Ignoring the tone-deafness of "meatbag", human workers will continue to be part of Amazon's systems for a long time to come, so it makes sense to develop things

Ignoring the tone-deafness of "meatbag", human workers will continue to be part of Amazon's systems for a long time to come, so it makes sense to develop things for humans. Robots are - and will continue to be in the foreseeable future - massively expensive, require long lead times, and slow to scale. In the current state of the US economy I can hire several thousand humans to do a job practically overnight, while buying/renting several thousand industrial robots requires both considerably more money and time. Amazon's business is highly seasonal, which naturally favors options with low initial cost but high marginal cost (humans) rather than high initial cost and low marginal cost (robot). Near-total replacement of a high-variance business process with robots is likely impractical and will continue to be for a long time.