28 2 / 2012

missbhavens: longreads: A writer goes undercover at a shipping warehouse in Mississippi—and wonders whether Americans will ever demand higher standards for how their Internet purchases are being fulfilled: We will be fired if we say we just can’t or won’t get better, the workamper tells me. But so long as I resign myself to hearing how inadequate I am on a regular basis, I can keep this job. “Do you think this job has to be this terrible?” I ask the workamper. “Oh, no,” she says, and makes a face at me like I’ve asked a stupid question, which I have. As if Amalgamated couldn’t bear to lose a fraction of a percent of profits by employing a few more than the absolute minimum of bodies they have to, or by storing the merchandise at halfway ergonomic heights and angles. But that would cost space, and space costs money, and money is not a thing customers could possibly be expected to hand over for this service without huffily taking their business elsewhere. “I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave.” — Mac McClelland, Mother Jones More McClelland: “I Can Find an Indicted Warlord. So Why Isn’t He in The Hague?” — Mother Jones, Sept. 28, 2011 Eeeeeeek. As an Amazon Prime abuser, this hurts to read, I used to work for the world’s largest logistics and distribution companies and I’ve seen the warehouses. They’re INTENSE. Our business wasn’t build as much around overnight delivery, so I think the pressures were different but in a lot of ways the same. The boxes never stop coming - the computer would determine the size of the products to be packed and would select the appropriate box which would be pre-tagged and labeled and waiting for products. The fact that warehouses are all set up pretty much alike speaks to the physical challenges: they’re HUGE spaces full of tall shelves; no human is comfortable after running back and forth and bending or stretching to reach things for 12 hours a day.

missbhavens:

longreads:

A writer goes undercover at a shipping warehouse in Mississippi—and wonders whether Americans will ever demand higher standards for how their Internet purchases are being fulfilled:

We will be fired if we say we just can’t or won’t get better, the workamper tells me. But so long as I resign myself to hearing how inadequate I am on a regular basis, I can keep this job. “Do you think this job has to be this terrible?” I ask the workamper.

“Oh, no,” she says, and makes a face at me like I’ve asked a stupid question, which I have. As if Amalgamated couldn’t bear to lose a fraction of a percent of profits by employing a few more than the absolute minimum of bodies they have to, or by storing the merchandise at halfway ergonomic heights and angles. But that would cost space, and space costs money, and money is not a thing customers could possibly be expected to hand over for this service without huffily taking their business elsewhere.

“I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave.” — Mac McClelland, Mother Jones

More McClelland: “I Can Find an Indicted Warlord. So Why Isn’t He in The Hague?” — Mother Jones, Sept. 28, 2011

Eeeeeeek. As an Amazon Prime abuser, this hurts to read,

I used to work for the world’s largest logistics and distribution companies and I’ve seen the warehouses. They’re INTENSE. Our business wasn’t build as much around overnight delivery, so I think the pressures were different but in a lot of ways the same. The boxes never stop coming - the computer would determine the size of the products to be packed and would select the appropriate box which would be pre-tagged and labeled and waiting for products. The fact that warehouses are all set up pretty much alike speaks to the physical challenges: they’re HUGE spaces full of tall shelves; no human is comfortable after running back and forth and bending or stretching to reach things for 12 hours a day.

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