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Unsurprising. I've been told by a relative that worked in an Amazon warehouse that the camera systems overhead (not dissimilar to the type you see in Amazon Go

Unsurprising. I've been told by a relative that worked in an Amazon warehouse that the camera systems overhead (not dissimilar to the type you see in Amazon Go / Amazon Fresh retail stores) are used to issue disciplinary warnings, and it's pretty easy to get issued a warning for completely normal exception-handling behavior. For instance, the shelved/dry goods sections of Fresh warehouses are notorious for being a trainwreck, with items sort of strewn in the general area of where the inventory/pick list says they should be, rather than being neatly arranged. If an employee on picker duty stands around browsing a shelf too long to find the item they're supposed to grab (but can't find it, because it's been shuffled several feet down the shelf)...the cameras monitoring generates an automated warning that goes to your management. Mark the item as out of stock / missing from inventory instead? Get a warning when someone else finds it and scans it later that day, or when inventory is next reconciled. It's a no-win situation.

iLoveOncall 4y ago
> For instance, the shelved/dry goods sections of Fresh warehouses are notorious for being a trainwreck, with items sort of strewn in the general area of where the inventory/pick list says they should be, rather than being neatly arranged. If an employee on picker duty stands around browsing a shelf too long to find the item they're supposed to grab (but can't find it, because it's been shuffled several feet down the shelf)...the cameras monitoring generates an automated warning that goes to your management. Mark the item as out of stock / missing from inventory instead? Get a warning when someone else finds it and scans it later that day, or when inventory is next reconciled. It's a no-win situation. I would like to see any evidence you have to support any of those issues, because having visited an Amazon fulfilment center myself, I can guarantee you that the problems with picking items you mention literally cannot happen.
- pseudalopex 4y ago
  > the problems with picking items you mention literally cannot happen. How?
- gnatman 4y ago
  It's pretty easy to imagine both of these things being true, and the one fulfillment center you visited having substantially less than 13k disciplinary notices. I worked 7 years in industrial staffing for a variety of large distribution centers (not Amazon), and the automated discipline systems in place around voice-pick efficiency were borderline draconian.
  - FreqSep 4y ago
    The real question is, are there any examples of companies achieving what Amazon is achieving at its scale, *without* employing these techniques? And if so what are they doing differently?
    - NineStarPoint 4y ago
      I think the closest you’ll get is Costco, but obviously their distribution model isn’t super comparable. (They do have some similarities though, especially in how they make a lot of their profit from a yearly subscription)
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - politician 4y ago
      That’s not the the real question. The real question is “what is the maximum amount of productivity that our culture will accept beyond which it considers the burden inhumane?” For example, in antiquity, slavery was acceptable.
      - mc32 4y ago
        Even more recently, Taylorism. I mean, yeah, it's good for robots but not for people. When people design systems they should consider the humanity of such systems despite the issue of people knowingly and maliciously short-circuiting things.
    - 4y ago
- IE6 4y ago
  Both of your experiences are purely anecdotal but I would explain away the difference in your opinions as the difference being "someone I know who worked there" versus "I visited (a potentially curated) fulfillment center once".
  - iLoveOncall 4y ago
    To be more clear I visited an Amazon FC during the first week when I joined Amazon in one of their operations teams, in which I have then spent 4 years. There are processes in place and physical things that are completely different from what the original commenter says and those things prevent the issues (having items on another shelf multiple feet below where they should be) from being possible.
    - camtarn 4y ago
      Another ex Amazon guy here. I visited the Dunfermline FC, did picker training, and shadowed a picker for an hour. I also followed company email lists and FB groups for years. It became extremely obvious to me that what I saw in my curated experience was nothing like what I was hearing from the other FCs. So, even though from my experience I can't see how items could be 'shuffled' out of their bin by mistake (other than falling on the floor and being chucked in an amnesty bin or onto a random shelf, but that seems like a rare case) I also wouldn't find it super surprising to find an FC which just uses a completely different way of organising stuff. That said, I wasn't in ops. Perhaps you had a much better birds eye view of every single FC organisation scheme? More details would be greatly appreciated.
    - bastardoperator 4y ago
      The radio plays what they want you to hear...
    - deepspace 4y ago
