Peak: A Look Inside an Amazon Fulfillment Center
By Jacob Caffey
An Amazon warehouse in Phoenix, Arizona.
A bird's-eye view of the warehouse floor.
A worker picks products using a PIT.
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Along the dusty stretch of Interstate 10 in Phoenix, Arizona, sits an unassuming building. Flat and grey, it’s impossible to see from the freeway. Even if you turned off and drove along 75th Avenue where its address is located, you’d have to be looking hard to see it. There is no flashing neon sign or extravagant archway to mark its presence, only a low concrete marker sitting back from the road. The sign reads Amazon Fulfillment Center.
Turning off the road will lead you into a parking lot that seems to stretch on forever. Dotted with withering trees, the lot runs the entire expanse of the building-a massive warehouse, at least three stories tall and a quarter mile long. Filling that massive space are the countless products found on Amazon’s digital shelves in physical form. Also inside are the hundreds of hardworking employees that make sure we all get our products with the lightning fast efficiency the company is known for. The sun is low on the horizon as Rodney Peaches pulls his grey Honda Accord into the vast parking lot. The Phoenix sky is a brilliant watercolor of cotton candy pink and blazing oranges and reds. Rodney works the night shift, which means arriving at 6:30 in the evening and working until 5 in the morning. During holiday shopping season, which starts in late October, the hours are stretched into eleven or twelve hour shifts. Often Rodney and his compatriots will work six of these shifts in a row. Rodney, or Peaches, as his coworkers call him, works at Amazon Phoenix 7, one of five Amazon warehouses currently operating in the valley. He works as a “water spider”, a curiously named job. When I ask him about the meaning for the unique name of the position, he simply says, “I don’t know. Nobody knows.” The task involves hauling heavy stacks of cardboard boxes from the aptly named “boxland” to the packing lines. Peaches performs the grueling task ten hours straight every day, or in his case, night. “Yeah, we’re only supposed to do it half the night then switch to pack,” he tells me. “But, since no one else wants to do it…” Peaches and his fellow water spiders tirelessly haul stacks of unassembled boxes underarm or by hand truck to the orderly row of stations where packers assemble the boxes, fill them, and push them down a conveyer to be labelled and sent out. “It’s alright,” he says of the exhausting job, “At least we don’t have rate.” Rate refers to the minimum amount of boxes an employee must pack each hour to stay employed. At Amazon 7, packers must build and stuff at least 100 boxes per hour. Falling below the minimum line could easily lead to looking for another job, a fact everyone is keenly aware of. The packers push themselves to work as fast as possible, which means a lot of hauling for Peaches. The hot and dry desert city of Phoenix is one of Amazon’s main centers of activity in the United States. The five massive warehouses operating in the arid city are responsible for shipping much of the companies West Coast supply, and handle a dizzying array of products. Phoenix 7, where Peaches works, houses some of the retailer’s larger items, from microwaves and exercise balls to big screen televisions. The reality of handling these large products is backbreaking work. That sort of backbreaking work is what thousands of additional employees have in store when they descend upon the various Amazon Fulfillment Centers in late October and early November. Known to Amazonians as “peak”, the holiday shopping season brings a massive influx of online orders, and with it, a massive influx of undertrained seasonal workers. “Yeah, dude, it’s pretty [expletive] crazy,” Peaches tells me. He goes on to detail the various ways in which the hundreds of new workers struggle to perform the proper procedures in their new workplace. “But the worst part is they let them drive PITs. Oh, my god dude…it’s like Mad Max out there.” PIT, or powered industrial trucks, are the various forklifts and other machines that workers use to move the pallets and cages of products through the enormous warehouse. The problem, as Peaches and his fellow Amazonians see it, is that the seasonal workers don’t know how to drive the machines-and how could they? Listed under the cons of one seasonal worker’s online review of the job is the phrase “Training should be longer than a week.” According to Peaches and most of his coworkers, this sentiment is widely shared. Walking into the building for that short session of training may inspire awe in new workers. The mammoth warehouses are constantly abuzz with employees rushing through the aisles to pick products off the shelves as fast as possible. PIT machines hurtle recklessly down the lane that divides the warehouse. Fluorescent light glares down unblinkingly from the metallic ceiling dozens of feet above. Unfortunately, many seasonal workers struggle to make it past their first few days in this jungle. While full time workers hired during the rest of the year may be eased into the work with shorter shifts and weeks, peak employees are afforded no such luxury. Most are thrown straight into grueling 55 or 60-hour work weeks. The results are tired, undertrained workers making mistakes-which simply serves to heighten the frenzy that swirls constantly through the warehouse like a wicked holiday miasma. The work is tough, but surely it can’t be all bad. I ask Peaches what it is about working at Amazon that has stopped him from fleeing the tiresome job. “Well, it pays alright. And probably the insurance.” A quick look through Amazon’s website reveals a long list of benefits for full-time workers. Cheap and substantial healthcare, tuition reimbursement for school, an array of time off options, and employee stock options are big draws for a job that requires no previous training or education. The company even helps employees relocate if they wish to transfer to another facility, of which there are many spread around the globe. With the 2016 holiday season promising to be busier than ever before, Peaches and the rest of the Amazon team have a lot of weight on their shoulders. At the time of writing, peak season is just getting started-but Peaches is already looking towards the end. “Just gotta make it through peak,” he tells me. That seems to be the mantra for many Amazonians. Making it through this hectic season is something of a rite of passage-if you can make it through peak, you can make it through anything. |