The Secret Lives of Amazon's Elves 202
theodp writes "If Amazon is Santa, says Gizmodo's Joel Johnson, then the 400 folks living in RVs outside the Coffeyville, KS fulfillment center at Christmas time are the elves. Amazon didn't always lure in 'workcampers' from the RV community with the promise of free campgrounds and $10.50-$11 an hour seasonal jobs. 'Amazon had a bad experience busing in people from Tulsa,' explained tech nomad Chris Dunphy. 'There was a lot of theft and a lot of people who weren't really serious.' Workers from Tulsa were adding a 4-hour round-trip commute to a grueling 10-to-12 hour shift, Cherie Ve Ard added. 'They'd get there exhausted.' The work wasn't exactly what Cherie had envisioned."
I'm in a good place with Amazon..... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm making more money than I ever have before (I'm 43), the work is steady, benefits are nice (including the exercise I get working), and everyone has a good sense of professionalism. As for firing you for taking off sick (Huff. Post article), um, sorry, no. Not here. (See, someone does read the articles before posting!) Cheating on overtime? I'm going over my financial records right now, and the occasional mistake does get corrected. And I take off for the Men's room whenever I need to.
Fascinating article, though. Always wondered about our other operations. Sorry some of the campgrounds aren't so nice, hopefully that will improve.
Re:I'm in a good place with Amazon..... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Robots (Score:5, Informative)
Robots cost too much when compared to low-paid human labor. Also, robotics in such plants are still mostly experimental. I worked at several plants similar as described in the article. They were trying to introduce robots in one of them.
One robot was designated as "beer master". Its sole purpose was to pick beer crates. It usually jammed up at least twice a day. Most of the time it stood idle as the guy on forklift duty couldn't keep up with it.
The second robot (if you want to call it that) was extremely large. It was designed to handle (store, pick, sort and package) anything box-shaped. In the 6 months I was working there I never saw that machine running, aside from a few test runs.
Those very computers that decide the most optimal packing tend to screw up royally when one of the white collars upstairs feeds it the wrong dimensions. I remember my load being considerably oversized on more that one occasion due to someone missing a digit. Nor can they decide if the "this side up" marker can be safely ignored in order to make the load more compact and/or stable.
Robotics (for now) can only operate efficiently when their task contains few variables. Unless designers stop thinking up weird-sized packages and consumers stop mixing products around, the human factor will most likely remain.
Re:What is the point of this article? (Score:3, Informative)
What else do you want from a Huff Post article? That's where you go for this sort of thing. Complaining about the Huff Post being whiny is like pointing out factual errors in a Michael Moore movie or pointing out that rushlimbaugh.com seems to have a bias.
Re:I'm in a good place with Amazon..... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I'm in a good place with Amazon..... (Score:2, Informative)
I made more as a plastic extruder operator on shift work than my brother in law was making with a degree in software engineering and 5+ years experience in the field. If you factor in the years I was earning money while he was a full time student, it will be a long time before his education pays off economically compared to the two day forklift course my job required. Having now purchased some of my own equipment so I can work for myself, it is unlikely that he can ever match my hourly rate working for a company, however his stock options may make him wealthy.
That's not at all to say that I'm against education, I'm learning to program now, but to compare ROI, I will be better off to buy a truck than get a degree. Since I consider education an end in itself that's not necessarily always the deciding factor.
How it's done, and has been done for a century. (Score:4, Informative)
Their fulfillment centers are pretty impressive. Before I started working there I would have never realized that so much though, planning and technology went into packing the right stuff into the right boxes.
The basic system is a century old and was invented at Sears, Roebuck and Company, the first really big mail order operation. They had several city blocks in Chicago for what they called "The Works", their fulfillment center.
In the "schedule system" at Sears, orders came in, and each order was assigned a assembly bin for a 15-minute window. Picking tickets were generated for the various departments, each with the bin number and 15-minute window. The stock pickers in each department started on a new batch of tickets every 15 minutes, and as they picked items in their department, they attached the pick ticket to the item or a basket containing it, and sent it to the order assembly area by chute, conveyor, or pneumatic tube. At the order assembly area, incoming items were routed to the appropriate bin. At the end of each 15 minute window, each assembly bin was dumped to a basket, which went on a conveyor to the checking and accounting section. There, the items in the bin were matched against the order and the bill totaled up. The baskets then went to the packaging and shipping section and out of the Works.
Amazon's plant works about the same way, except that their computers know what's in inventory, so they don't have many "fails", where an item can't be found. They don't have to work to such a rigid clock-driven timetable, because the computers know when an order is fully assembled, and can allow more or less time depending on the complexity of the order. The basic concept, that a set of orders is being picked at any one time, picking orders fan out to departments, and items come back to an assigned bin for checking and packaging, remains the same.
Re:What is the point of this article? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:I'm in a good place with Amazon..... (Score:2, Informative)
I'm not the poster you replied to, but that girl was mocking the work that provided her sustenance and the man who did it. It is extremely bad form to mock those you depend upon as inferior. I've seen a poster here mock welders, for example. That poster almost certainly was dependent on some of those welders, at least for their transportation to their so-called superior work.
Re:Political science in 8-bits (Score:3, Informative)
...which is only enabled by customers and employees that accept what is offered to them; individuals can avoid doing business with a corporation, but cannot escape the grasp of a government.