“when you ... take a 50,000 ft view of it, it kind of seems inefficient"
December 10, 2019 9:26 AM Subscribe
Buying from Amazon, or Target, or Wal-Mart online? Your packages may pass through the small town of Roundup, Montana on a circuitous journey from warehouse to prep center to warehouse to prep center to your home
Your Amazon package has a wild journey before it gets to your door
Your Amazon package has a wild journey before it gets to your door
Josh DziezaNot to be confused with the Amazon side-hustle of retail arbitrage - previously
So this started when I was talking to an Amazon seller for another story and he mentioned that he never really handled his goods. He bought them online from other retailers and had them shipped to a building somewhere where they were unboxed, re-boxed and sent to Amazon unboxing and re-boxed.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross
Why did they have to be re-boxed?
Josh Dzieza
That’s what I was surprised about, too.
Amazon has fairly strict requirements for how goods arrive at their fulfillment centers. Work in the fulfillment centers is partly automated and partly just intense physical labor. And to streamline the process, there are requirements for how things arrive. You can’t have multiple barcodes because someone might scan the wrong barcode, can’t have packing peanuts because they get everywhere.
So if you buy something from some other retailer, you have to unbox it, make sure it’s not broken, re-box it according to Amazon’s specifications, and send it to Amazon.
This is pretty fascinating. But I suspect the "If" is doing even more work here than the author lets on:
Each item prepped and shipped nets the women a dollar. If the items are small and the preppers work fast, they can make good money. Sandi, who tracks her prepping in a spreadsheet on her desk, calculates that she made $49.55 per hour bagging 353 miniature animal toys the day before. Their income drops if they have to prep, say, strollers or televisions, but the work is flexible and still pays better than most of the jobs available in the area.posted by Not A Thing at 10:01 AM on December 10, 2019 [2 favorites]
Work in the fulfillment centers is partly automated and partly just intense physical labor.
Pretty much slave labor. In the 90s, I worked one Christmas season at the first such warehouse, pre-automation. One ran around pushing a cart across a concrete floor, and filled it with books lined spine up with slips of paper inserted in their flyleaves sticking forth on the shelves of rows and rows of metal bookcases. And I mean ran. The slow were fired by the day.
This was all done under shiny cloth banners hung from the rafters which were emblazoned with slogans about how You Are an Owner, etc. The Quotations of Chairman Bezos, as it were.
Well, that was for the 5% who were regular employees. Who repeated those inane slogans like true believers. The rest were temps, me included. In Seattle, a substantial number of temp employees were living in cars parked in the neighborhood of the warehouse.
And here I thought I was going to be working customer service, staring at a screen and surfing the net between orders. My feet never hurt so much. Talk about the road to serfdom.
I was told a couple of years later that workers in fulfillment centers in the the South had to walk through metal detectors so they could not bring guns to work. From the pace, intensity and frustrations of the jobs, I could see where that might present a problem.
posted by y2karl at 10:10 AM on December 10, 2019 [13 favorites]
Pretty much slave labor. In the 90s, I worked one Christmas season at the first such warehouse, pre-automation. One ran around pushing a cart across a concrete floor, and filled it with books lined spine up with slips of paper inserted in their flyleaves sticking forth on the shelves of rows and rows of metal bookcases. And I mean ran. The slow were fired by the day.
This was all done under shiny cloth banners hung from the rafters which were emblazoned with slogans about how You Are an Owner, etc. The Quotations of Chairman Bezos, as it were.
Well, that was for the 5% who were regular employees. Who repeated those inane slogans like true believers. The rest were temps, me included. In Seattle, a substantial number of temp employees were living in cars parked in the neighborhood of the warehouse.
And here I thought I was going to be working customer service, staring at a screen and surfing the net between orders. My feet never hurt so much. Talk about the road to serfdom.
I was told a couple of years later that workers in fulfillment centers in the the South had to walk through metal detectors so they could not bring guns to work. From the pace, intensity and frustrations of the jobs, I could see where that might present a problem.
posted by y2karl at 10:10 AM on December 10, 2019 [13 favorites]
You do have to admit that the town is perfectly named.
posted by clawsoon at 10:16 AM on December 10, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by clawsoon at 10:16 AM on December 10, 2019 [1 favorite]
With Amazon it's like every destructive, selfish, soulless thing that Walmart ever did in the 90s has been blown up with the breath of the devil to be ten times larger, with more evil intent and even more casual secondary corrosive ruin for the larger economy.
posted by Cris E at 10:45 AM on December 10, 2019 [10 favorites]
posted by Cris E at 10:45 AM on December 10, 2019 [10 favorites]
Carbon tax, carbon tax, carbon tax.