      A close family member worked in an FC for 3 years. They agree that what the original commenter said happens ALL the time. Maybe you were only shown a shiny new FC, but the older ones are often much less organized. Depends a lot on local management too.
- beastcoast 4y ago
  Fresh warehouses are verrrry different than the robotic one you probably visited. I’m not surprised at all that a fresh building would have those problems.
  - kristjansson 4y ago
    I’ve never been in one, but I’m imagining a Whole Foods without a front door or windows?
    - CodeWriter23 4y ago
      Some are hybrid plants. FBA in one section, Fresh in another. They recently opened a center in Huntington Beach that does both.
- MisterBastahrd 4y ago
  You're saying that you guarantee it? Congratulations. The burden of proof is now on you. Please prove your claim.
- darksaints 4y ago
  I can assure you, as someone who has both visited multiple fulfillment centers as well has worked on the inventory systems that manage them, that this literally happens thousands of times per day.
- dylan604 4y ago
  >I can guarantee you that the problems with picking items you mention literally cannot happen. That's a very bold statement. Guarantee that something can't go wrong? Where do I put my money on this bet?
Anderkent 4y ago
Given that, are the warnings a serious issue? If management keeps getting those and knows the workers are not at fault in this particular warehouse, the only reason to act on the warnings is political. which yes, might well be an issue, but just the number of warnings issued is meaningless without knowing how they're acted upon.
- kitanata 4y ago
  Selective enforcement is one of the principal ways that workers experience discrimination in the workplace. Remember that Amazon doesn’t fire people for unionization, or because they are black or transgendered. They fire them for disciplinary reasons that are completely “normal” and “typical” as under-performers. This kind of system of “feedback” is a weapon and it is absolutely used to that affect in every place where it is implemented to the degree that Amazon does. Can we please stop be apologists to giant profit-driven organizations and start maybe… just maybe… empathizing with people instead?
  - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
    Amazon as an organization doesn't care who you are or what demographic groups you belong to so long as the ROI of your continued employment is in the same ballpark as everyone else with your job title. You remove the metrics and then anyone who has the authority to fire people for poor performance gains the ability to fire people for personal bias reasons while saying it's for performance reasons. The whole point of the metrics is that it makes it harder to make decisions that are bad for the company (like firing otherwise productive people because you don't like them) under the guise of them being good for the company. Because of the metrics people with the authority to do influence hiring and firing at scale can't fire protected demographics without leaving an incriminating paper trail and getting told by legal to knock it off. Nor those people put their thumb on the scale fire non-protected demographics before some MBA sees what's going on and tells them to knock it off because they're leaving money on the table. Literally none of the bad stuff you have described is made better by removing performance tracking and much of it is made worse. Go read about what working for BigCo was like for members of race/religious/political groups in the first half of the 20th century if you don't believe me. Maybe think through your comment before you call everyone corporate apologists.
_fat_santa 4y ago
Amazon seems to be hiring the wrong people for the job. They are hiring humans when they really are looking to hire robots.
- Scalestein 4y ago
  You might say they are using humans as an MVP/POC test for what their robots should be like. Make the humans as robotic as possible to see what features are really needed in the robots they eventually use.
- WillAdams 4y ago
  I dunno. I worked part-time in an Amazon warehouse for over a year, then full-time for a couple of weeks in-between jobs. Once, when rolling up to a bin full of non-descript boxes, I was able to choose one, flip it in hand for the six-sided box check, and scan it to determine I had the correct box, w/o having to consider any of the other boxes. A trainer and a group of trainees nearby asked how I had done this --- it took a couple of minutes to break down the description from the scanner and compare it to all of the boxes and explain how the box I had selected was the only possibility based simply on a visual examination. Given how many singles Amazon ships, I'm really surprised that they haven't gone to a standard of just packaging on receipt of product, then shipping the boxes by pulling them and slapping a shipping label on --- it would be far more automatable.
  - CodeWriter23 4y ago
    > Given how many singles Amazon ships, I'm really surprised that they haven't gone to a standard of just packaging on receipt of product, then shipping the boxes by pulling them and slapping a shipping label on --- it would be far more automatable. Because physical volume matters and directly correlates to all transportation expenses.
panarky 4y ago
You don't need fancy machine vision when you can just count events in a database.

