Picking and placing items into these cubbies at a rate of 12/minute for 10 hours... tracking performance down to the individual item placed... Obviously this is

Picking and placing items into these cubbies at a rate of 12/minute for 10 hours... tracking performance down to the individual item placed... Obviously this is not really a job fit for for a human. How long until robots can reliably do the stowing for the majority of items? Or to alter the problem, why not require packaging to conform to certain standards such that robots can do the job today? $16/hr - let’s say $24/hr fully loaded - placing 600 items in a hour would be a marginal cost for this stocking task of $0.04/item. If Amazon was willing to tolerate $0.05/item for this particular task along the pipeline, that would translate to 8/minute items shelved instead of 10/min. $0.06/item comes out to 6.66/min (again assuming a fully loaded cost of $24/hr). Adding just $0.02 of packaging obviously cannot eliminate this job, so automation which required certain packaging would be quite wasteful. What I don’t quite understand is why the job has to be so breakneck. I wonder if they are limited by the number of humans who can be in the plant at once, meaning it’s not a question of hiring more humans. Or perhaps part of the issue with breaks is if they are limited by law to how many unpaid breaks an hourly worker can take? Otherwise I can’t see why they would care about breaks as long as their algorithm can capacity plan by adjusting for your average break-rate. The only reasonable explanation is they have an expensive asset (their fulfillment plant) where the humans are the gating factor to the total output (deliveries) and an equation where at some point adding more humans actually decreases total output. None of this is to excuse creating a system which requires humans to perform tasks in this manner though. Amazon ships ~600 million packages per year, so assuming a human touches each item 10 times on the way in and out, spending an extra $0.10/package makes those human’s jobs significantly more tolerable, that’s only $60 million on Net Income of $10 billion... But again that calculation only works if shipment volume can be maintained with more humans doing slightly less work each. If shipment volume falls a corresponding amount because stocking goes from 12/min -> 10/min (16.66%) then Amazon loses an extraordinary amount of money.