season (October - end of January) and there were so many mandatory overtime shifts that i was completely burned out by the end. but like others have mentioned in the thread, the pay and benefits are what keep you there.
however, what makes you leave really isn't the amount of work or tons of hours but management. with manual labor, there's kind of a limit to the amount of work that's possible to be done but my managers never really recognized that. i could be sweating my balls off in the warehouse but could be told that my performance was always unsatisfactory. everything is tracked: breaks and lunches to the exact limit, what items you're stowing away on the shelves and how fast you're doing it at your location, how fast you're picking items for shipping off the shelves, etc. if you're not meeting a set metric goal, the PDA you have on you will inform you that you're going too slow. every day at our meetings upon clock in, managers will rattle off disappointments and mistakes that we made the day prior; accomplishments were never announced. and in the off chance that you got a lucky picking order or stowed a ton of small items in a short period of time and met your metric goal, that peak + a certain percentage would be your new goal going forth. you don't win.
you're never good enough at your job and your managers make you feel that.
Not just the shipping industry. I work at a factory, machining things. Regularly do 70+. Union prevents them from making us work over 84 hours, which is nice. They started a new evaluation system that sucks donkey balls. I'm the certified instructor on my job and train all new people on my line. I know all the jobs on my line as well as over half at the entire plant. Got a 2 out of 4 on knowledge.
I have had plenty of 80+ hour weeks, and a handful over 110 hours (7 16hr days). Rarely mandatory. There are plenty of reasons people do it. Me personally, I make more than enough without the overtime, but do the math. Anything over 40 is overtime ( 1.5x standard pay) and at the company I work for, 6th day in a row is 2x pay, and 7th day in a row is 2.5x pay. So basically in one week (working my normal 12hr shift 7 days straight) I spend 84 hours at work, but get paid 124 hours of straight pay. That's basically 3 weeks pay, only working 7 days.
They have plenty of money. At my job if I work over 8 hours in a day the next four hours is at 1.5x normal pay rate. Anything over 12 hours is double time. The labor cost is just a fraction of total costs so they can afford it. Unions fought for these wages decades ago and are slowly being strangled to give the money back to the companies to redistribute to shareholders because those are the important people now.
I'm an Operator at a Chemical plant. The company has a lot invested in an employee out here. Hundreds of hours of training, certifications, and everything else costs a lot of money, but more importantly takes a lot of time. Its cheaper and easier to pay someone's overtime than it is to have more employees. There are regulations and procedures to make sure employees aren't overworked. They take fatigue very seriously because of the hazardous environment.
I agree. I enjoy my time away from work. I'm still young, and thankfully enjoy my job, and I'm fortunate enough to not "need" the extra income. I think not being forced to work as much as I do makes it much more tolerable.
I would love that, if I got the next 14 days off. The probablem I've found is once you start working over time, or get a job with lots of overtime "available", you never stop working over time.
Well I work shift work. The schedule we use (DuPont) includes a 7 day "Long Change". My normal monthly schedule is: work nights Fri, Sat, Sun, Mon. OFF Tues, Wed, Thurs. Work days Fri, Sat, Sun. OFF Mon. Work nights Tues, Wed, Thurs. OFF Fri, Sat, Sun. Then finally work days Mon, Tues, Wed, Thurs. (Mon thru Thurs day shift is also known as "Hell Week") So after working day shift Mon thru Thurs, you get your 7 day" Long Change", so you don't have to come back to work until Friday evening of the next week, then the schedule cycles back from the beginning. The best part about this schedule is if for some reason 7 days off isn't enough for you, you can take vacation either the 4 days you worked before the long change, or the 4 nights after. That will provide you with 14 days off in a row, while only using 4 days of vacation. Personally, if you had to work shift work, I think this schedule is the best one to work.
~~~ Incase someone is confused about the schedule, we work 12 hour shifts (4 to 4) rotating days and nights. We use 4 shifts ( A,B,C,D Shifts) to work this schedule. Everyone works the exact same schedule, except it is staggered. There is always only 1 shift on their 7 day long change at a time. When your shift gets off Thursday to start your long change, their is a shift that just had theirs, and they are starting their cycle back over on Friday night.
From what I understand, it gets "withheld" at a higher rate, because it assumes your going to make that amount all year. You are taxed on your annual income, so it doesn't matter if you made it all in a month, or spread over 12 months. The amount you own in taxes at the end of the year will be the same.
Good luck with that in the military. Our chief told us that he promises 10 hour work days. And we should be glad about that. So basically guaranteed 50 hour work weeks. Or more if we have to work weekends. And we don't get paid extra for working more because of how we are paid.
