T'is the Season for Amazon Seasonal Workers
A holiday tale about Prime and seasonal workers to keep you warm and filled with joy
I woke up this morning to a message from Amazon that my order would be delivered by noon. It immediately made me think of my “fulfillment center” friends from Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
There was the one-toothed, obese friend girl who tried to give me money for a Giant gift card. Amazon gave us a $20 gift card to the local supermarket on our first day, and I did not need mine as I was living in a hotel, so I offered mine to this young woman. She sweetly said she couldn’t afford to buy it from me.
Then, there was the middle-aged Black woman, Michelle, who loved her “vodka and Hi-C in the evening with my programs.” She also seemed to think that only white men bought sex toys.
At Amazon, sex toys are stored in the “stock library” in brown paper so they don’t offend anyone. When we were being trained, the manager peeled back the paper, and we saw a rubber face with puckered lips staring at us. The sex toy’s name was “Blow Job Betty.”
“Oo-wee, you white boys are nasty creatures.”
Looking at my message and grateful that my son’s Lego would be arriving today, I recalled how quickly I grew to dislike Amazon Prime when I worked undercover at that fulfillment center in Carlisle.
Undercover at Amazon
My ten days of pretending to be an average American needing some extra earnings opened my eyes and made me hate innovative marketing initiatives devised by even smarter marketers. The programs, devised in the sterile laboratory of the corporate office, often show little regard for the logistics of how to fulfill the marketing promises.
Amazon Prime is a marketing initiative that, despite its initial costs, has been one of the reasons Amazon became the behemoth it is today. Prime, like the railroads in our country, was built on the backs of poor, desperate people.
The promises Amazon’s upper management makes to consumers through its many marketing programs for ever-quicker service and delivery fail to consider one small thing: Humans do the fulfilling in the warehouses. My time at Amazon gave me a whole new outlook on my work, which for years had been to make up programs like Prime to blow shoppers’ minds and deepen their brand loyalty.
What happens when you order through Prime?
I am sure most people have no idea and don’t care what happens. The most important information is that “free delivery” is guaranteed and the package will arrive lightning-fast. Great news, right? Yes.
The thing is that during the year, people who Amazon officially employs are fulfilling your Prime orders, and most have developed wonderful methods for dealing with the stress of the fulfillment center. In addition, most are being paid decent hourly wages and even have some form of health care.
During the holiday season of just after Thanksgiving to New Year’s, known as “Peak,” Amazon hires thousands of unskilled, and in many cases unfit, workers through third-party companies to help meet your holiday demands.
First of all, it’s good that these jobs exist. I am not going to be so impractical and say that this employment is a bad thing because it serves the interests of one of the wealthiest companies in the world — no, liberal, pie-in-the-sky mumbo-jumbo here. The jobs are needed by many, and families look to these seasonal earnings as ways to make ends meet. None of these facts, however, make the life of the seasonal worker any less taxing, stressful, and miserable.
As a Prime member, you place your order and go off to the kitchen for a cup of tea. Your role in the saga is played, and the tracking begins.
The moment you sent off that order, and after Amazon thanked you for it, hell begins to break loose for one of these Peak workers at some undisclosed location somewhere in the world. In my case, the “undisclosed location” was Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
When the Prime order comes across the screen of your “gun,” the handheld device that determines your physical position relative to every item in the giving fulfillment center (FC), whatever you are doing must be stopped, and the Prime order must be fulfilled. You might be in the bathroom. You might be on break. You might be in row 1 with a cart filled with 50 items, and to fulfill the Prime order, it is necessary to go to row 49: Run!
The Prime order has to be “picked” from the library, delivered to the packing line, and on a truck within 30 minutes! This is an incredible promise to the customer that only an American capitalist could come up with, which is why Jeff Bezos’s company is what it is.
From my ten days in Carlisle, I can tell you that the average seasonal worker was not in very good health. Most were overweight, had just ended months of unemployment — or underemployment — and were barely holding onto a semblance of survival in rural America. I am also sure most of the people I worked with voted for Trump the following year, and even a bunch died from Corona due to Class III obesity, otherwise known as morbid obesity.
Sent there by my company to learn the ways of Amazon’s fulfillment process, I was buzzing around with an ulterior purpose. Thanks to my salary, I was motivated financially at a much different level. The Amazon one was not bad and was just added money for personal use. My fellow pickers regarded this money as life-preserving: To keep them afloat, in homes, out of prison, or to pay the added bills that Christmas was certain to create.
The cacophony of heavy breathing, the rhetorical questioning of God, “Oh, sweet Jesus, when do we get a break?” and a whole other assortment of sounds, sighs, and amusing comments made by people not used to such labor created everything but festive anticipation of Christmas. As professionally enlightening as it was for me, it was goddamn depressing to think that this is the best our economy had to offer for way too many people.
Unhealthy by life choices made in ignorance of anything better, or simply because they can’t afford anything better, armies of Americans are wrecking knees, having heart attacks, and just giving up because physically they are incapable of functioning for long in strenuous conditions.
I never broke a sweat but I did warm up. Like any warehouse in the winter, the fulfillment center is not heated, so it’s cold. Once you get a picking gun full of orders, you start to warm up because it requires moving quickly in and out of the rows in the library as you fulfill orders.
If you fall behind in getting the Prime order to the delivery line fast enough, the managers, who track your every move on computers up in the control booth, send angry messages to your gun: Move it. What’s going on down there? Hello, anybody home? Hey, So-and-so, where are you?
One woman I liked failed to get three Primes in on time. She was warned that a fourth would result in dismissal. She came to me crying. After that, I helped her with her Prime. She was obese and was one of the slowest-moving people I ever met. Her knees barely bent, and really, she should have been in a wheelchair.
Prime is a great added benefit for us shoppers. We can get anything in crazy-fast times pretty much anywhere in the world. Like anything, though, there is an environmental and human element. Before requesting something to be delivered as quickly as possible, or even before joining a program like Prime, ask yourself, do I Iak need those socks tomorrow by 9 AM?
If I could offer an extra tip or something to the nameless, faceless seasonal workers who will, in two weeks from now, be let go, I would indeed send a few dollars.
Oh, by the way, each year, a handful of the seasonal folks who proved to be the most efficient during Peak get offered full-time employment with Amazon, which for many is the same as being picked by Jesus to play for His team.
Happy holidays.