Eleventh Day One

As soon as I was allowed to, I applied to use headphones on the warehouse floor as a salve for the monotony. The manager responsible for approving my use of headphones corrected me when I told him it was my Day Eleven. “Oh, no, no,” he said amicably. “You mean it’s your eleventh Day One.” He said the last two words with cocked head and raised eyebrows, a sort of pointed, “Am I right?” I laughed in knowing acknowledgment that he had caught me in a faux pas. Amazonians like to repeat that it’s always Day One, and so phrases like “Day Eleven” make no sense to them. It’s like admitting defeat, declaring that all the hope and optimism had long since passed.

Amazon warehouses are similar to prisons in a way: there are minor privileges that are granted or revoked based on a record of past infractions — what Amazon calls quality or safety errors. One privilege that can be earned after two weeks of infraction-free employment is the opportunity to wear headphones while in certain roles at the warehouse. To do so, you need to fill out a form with the Loss Prevention team, complete with the serial number and proof of purchase of the headphones. The Loss Prevention team, which ensures associates aren’t stealing things from Amazon’s warehouses, is the one to administer the whole headphones program because they’re more concerned about headphone theft than, say, viewing the opportunity to wear headphones as an HR-administered perk. And, as with jail, dribbling out small, revokable perks like headphones to break the eleven-hour monotony of the day becomes a great source of leverage. The threat that any infraction, large or small, will go on “your permanent record,” accompanied with multi-month losses of privileges like the headphones or even the opportunity to ask to be switched to another role or shift, is a great source of explicit power in the warehouse hierarchy.

Amazon allows only a small set of headphones to be used on its warehouse floors for safety reasons. Specifically, they require headphones using something I’ve only learned of through this very experience called “bone conduction” technology. It’s indeed every bit as creepy as it sounds. Bone conduction headphones cause you to hear sounds by vibrating the bones of your skull instead of putting sounds out to your ears. They’re the only type allowed in the warehouse because they don’t cover your ears or block your ear canal, and instead grip on to cheekbone near your jaw hinge as well as the portion of the skull behind your ears, leaving you, in theory, able to hear things around you such as a forklift backing up or the conversation of nearby friends avoiding work. Never mind that throughout the warehouse there are packets of earplugs that associates are welcome to use at any time due to the excessively loud warning sirens and machine noises lasting prolonged hours. In fact, the only way to even hear the bone conduction headphones through all that warehouse noise is to wear earplugs at the same time. So the very reason of requiring bone conduction headphones in the first place is betrayed by the fact that they’re ineffective without blocking the ear canals. I now live with that cognitive dissonance daily.

Welcome to Peak Salvation. Today’s episode: Eleventh Day One.

It’s the week after Thanksgiving. I’ve now worked eleven-hour shifts on Black Friday and the Saturday after, as well as on Cyber Monday and the Tuesday that follows. The issue that has come up at last is a form of repetitive stress injury. Every day at Amazon I lift and move about six tons of boxes (eleven hours moving around 250 boxes an hour, averaging between four and five pounds each, leads to six tons). Twelve thousand pounds is a lot of weight to move on any given day, much less day after day during the height of America’s shopping spree.

I’m not sure how many listeners have personally moved one ton of material. When building part of our previous house, I did a lot of DIY work of all sorts. As part of that, I needed to buy a ton of sand — literally a ton. It turns out you can either buy bags and bags from Home Depot, or you can order a truck to come by to dump a ton of sand onto your driveway. We opted for the latter because it was dirt cheap — in fact, at the time, a ton of sand cost $80; the delivery cost alone was higher than that. Spoiler alert: if you’ve never seen a ton of sand, it makes a smaller pile than you might imagine, because chances are that you, as I had at the time, underestimate the density of sand. A ton of sand piled on your driveway covers the area of a large Jacuzzi piled in a pyramid up to your hips. Doesn’t seem like much, right? Let me tell you, if you personally shovel 2,000 pounds of sand into a wheelbarrow and wheel it across your house to dump it into what you’re building, you will feel 2,000 lbs. And it hurts.