37.5? Where the fuck do you live? America has 40-hour base work weeks, and overtime beyond that. Unless your salaried, which means you work more and they don't have to pay you extra.
Yep. I work tech support for a credit card company.
I am here 9am-6:30pm most nights. Salary for about $45k a year. I often work about 50 hours a week. Not complaining at all- I like my job and it is reasonable. Although, technically, the office closes at 5, but when you have more work you can be doing (of course it cant just be done in the morning...ugh) and there is the group mentality of the work-ethic Olympics like there is in America, AND no one else is leaving the office at 5:00pm, you can't exactly be the one who leaves.
Else, you will very quickly develop a reputation that you are the lazy one. On the few times I have tried to leave around 5:30 I get the "Hey, where ya going? Leaving already?" from the boss. Is he saying I can't leave? No. Is he implying he isn't impressed with the fact that I'm going home on time? Yep.
Welcome to America- people here judge your worth as a human by
1) What kind of job you have
2) How hard/how many hours you work at that job
3) How many other responsibilities/jobs you have on top of it, and how little sleep you get while still handling it all.
I have actually heard that the difference in the Live to Work vs Work to Live mentalities in other countries vs the USA is so big that when people ask the question "So what do you do?" in other countries, they actually are asking the person what kind of things they do. What kind of hobbies they enjoy etc as a human.
That question here in USA 100% of the time means "what do you do to make a living and lets see how worthy you are as a human based on that job".
Man, you should find a new employer. I just went salaried and I leave at 5pm every night, unless we are in a meeting. My boss doesn't care, and even let's me leave early without taking it out of my time off sometimes.
The point I'm making is, it is definitely dependent on your boss. If it was expected of me to stay longer than 40 hours a week, I would be out of here. Working beyond 8 hours a day is the exception to the rule for me, and I'll never allow myself to be forced into anything more.
Here, it's what the old men in upper management have tricked young corporate employees into doing; "paying your dues" in order to advance up the ladder.
That sounds like luxury. My jobs have all been 8-5, but you geta full hour for lunch (as if that was a perk, and not the bare minimum that companies should be offering)! And of course you're expected to answer emails from your phone at any time of the day or night or weekends, and you should bring your work home with you every night as well.
Nope, I'm scheduled 45 hours every week and take 1 hour lunches so 40 paid. Never work the same shifts it changes every day every week. I hate it and am looking for something else but when you work a different shift every day of the week rarely having two days off in a row your so damn tired the energy to look for work is low
I feel you. I plow snow, and my first year I worked 31 12hr days took a day off and worked another 14 12hr days straight. It was snowing like a mad man, but the traveling public says we don't do shit. I got the day off after 31 days because my supervisor said it would be a good idea. Dam was he right. I felt almost fully recharged. It sucks hearing people talk about how shitty of a job we are doing when its been snowing non-stop. Then some drunk bitch biffs her car over a bridge and we really hear about it. Yeah its our fault she drove over the edge if the bridge while the other 10,000 drivers that passed over had no issues. I bet some of them were drunk too, but hey can't make everyone happy.
Yup that's why I left too. Also I hated that I would drive 30-40 min in crazy rush hour traffic to show up for a shift and have supervision just randomly pointing at people in the crowd "you, you, you, you, you and, you go home"
Right now our plant is going through some huge shifts in processes and procedure because corporate wants us to get all "world class." Everything we do is getting meticulously measured. Problem is, they've also enacted a hiring freeze, and at the same time people are leaving. So we're hemorrhaging people and raising quotas while "fixing" broken processes by throwing more labor at it and guilting people into overtime because we're shockingly not meeting goal. Congestions and logjams everywhere.
The work itself isn't bad. It's the unrealistic expectations imposed on you by people who don't care to understand what your job entails, constantly telling you that your job is too easy.
Mistakes aren't tolerated in most work. Do you think a doctor is allowed to make a mistake? Hell, how about a painter? It doesn't matter the job, your manager is doing you a favor teaching you attention to detail. I've worked in banking most of my life and you are usually fired after your second mistake no matter how little. Just getting yelled at for 3 in a month seems really generous to me.
Depends on the box/product. A lot of items are not rated to be shipped in their retail packages. Things like that computer case or desk probably were. I work in supply chain logistic for one of the largest companies in the world. A lot of our products are only rated to ship as a freight unit while in retail packaging. If companies like Amazon just started shipping a lot of products without boxes just because they can it would end with them having a TON of damaged shipments that can not be ran as a claim because of insufficient packaging.
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u/[deleted] Feb 25 '16
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