An Invitation from the Evil Overlord

We took an Amazon tour today. The invite came in one of the many boxes that arrive at our house every week. Would we like to visit a fulfillment center? Are you kidding? Who wouldn’t want to see how an order placed on your phone at breakfast ends up at the door by mid-afternoon?

We covered a mile of this cathedral to consumerism.

I’ve always been grateful to Amazon, despite its reputation for harsh working conditions, union busting, environmental concerns and general “take over the world” vibe. The company delivered drugs, food and supplies to us during COVID, and after my husband’s accident, when we couldn’t leave the house. Amazon provided the platform to print my novel, and the supply chain to distribute it. The Amazon Kindle lets me carry thousands of books in my purse. We watch Amazon movies every week. Thanks to this global conglomerate, I can send gifts to my niece in England, and the box arrives the next day. When I ship the same stuff, it takes weeks, and the postage costs more than the contents.

But every cardboard box comes with a twinge of guilt. The trees, for one, and the mom-and-pop stores forced out of business, the poor employees shackled to their workstations. Amazon represents the pinnacle of modern digital capitalism. Would someone try to sneak us a note on the tour, begging for help?

The Orlando fulfillment center, MCO-1, covers 2.4 million square feet. It was, indeed, the biggest building I’ve ever seen. About 1,000 employees work per shift, 363 days a year (closed Christmas and New Year’s Day). As one worker explained, they have a bank of sick time and paid days off, and they can choose not to work any day, without telling a manager, as long as they have time saved. When they come to work, a large screen tells them what job they’re doing that shift.

If you’ve ever worked in a factory, as I did during college, the hardest part is the monotony. Watching the clock—or rather, forcing yourself not to look—is how a day drags by. But the money was good. In fact, I made more money as a Teamster than I did with a college degree for a while. Amazon employees average $23 per hour, with medical, dental and vision insurance, 401k benefits, and an education program that pays tuition with no obligation to continue working for the company.

We passed dozens of employees on three floors, and everyone smiled. Were they being forced? It didn’t feel that way. No one looked rushed or harried. I doubt that the Ford plants in Cleveland, where my husband’s uncles spent their lives, were jovial places. You earned a decent wage, and then you retired. Cars are being built by robots these days, and the automation at Amazon is truly staggering.

Each Hercules robot can lift 1,250 lbs.

I imagined products stacked on shelves to the ceiling, like Home Depot, and that’s how it used to be. Now, everything goes in a yellow pod—a 4x4 stack of cubbyholes, 8 feet high, moved by its own Hercules robot (a Roomba on steroids.) One million items arrive at the facility every day, and a million more ship out. Here’s the confounding part: each item comes out of a box, is scanned by a worker, and then thrown into a cubbyhole, wherever it fits. No sorting, no grouping—an iPad, a bottle of vitamins and a hammer might go in one space. Computers keep track of each location.

Once all cubbyholes are filled, the pod rolls away. Each runs on an 8-hour battery. Behind the safety fence, we watched hundreds of pods moving autonomously, their scanners reading barcodes in the floor—a mesmerizing dance. On the order fulfillment side, a worker sees an item on a screen, and a pod rolls up, with a light shining on the corresponding cubby, where the item is removed, scanned again, and thrown into a bin. (The lights made it look like a video game.) At other stations, workers assemble items from these bins and box them, adding bar codes. Mailing labels are affixed later, by robot arms. In other words, if your neighbors work at Amazon, they can’t see what you buy. There are 20 miles of conveyor belts, some moving as fast as 10 mph.

“Impressive” was the word everyone kept using. After about 90 minutes, and a mile of walking, we were tired. It’s a noisy place. Workers wear ear protection, of course, and stations are designed for ergonomic safety.

I can’t attest to Amazon’s treatment of its people, or its environmental record. All I can say is that its technology is amazing. Tours are available across the country if you’d like to see for yourself. Sure, the robots will kill us all one day, but the next time I see a box by the door, I’ll take a minute to say thanks to the humans who got it there.