I do the equivalent of that six times a day, every working day. But I do it in small chunks ranging from two to forty-nine pounds for each package, which is a form of death by a thousand cuts. Six tons of packages is around 2,750 boxes, or thirty-seven Amazon six-foot-high cartloads, which more than fills an entire eighteen-wheeler trailer. If you arrived to work every morning and I pointed to a completely full fifty-three-foot-long trailer and asked you, by the end of the day, to pick up every package singly, scan its barcode, and move it to a different trailer, you’d likely find it discouraging, especially if you knew you’d repeat the same thing again the next day — and in fact, every working and overtime day until Christmas. No single particular package breaks your body or your will, but the aftereffects, both physical and mental, compound.

My will is unbroken primarily because I know my employment will come to an end: Christmas is only four weeks away. But my body is another story. My fingers stay rather curled throughout the day now, and it hurts to straighten them because the muscles and tendons of what the internet calls my “FLEXOR DIGITORUM PROFUNDUS,” the muscles in your forearms that bend your fingers, are permanently tight and tingle or hurt throughout the day. Not badly yet, to the point where I’m concerned about permanent damage, but it’s definitely disquieting to find yourself unable to straighten your fingers comfortably even after a full day off work. You’d imagine, perhaps, that the most strained muscles are in my back or thighs from lifting all that weight, but I find those muscles to mostly be sore at the end of a day without verging into pain. The fingers, however, bear a lot of weight every day because you need to flex your fingers to hold any box. For large boxes, you curl your fingers in order to grab their corners; with small, flat boxes, you pinch them in one hand in order to operate the scanner with your other hand. Doing this nearly three thousand times a day, it turns out, can inflame the tendons and make you unable to straighten your fingers.

I need to be careful here not to venture into Mike Daisey territory and start making up stories about gnarled hands unable to open at all after working at Apple factories in China. My hand opens just fine. My fingers stay a bit more curled in the day like I’m doing Method Acting to audition for a role in a horror movie or a spot as a backup dancer for a reboot of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video, but my hands don’t look at all like a witch’s. I am able to straighten my fingers if I push or pull on them hard enough; it’s uncomfortable, but not that painful. Yet. I’m concerned about this development more because my jobs in tech always feature typing on keyboards quite prominently. If I were to lose the use of my fingers, or to experience pain whenever using them, I would have made a terrible choice to satisfy my curiosity by throwing myself into the deep end of Amazon in its busiest season of overtime only to make the rest of my life’s work difficult or impossible. But things are nowhere near that state yet. Oh — and it’s beginning to be a daily occurrence that for the first half hour or so of every morning after I wake up, both of my hands stay numb with a tingling sensation that won’t go away. All this is like the scene in Supersize Me when the documentarian eats so much McDonald’s that he throws up on camera. You feel bad watching it, and you think it serves him right to push himself to that point, but you know he’ll be fine once the cameras stop rolling. Similarly, I move six tons right now, but I could easily move two without anyone noticing. If things get worse, I’ll begin to learn from the best in BFI4 how to slow my productivity while avoiding the Eye of Sauron.

Everybody avoids eye contact in the break room. On my first day at work, I had discovered most break rooms have little tables that are further split so that two employees sit across from each other just a few feet apart. It turns out that it’s exceptionally important never to make eye contact with the employee directly across from you. The few times this has happened to me have always resulted in both sides feeling quite awkward because the distance you’re sitting across from each other, in any other context, would be a level of intimacy akin to speed dating. But in this case, it feels much better to simply not acknowledge each other, and instead look any which way but forward. This quickly becomes a skill. An instinct completely natural — looking at something or someone directly ahead of you — easily becomes something you consistently avoid without conscious effort, much like an actor does the camera in order to maintain the fourth wall.

In general, actually, people avoid eye contact or talking to each other throughout the warehouse, except for the few pairs of people who are obviously friends. One of the reasons may be the very itinerant population of employees. Amazon’s annual turnover rate for its employees is 150%, meaning the average worker stays eight months. So there’s less motive to build relationships when people are leaving all the time. Not to mention everyone works different shifts, so you end up seeing very different sets of people on different days of the week. Furthermore, most jobs in the warehouse are solitary, where you stand at one station working on your own all day without reason for contact with others. In all, these factors lead to the situation in break rooms where you can have more than 100 employees each staring at their phones without a single person talking.

