It would be convenient to think that the Amazon ops executives have this all figured out and that the numbers support their labor strategy, but after having bee

It would be convenient to think that the Amazon ops executives have this all figured out and that the numbers support their labor strategy, but after having been one of the people whose job it was to put data in front of those executives, I wouldn't trust their judgment with data at all. Their ideologies and their incompetence trap them to inferior analysis. They think their pay is good because it is higher than other warehouse jobs. They don't actually compare the workload at other warehouse jobs, but needless to say nobody is worked anywhere near as hard in those other jobs. Their hiring and retention costs are insanely high, but they don't recognize their role. They view their retention as belonging in two categories: those who are fired and those who quit. Both are much higher than competing warehouses. They fire more because they have zero tolerance policies for too many things and three strikes for everything else...with no forgiveness for anything ever. Voluntary quits are high because they don't pay enough for the job that they are hiring for, but they see voluntary quits as being a problem with management. So they churn the management like crazy too. And since they churn management like crazy, they institute policies that basically take all judgment out of the hands of managers and only use them to enforce policies. Besides, retention, training, and hiring costs don't fall into the ops budget, it falls into HR, so it's not their problem anyway. At least from one anecdotal exchange with a local ops manager, they would likely need to be paying double their going rates if they wanted to bring their retention and hiring rates in line with the rest of the industry. But it's not gonna happen. They're gonna keep playing this musical chairs blame game until it breaks them.