iLoveOncall 4y ago

> For instance, the shelved/dry goods sections of Fresh warehouses are notorious for being a trainwreck, with items sort of strewn in the general area of where the inventory/pick list says they should be, rather than being neatly arranged. If an employee on picker duty stands around browsing a shelf too long to find the item they're supposed to grab (but can't find it, because it's been shuffled several feet down the shelf)...the cameras monitoring generates an automated warning that goes to your management. Mark the item as out of stock / missing from inventory instead? Get a warning when someone else finds it and scans it later that day, or when inventory is next reconciled. It's a no-win situation. I would like to see any evidence you have to support any of those issues, because having visited an Amazon fulfilment center myself, I can guarantee you that the problems with picking items you mention literally cannot happen.

pseudalopex 4y ago
> the problems with picking items you mention literally cannot happen. How?
gnatman 4y ago
It's pretty easy to imagine both of these things being true, and the one fulfillment center you visited having substantially less than 13k disciplinary notices. I worked 7 years in industrial staffing for a variety of large distribution centers (not Amazon), and the automated discipline systems in place around voice-pick efficiency were borderline draconian.
- FreqSep 4y ago
  The real question is, are there any examples of companies achieving what Amazon is achieving at its scale, *without* employing these techniques? And if so what are they doing differently?
  - NineStarPoint 4y ago
    I think the closest you’ll get is Costco, but obviously their distribution model isn’t super comparable. (They do have some similarities though, especially in how they make a lot of their profit from a yearly subscription)
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - politician 4y ago
    That’s not the the real question. The real question is “what is the maximum amount of productivity that our culture will accept beyond which it considers the burden inhumane?” For example, in antiquity, slavery was acceptable.
    - mc32 4y ago
      Even more recently, Taylorism. I mean, yeah, it's good for robots but not for people. When people design systems they should consider the humanity of such systems despite the issue of people knowingly and maliciously short-circuiting things.
  - 4y ago
IE6 4y ago
Both of your experiences are purely anecdotal but I would explain away the difference in your opinions as the difference being "someone I know who worked there" versus "I visited (a potentially curated) fulfillment center once".
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  To be more clear I visited an Amazon FC during the first week when I joined Amazon in one of their operations teams, in which I have then spent 4 years. There are processes in place and physical things that are completely different from what the original commenter says and those things prevent the issues (having items on another shelf multiple feet below where they should be) from being possible.
  - camtarn 4y ago
    Another ex Amazon guy here. I visited the Dunfermline FC, did picker training, and shadowed a picker for an hour. I also followed company email lists and FB groups for years. It became extremely obvious to me that what I saw in my curated experience was nothing like what I was hearing from the other FCs. So, even though from my experience I can't see how items could be 'shuffled' out of their bin by mistake (other than falling on the floor and being chucked in an amnesty bin or onto a random shelf, but that seems like a rare case) I also wouldn't find it super surprising to find an FC which just uses a completely different way of organising stuff. That said, I wasn't in ops. Perhaps you had a much better birds eye view of every single FC organisation scheme? More details would be greatly appreciated.
  - bastardoperator 4y ago
    The radio plays what they want you to hear...
  - deepspace 4y ago
    A close family member worked in an FC for 3 years. They agree that what the original commenter said happens ALL the time. Maybe you were only shown a shiny new FC, but the older ones are often much less organized. Depends a lot on local management too.
beastcoast 4y ago
Fresh warehouses are verrrry different than the robotic one you probably visited. I’m not surprised at all that a fresh building would have those problems.
- kristjansson 4y ago
  I’ve never been in one, but I’m imagining a Whole Foods without a front door or windows?
  - CodeWriter23 4y ago
    Some are hybrid plants. FBA in one section, Fresh in another. They recently opened a center in Huntington Beach that does both.
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
You're saying that you guarantee it? Congratulations. The burden of proof is now on you. Please prove your claim.
darksaints 4y ago
I can assure you, as someone who has both visited multiple fulfillment centers as well has worked on the inventory systems that manage them, that this literally happens thousands of times per day.
dylan604 4y ago
>I can guarantee you that the problems with picking items you mention literally cannot happen. That's a very bold statement. Guarantee that something can't go wrong? Where do I put my money on this bet?