Now I don’t mean that break rooms are absolutely silent, though they are one of the few places where the constant rattling, whirring, and clanging of machines is less loud. There are two types of sounds that punctuate the otherwise monastic silence of break rooms. First, there’s the occasional person who doesn’t at all mind taking a phone call during break. This person almost always speaks into the phone as if it’s a trunk line call from India back in the ’80s, where shouting into the phone enhances the other caller’s experience of the conversation. But loud calls are more rare than the usual few people who like to advertise their musical taste to everyone else by playing music from their phone at a volume meant to accommodate a small bar mitzvah. The most popular genres for this sort of generous music sharing seem to be R&B and mariachi. Everyone seems to accept this as fine behavior, or perhaps no one speaks up about it for fear of getting into a confrontation.

This sort of broad sharing of music has always puzzled me in that you find the same behavior on hikes in the Pacific Northwest. Usually, it’s quiet the entire way up the mountain, with the occasional polite hello exchanged between hikers. But once in a while, perhaps every third time you go on a hike, someone takes it upon themselves to ensure that the hills stay alive with the sound of music. Inevitably, the music isn’t Enya singing about the ancient Celts and their relationship to old-growth forests. Instead, the music is usually some sort of contemporary pop featuring calls to shake various body parts largely unrelated to hiking. I find forcibly shared Amazon break room music much less annoying than in the hiking context, and over time I’ve come to accept it the same way that I accept music played in any cafe or store.

With this work as relentless and all-consuming as it is, I find that I enjoy little things a lot more. There’s a way your expectations tend to adjust to whatever circumstances you’re in. Save up three years for Disney World, and your kids will find it incredible. Take your kids there annually, along with the occasional outing to Six Flags and other parks, and pretty soon your kids will ask instead to just stay in the hotel on their phones; you’ll raise adults who can only get a thrill skydiving, Rocky Mountain climbing, or going 2.7 seconds on a bull named Fu Manchu. This dynamic of losing enjoyment once you’ve had something too often is called the “hedonic treadmill.” It’s a treadmill because you need to keep upping the ante just to stay in place. Working even just a few weeks at the Amazon warehouse has reset the hedonic treadmill I was on. By adding something difficult and uncomfortable to my life, I’m now appreciating even minor things much more.

Take, for instance, the madness of the employee parking lot at the end of my shifts. Imagine hundreds of people coming out of a building within a ten-minute window, each getting into a car and trying to head out one of only two exits in the parking lot — exits which also, at the same time, serve to let in the next shift of nearly a thousand workers. I’ve managed to trim the time it takes to exit from twenty-two minutes down to eight with a variety of strategies having to do with exactly where you park, the relative speed differentials between walking farther versus driving it in bumper-to-bumper traffic, et cetera. But here’s the main thing about this entire parking lot saga: I find that at the end of a day working eleven hours standing, I don’t mind being stuck in the parking lot because it’s the first time since sunrise where I get to sit on a soft seat in a quiet, air-conditioned space. My ankles decompress from the day. My back begins to relax. It just feels amazing to sit.

Speaking of sunrise: Amazon’s peak season falls at a time in Seattle where I begin work way before sunrise and I leave work long after sunset. Within the building, there are no windows except in the break rooms. And the particular break room nearest the Ship Dock can only seat about one-third the employees that need that break room; the remaining two-thirds have to sit outside the break room in the main warehouse, back in the dim fluorescent lighting amongst the incessant loud machines and sirens. The times when I get to sit in the break room are thus the only times when I see natural light in the day, during the fifteen minutes of break or the thirty minutes of lunch. These moments of natural light, and perhaps even sun during the rare times a clear day happens in the Seattle winter, become quite special, and I appreciate every minute.

When you’re doing nothing but scanning and moving boxes many hours straight, it’s also a relief to be interrupted for pretty much any reason at all. When a lead on the floor needs me to temporarily jump on another task, I’m more than happy to do so. Unload a truck? Sure! Push some carts elsewhere? No problem. Variance obliterates monotony, and you come to seek and appreciate any variance whatsoever.

Sometimes even the smallest of things can feel like such a joy. One day, I opened a tiny snack container during break, packed for me by my wife, Tanya, to discover four little chocolate-covered pretzels. I do not have the words to adequately express how much of an unexpected little joy this was, like the smallest of oases in a bleak land of concrete. When you work so hard, it’s a pleasure to eat something delightful. But the surprise also touches me. I’m reminded that Tanya packs my lunch every day, that she wakes up in solidarity with me every morning at 5:30 a.m., hours before she would otherwise. I write her a message on my phone, and the ensuing brief exchange is its own sort of oasis in the jungle of anonymity I otherwise find myself in.

