See what it's like inside Amazon's massive warehouses
Robert Galbraith / REUTERS
Over the weekend, The New York Times published a highly critical inside look at Amazon's office environment.
The piece describes an intense, "bruising" work environment for Amazon's white-collar employees.
But Amazon also employs tens of thousands of workers in its more than 90 fulfillment and sortation centers located all around the world.
These workers, whose job it is to make sure Amazon ships products to customers in a timely manner, have their own set of challenges.
Amazon calls its warehouses "fulfillment centers" or FCs. It also has sortation centers, where prepped packages are sorted before being shipped to individual post offices. Note all the loading docks at the FC below.
Amazon's fulfillment centers are busiest over the holidays. During the Peak Season of November and December, FCs send over a million packages a day, and employees sometimes work 12-hour days.
Amazon added more than 20,000 full-time fulfillment associates in 2014.
Source: Amazon
FC employees are generally paid between $10 and $14 per hour.
Source: NBC
One of Amazon's largest fulfillment center is in Phoenix, Arizona. It's so big (1.2 million square feet) that it could hold 28 football fields.
As you might expect, working in an Amazon warehouse can be very taxing. Employees need to be able to lift up to 49 pounds and stand or walk for 10-12 hours per day.
Source: Amazon
Depending on their role, workers may walk between 7 and 15 miles every day inside the warehouses.
Job listings warn that temperatures inside fulfillment centers can sometimes rise above 90 degrees. In 2011, Amazon came under fire for allowing associates in a Pennsylvania warehouse to work in 114-degree heat. The next year, Amazon retrofitted all of its fulfillment centers to include climate control, according to a company spokesperson.
Source: Amazon, The Morning Call
Each time someone orders something on Amazon, that order will get pinged onto an employee's handheld scanner or "pick mod." It will direct them to the areas where each item is located. Employees scan the item, place it in a tote, scan the tote, and then send it on a conveyor belt for shipping prep.
Source: Wired
Fulfillment centers are all about efficiency, and the conveyor belts move fast. The one in Campbellsive, Kentucky, handles 426 orders per second.
Source: CNBC
"Pickers" are the workers who put all the products someone has ordered together in totes. "Packers" then put those products into Amazon boxes.
Amazon packers are told to "treat every package like it's someone's Christmas present."
Source: Amazon
Algorithms determine the right type of box for each order.
Source: Wired
Software plays a huge role in the fulfillment centers. Anything that can be optimized or automated by an algorithm, is. "An Amazon fulfillment center is like a giant robot," according to Wired.
To make things a bit easier for its workers, Amazon added about 15,000 Kiva robots to 10 US fulfillment centers during the 2014 holiday season. Amazon bought Kiva Systems, the company that manufactures the robots, for $775 million in 2012.
Source: Business Insider
Some employees have said that Amazon tracks their every step throughout the fulfillment center and will put them on alert if they're not as productive as their counterparts.
Source: CNBC
Others have complained that because the warehouses are so massive, they waste their breaks just walking to the proper areas.
Source: Gawker
To enter and exit each day, employees pass through metal detectors. In a recent lawsuit, workers in a Las Vegas warehouse said the security screening at the end of the day can take as long as 25 minutes. Amazon contests that post-shift security takes "little or no wait."
A few years ago, a source told us about some of the strict rules at fulfillment, like that employees aren't allowed to wear lipstick, and they can only drink water from clear bottles so floor supervisors can tell what the liquid is. An Amazon spokesperson has denied that these rules exist, though they added that only water is allowed because of the robotic technology used in the warehouse.
Source: Business Insider
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