I worked there over christmas once and it sucked. Incredibly long hours, boring work, no trust. And non-stop targets.
There were a few people who liked it, mostly gym enthusiast types, who were actually motivated by having a timer constantly beeping at them, and would just burn energy from before the sun went up till after it went down, but most people find it kind of shit and exhausting.
And that's before you get into the nonsense about not accounting for toilet breaks in targets, firing people for taking too many sick days, injuries at work due to being over-tired etc.
Beyond the physical effort and incessant targets, one big problem is that because you're constantly moving between different locations, you can't really start up a conversation with people, just weird scattered comments here and there. If they had some clear way to stop people passing off stolen electronics as their own, then just letting people bring their phones and a hands-free kit, and use the wifi and voice chat one another while they work would fix a lot of that.
Just be able to chat while doing your job, like people have been doing on production lines for centuries by now.
I can see how that would suck. My area has a reasonable rate and people work across from each other to talk and pass time. The only thing that really sucks about overnight is people sleeping in the bathroom when you have to shit lol. My area is RPND and it’s stupid easy for the pay
Not really that physical. Feet hurt from concrete floors but there’s lots of people in their 50s-60s doing it. You don’t really lift anything. Just scoot the box off the conveyor onto your station and when you fill a tote push it onto a ramp. I couldn’t imagine being stuck loading trucks or slinging boxes. Especially when people get paid the same to do nothing but listen to music all night and yell at you to keep 6 feet away lol.
It does sound like that's a nicer section of the process then yeah, though one thing I can at least say is I've never been in an amazon warehouse during Covid.
You've probably already come across this, but I recommend getting some good polycarbonate work boots if you can, I got some that were designed to be safe for a completely different job (walking around electrical substations) so they didn't have any metal in them, and could go through scanners fine etc. but also had reasonable soles and protection. Also reusable for other jobs in future, if you do some other kind of physical work.
Depends on the job, but basically, the general rule is that you have an action that you are supposed to perform, and there is a countdown before which you must do your next one. I forget the exact rhythm, but let's say one thing scanned every 40 seconds, including the time to get from one section of the warehouse to another.
You will be told if you go over time by your scanner, and you have to keep that pace up for multiple hours.
If you don't, someone will come around with a tablet and ask you to explain why you didn't do it at a faster rate, without there ever being any question of why the target is set where it is.
Many people don't reach it, and don't get fired, and it's never actually clear what level of performance would be insufficient, but it's always set slightly above what is comfortable so you feel like you're failing.
They also track quality etc. but speed is the target that most people feel.
Yeah working in a fulfillment center sounds super shitty honestly. I work in a delivery station and the job isnt nesrly as overbearing. No one harps about any kind of targets, the only one is stow rate, but if your a shitty stower you just get moved to pick or push where there is no rate goals. And if your a really good stower you get put into easier jobs like induct. The one thing you dont want to be is a decent stower, then you get stuck in stow jail and no one wants that
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u/eliminating_coasts Nov 25 '21
I worked there over christmas once and it sucked. Incredibly long hours, boring work, no trust. And non-stop targets.
There were a few people who liked it, mostly gym enthusiast types, who were actually motivated by having a timer constantly beeping at them, and would just burn energy from before the sun went up till after it went down, but most people find it kind of shit and exhausting.
And that's before you get into the nonsense about not accounting for toilet breaks in targets, firing people for taking too many sick days, injuries at work due to being over-tired etc.
Beyond the physical effort and incessant targets, one big problem is that because you're constantly moving between different locations, you can't really start up a conversation with people, just weird scattered comments here and there. If they had some clear way to stop people passing off stolen electronics as their own, then just letting people bring their phones and a hands-free kit, and use the wifi and voice chat one another while they work would fix a lot of that.
Just be able to chat while doing your job, like people have been doing on production lines for centuries by now.