—

One thing about working at a warehouse job is that you become incredibly sensitive to time. You can’t clock in more than five minutes before shift start or five minutes after. You can’t clock back in before the thirty minutes required by law for lunch. Even the process of eating becomes something you need to keep an eye on. Can you actually call your spouse or wish a friend happy birthday and finish your lunch? Or perhaps do you cut out the bathroom visit, which, for me, turns out to be completable in under two minutes if you allow for hand washing shorter than COVID’s twenty-second rule? How long do you need to finish a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich? Or a 12-ounce soda? It turns out that the latter, for me, takes surprising focus and dedication in order to do so comfortably within the allotted lunch time.

When every minute is counted, with penalties and consequences attached, you become much more aware of how much time small things take. Typical walk from the front door of BFI4 to my car: around eighty seconds, but longer on days when parking’s bad. From the door, clocking in, to Ship Dock’s meeting spot: two minutes, assuming no pedestrian traffic jams on the way. And these two minutes are important, because the morning team meeting in Ship Dock starts precisely at 6:30 a.m. So to make it, you need to punch in at 6:28 a.m. at the latest, and to be aware of a few pinch points in the warehouse — for instance, the elevated walkway that takes you over a set of fast-moving conveyors full of products in gray bins — which can slow to a crawl if, say, three associates love strolling side by side and chatting idly. Those pinch points are like drive-throughs at fast-food restaurants: once you’ve committed, you’re locked in; there’s no turning back and pushing past throngs of other associates also trying to get past the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria of walkway sauntering. Vacations and sick days are both awarded and taken by the minute. As of today, I have 141 minutes of vacation and 84 minutes of sick time. I’ve had indigestion in the past which thankfully blew over in around an hour, so 84 minutes might be all right depending on what I come down ill with.

The ultimate enforcer of time discipline is your stash of UPT, the unpaid time which, if it ever run negative, results in termination. You start your job with ten hours of UPT, and earn more UPT every three months you work. The most reliable employees have their UPT maxed out, and checking an employee’s UPT is often a proxy for managers to quickly get a sense for what sort of worker they’re dealing with. Although ten hours of UPT might sound like a lot, you basically go negative if you miss even one eleven-hour shift during Peak. Furthermore, unlike vacation, PTO, or sick time, UPT can apparently only ever be subtracted an entire hour at a time for reasons never explained. You’re told several times during orientation on your first day that clocking in even one minute late means that an hour of UPT gets docked. If your car breaks down and you catch a series of buses instead, you could easily blow four hours. Basically, the job very strongly enforces attendance. I had kept a perfect record so far in my work except on one day when, on my way to work, a set of train-crossing barriers lowered right before I made it through the railroad crossing. I sat as its red lights blinked back and forth, back and forth. Five minutes passed. It was now 6:20, still in theory enough time to get to work if the train would just show up and pass. It’d have to be a short train, not a huge freight train. But it was still possible. By 6:25, I had to make a decision: should I wait some more, hoping the train would pass, then drive the three minutes to BFI4? Or should I assume something’s malfunctioned after no train’s shown up in ten minutes, and instead drive several miles in a loop that included a portion of highway in order to arrive at BFI4 from the south? If I waited even a minute longer, driving the long way around would get me to work late; so I decided to make a break for it. I made an illegal U-turn from the middle of the line of taillights and sped towards the highway, watching the clock in my car as minute after minute ticked by. When I at last arrived at BFI4 from the south, having driven a five-mile loop faster than was legally possible, it was 6:34 as I parked the car — just one minute before the five-minute grace period would expire. I ran out of the car, donning my facemask with one hand while trying to loop my badge lanyard over my neck with the other; it turns out these can’t both be done due to basic physiology, but it had seemed reasonable in my rush to be on time. I entered the building and realized I had left my keys in the car, which meant it would stay unlocked, along with my wallet. I stood momentarily in front of the electronic timecard machine showing 6:35, undecided whether keeping my wallet or my UPT was more important. I decided to bet it all. I clocked in, saving my UPT, and hoping for the best —that the car and its wallet within would still be there eleven-and-a-half hours later.