Anderkent 4y ago

Given that, are the warnings a serious issue? If management keeps getting those and knows the workers are not at fault in this particular warehouse, the only reason to act on the warnings is political. which yes, might well be an issue, but just the number of warnings issued is meaningless without knowing how they're acted upon.

kitanata 4y ago
Selective enforcement is one of the principal ways that workers experience discrimination in the workplace. Remember that Amazon doesn’t fire people for unionization, or because they are black or transgendered. They fire them for disciplinary reasons that are completely “normal” and “typical” as under-performers. This kind of system of “feedback” is a weapon and it is absolutely used to that affect in every place where it is implemented to the degree that Amazon does. Can we please stop be apologists to giant profit-driven organizations and start maybe… just maybe… empathizing with people instead?
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  Amazon as an organization doesn't care who you are or what demographic groups you belong to so long as the ROI of your continued employment is in the same ballpark as everyone else with your job title. You remove the metrics and then anyone who has the authority to fire people for poor performance gains the ability to fire people for personal bias reasons while saying it's for performance reasons. The whole point of the metrics is that it makes it harder to make decisions that are bad for the company (like firing otherwise productive people because you don't like them) under the guise of them being good for the company. Because of the metrics people with the authority to do influence hiring and firing at scale can't fire protected demographics without leaving an incriminating paper trail and getting told by legal to knock it off. Nor those people put their thumb on the scale fire non-protected demographics before some MBA sees what's going on and tells them to knock it off because they're leaving money on the table. Literally none of the bad stuff you have described is made better by removing performance tracking and much of it is made worse. Go read about what working for BigCo was like for members of race/religious/political groups in the first half of the 20th century if you don't believe me. Maybe think through your comment before you call everyone corporate apologists.

_fat_santa 4y ago

Amazon seems to be hiring the wrong people for the job. They are hiring humans when they really are looking to hire robots.

Scalestein 4y ago
You might say they are using humans as an MVP/POC test for what their robots should be like. Make the humans as robotic as possible to see what features are really needed in the robots they eventually use.
WillAdams 4y ago
I dunno. I worked part-time in an Amazon warehouse for over a year, then full-time for a couple of weeks in-between jobs. Once, when rolling up to a bin full of non-descript boxes, I was able to choose one, flip it in hand for the six-sided box check, and scan it to determine I had the correct box, w/o having to consider any of the other boxes. A trainer and a group of trainees nearby asked how I had done this --- it took a couple of minutes to break down the description from the scanner and compare it to all of the boxes and explain how the box I had selected was the only possibility based simply on a visual examination. Given how many singles Amazon ships, I'm really surprised that they haven't gone to a standard of just packaging on receipt of product, then shipping the boxes by pulling them and slapping a shipping label on --- it would be far more automatable.
- CodeWriter23 4y ago
  > Given how many singles Amazon ships, I'm really surprised that they haven't gone to a standard of just packaging on receipt of product, then shipping the boxes by pulling them and slapping a shipping label on --- it would be far more automatable. Because physical volume matters and directly correlates to all transportation expenses.

panarky 4y ago

You don't need fancy machine vision when you can just count events in a database.