The inefficiencies here, the amount of shipping, the wasted fuel and power just frustrates me so much. Going to have to remember this in the future when I look at Amazon. (I know it's not much, but it's a easy place to reduce)
posted by Hactar at 10:53 AM on December 10, 2019 [6 favorites]
The inefficiencies here, the amount of shipping, the wasted fuel and power just frustrates me so much. Going to have to remember this in the future when I look at Amazon. (I know it's not much, but it's a easy place to reduce)
posted by Hactar at 10:53 AM on December 10, 2019 [6 favorites]
I've been reading about the medieval and early modern economy, and one thing that happened during the decades of Amsterdam's dominance was that pretty much every ship, no matter where it was coming from or going to in Europe, would stop and load or unload in Amsterdam. Part of it was the massive amount of warehouse space that had been built up in the city, and part of it was all the webs of credit and financial settlement that centered on the city.
What's old is new again.
posted by clawsoon at 11:03 AM on December 10, 2019 [10 favorites]
What's old is new again.
posted by clawsoon at 11:03 AM on December 10, 2019 [10 favorites]
When I started to read an article about preppers in Montana I didn't expect it to be about Amazon... there's a joke to be made there, but I'm not going to reach for it.
I grew up in a one stoplight town in Montana. Went back last summer, there's still only one stoplight there. It's a beautiful place but the options are pretty limited when you get outside of the bigger cities. I can't say whether this repackaging deal is a good thing or a bad thing, but steady business, working at your own company, sounds like it's better than flat ass broke in the middle of nowhere.
posted by caution live frogs at 11:11 AM on December 10, 2019 [6 favorites]
I grew up in a one stoplight town in Montana. Went back last summer, there's still only one stoplight there. It's a beautiful place but the options are pretty limited when you get outside of the bigger cities. I can't say whether this repackaging deal is a good thing or a bad thing, but steady business, working at your own company, sounds like it's better than flat ass broke in the middle of nowhere.
posted by caution live frogs at 11:11 AM on December 10, 2019 [6 favorites]
y2karl: This was all done under shiny cloth banners hung from the rafters which were emblazoned with slogans about how You Are an Owner, etc. The Quotations of Chairman Bezos, as it were.
Reminds me of that time Khrushchev went to Hollywood and got into a friendly argument with the president of 20th Century Fox, who said that the great thing about America was that, "We have two million American presidents of American corporations."
Ever since I read about that, I've thought about how giving every ambitious asshole the opportunity to have their own little dictatorship shapes the American economy, for better and for worse. At least it gives them something to do, and at least they don't have the power to execute anybody, anyway.
posted by clawsoon at 11:19 AM on December 10, 2019 [5 favorites]
Reminds me of that time Khrushchev went to Hollywood and got into a friendly argument with the president of 20th Century Fox, who said that the great thing about America was that, "We have two million American presidents of American corporations."
Ever since I read about that, I've thought about how giving every ambitious asshole the opportunity to have their own little dictatorship shapes the American economy, for better and for worse. At least it gives them something to do, and at least they don't have the power to execute anybody, anyway.
posted by clawsoon at 11:19 AM on December 10, 2019 [5 favorites]
Can second the strict requirements for reseller goods in Amazon warehouses. Used to work for a small (actually, at least medium-sized by now) hobby electronics vendor that sold some of its stock via Amazon (both .com and .ca). We had to create very specific labels to go over vendor barcodes, and they had to be covering the barcodes completely. For non-Amazon fulfilled orders via Amazon, we were forbidden to put any identifying detail in or on the package that would let the buyer know who we were.
posted by scruss at 12:31 PM on December 10, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by scruss at 12:31 PM on December 10, 2019 [1 favorite]
At least it gives them something to do, and at least they don't have the power to execute anybody, anyway.
Save for working them to death, that is.
posted by y2karl at 12:48 PM on December 10, 2019 [8 favorites]
Save for working them to death, that is.
posted by y2karl at 12:48 PM on December 10, 2019 [8 favorites]
there's a joke to be made there, but I'm not going to reach for it.
You wouldn't even have to reach very far for that low-hanging fruit.
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:06 PM on December 10, 2019
You wouldn't even have to reach very far for that low-hanging fruit.
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:06 PM on December 10, 2019
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