I haven’t held a job in over twenty years where I’ve been so aware of when the day ends, counting down the minutes. My salaried jobs were understandably never about surviving through the minimum required time; it was just understood that you would always work more than forty hours, and sometimes a lot more. Ninety-two years ago, the economist John Maynard Keynes looked at productivity growth trends and forecasted that by the 1980s we’d all be working fifteen-hour weeks. What he failed to realize, much like the inventors of the washing machine who forecasted far more leisure time once hand-washing was a thing of the past, is that we instead increased our appetites. In the case of household chores, we simply increased our standards and expectations around the cleanliness of clothes. And in the case of work, our appetites for consumption and for competition with each other just grew. Low wage earners work no more than they did thirty years ago. However, high wage earners now work far more than they did thirty years ago, even as both productivity and inequality grew over the same period, lowering the theoretical need for them to work, given that the hours of salaried employees aren’t tracked. Whereas decades ago people aspired to be what was called “men of leisure” — essentially aristocrats wealthy enough to not have to work — it’s become a badge of honor in modern upper-middle-class circles to be perpetually busy, to always need to check in with work, to message a boss or subordinates with some time-critical issue.

Part of this is cultural, as a form of what’s being called “workism” is taking hold of the upper middle class, where past providers of purpose and meaning, like religion and other social spheres, are increasingly replaced by work alone. But I suspect another part of this is a natural consequence of our increasingly winner-take-all society. As globalism and technology enable low- or no-cost distribution, the world has become much more competitive between people. Whereas 400 years ago, you’d only need to be the best bard in your town to make a living playing music, these days with Spotify you’ll either be one of the handful of megastars that make far more than any bard ever had, or you’ll more likely be one of nearly all the other musicians who simply cannot compete when the stage is global, barely eking out a living, if at all. Same with being a model, a host of a radio show, or yes, even a software developer. The world stage has elevated the bar of talent at which anyone needs to perform in order to make a living, and at the same time has disproportionately awarded all the spoils to the few that make it. Twenty-five years ago the most popular coding job was being a Visual Basic for Office programmer who built little extensions to Microsoft Office that helped every business adapt the product for its own internal workflows. Nowadays, business processes are run by large multinationals like SAP and Salesforce who hire a much smaller set of elite coders to build platforms that eliminate the need for companies to have their own software developers. This, while greatly raising the bar for getting a job at a top software company, has also greatly increased the compensation for the few who survive. This type of competition is happening in all sorts of white-collar jobs, building a basal anxiety into every white-collar worker who senses the rising competition that globalization has engendered.

In my own experience being a software developer, it’s not uncommon to work all waking hours for weeks on end. When I joined Facebook in 2010 as the second person hired in Seattle, it had 500 engineers globally. Each person had a huge responsibility at a time when the site already had 500 million users. My responsibility was to ship the first version of video calling. For the weeks leading up to shipping that product and several weeks after, I moved to Silicon Valley and worked literally every waking hour. I’d eat all three meals at my desk and end the day at 2 a.m., only to start again with breakfast at work the next morning. Over a period of about four weeks I lost ten pounds even as I ate terribly, snacking frequently on the many free snacks on constant offer at Facebook. And this type of workism isn’t tied only to emergencies like when customers are hitting issues after you’ve just launched a product. It also comes in the guise of quote-unquote “fun,” like the twenty-four-hour Hackathons that Facebook was famous for, or the annual Camp Hackathona where employees would bring tents to work in order to build software over three nonstop days. Competition, desperation, greed, and purpose are all mingled into one as modern white-collar employees work ever longer hours.

Then there’s my work at Amazon: on regular weeks, guaranteed to stop at forty hours, down to the minute. During peak season, limited to fifty-five hours a week. At the most extreme, my current work is legislatively capped at sixty hours a week, maximum, no matter what happens. Whereas there were many months at Facebook where I consistently worked far more than sixty hours a week. So in a way, all this clock-watching in warehouse work does have a positive.

A perhaps related observation is that I find the warehouse work far less stressful than the many jobs I’ve had in software. In a way, you trade mental stress for physical stress when you make the transition from software to sorting packages. During many years in my career as a software engineer and manager, I struggled with stress-induced insomnia. I’d typically fall asleep during the most stressful times anywhere between three to six hours after first going to bed. And this would continue for months, to the point where I sought both counseling and medication in attempts to alleviate the problem.

In fact, this type of worry-induced insomnia was a key part of what led to me stepping down from my CEO role leading the nonprofit I founded in Seattle. By the time it grew beyond twenty employees, I found many things about the mantle of leadership overwhelmingly stressful. One of my biggest concerns was how to make payroll. Though the nonprofit was funded generously by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and had enough in the bank to keep the employees on for at least another eighteen months, I found it a profound burden to be the primary person responsible for raising future funding. And ultimately, when you lead a team or a company, failures are all either directly or indirectly attributable to you, especially if you have a strong personal sense of responsibility and accountability. That includes failures of both commission and omission. Perhaps the way you engaged in trying the fix a spat between two employees was too heavy-handed. Or conversely, perhaps you should have said something before things escalated. In another example, the nights leading up to firing someone were always sleepless. It’s certainly not as bad as being fired, but it truly is gut-wrenching if you care about the employee.

Whereas when six o’clock hits in the evening, no matter what state the warehouse is in, I punch out and go home. Doesn’t matter if spur 14 is overflowing with packages for DPD2 and WA9 to the point where they fall off the line and spill onto the floor — I’m still leaving along with everyone else. I’ve never once stressed about my warehouse job, either in anticipation of something difficult coming the next day or in reflection about something hard that happened in the current. When I’m not on the clock, I experience the eternal sunshine of a mind spotless from any thought pertaining to work whatsoever. It’s like years of skiing Roundtop in southern Pennsylvania, where the underlying mud stains the balding, soggy snow, and suddenly being transported to a mountaintop in the Rockies to experience the bliss of gliding soundlessly through deep virgin powder. The after-work mental load of being an Amazon warehouse associate is just like the latter. I close my eyes after work to nothing but peace, a pond with nary a ripple.

Or is it really so simple? You can’t really get by on just $18.55 in Seattle — you’ll hear more about this in an upcoming episode two weeks from now, but in the meantime, just go with me here. The law protects you from any one employer mandating more than sixty hours a week, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t working other jobs, that you don’t absolutely need to work other jobs in order to make ends meet. In my conversations with associates, I’d estimate at least a third work other jobs in addition to working through Peak at Amazon. The most popular second job is working a gig marketplace like Uber or DoorDash. Your second job needs to be flexible because of how unpredictable your time is at Amazon. Sure, you have normal shifts at pre-agreed times, but Amazon can call you into a full day of overtime with as little as eighteen hours’ notice. During my entire time at Amazon, I’d always need to check my latest schedule in Amazon A-to-Z some time after noon on the day before any expected day off because Amazon could have changed it to a required overtime day instead. So the only second job you could possibly keep reliably is one where you control your own hours.

You could alternatively do what I saw many other associates do, which is to work the warehouse with your partner. Many couples enter the warehouse together, sometimes working different departments, but often working the same. Ship Dock had at least two couples on my shift who preferred to work a spur together. They didn’t look any happier for the arrangement, though, so I wonder whether it’s more like Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in Revolutionary Road, or Tommy & Gina in Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer,” where their nighttime conversations mostly revolve around the possibility of leaving everything behind and starting over, wondering whether each passing day was another minimum-wage nail in the coffin of their aspirations. The future was probably already sealed, at least for one Filipino couple who looked to be in their late fifties. This would be as close to picket fences as they’d likely ever get, kindly passing each other cardboard boxes most of their waking hours during the holidays, their own little high-water mark chasing the American Dream.

The mental side of the deal isn’t even as simple as I’ve put it. Sure, millionaire Philip rests easy at night when his warehouse shift ends — but does everybody? You have a job on which your entire family’s healthcare depends, a job from which you can be fired at a moment’s notice given large enough a mistake. A PIT driver surprised me one day by telling me that many associates qualified to drive a PIT would rather not. The trouble with driving PITs, and with several other safety-crucial jobs in Ship Dock, is that you can commit mistakes serious enough to warrant on-the-spot firing. This PIT driver told me of an instance when he accidentally tipped a pallet, dumping its contents on the floor. His badge was revoked for a week — a punishment with a mental component, where you realize the badge could alternatively have been revoked forever, taking away health coverage for your entire family, as well as a financial component, in that you’re essentially docked a quarter month’s wages. Since PIT drivers get paid no more than anyone else, but are far more exposed to job uncertainty due to possible mistakes, many elect to instead do basic Ship Dock jobs that don’t involve the same risk profile. The threat of job instability and the resultant loss of family medical coverage must weigh heavily on associates’ minds.

There’s also one other source of stress in the warehouse job that’s independent of the job itself: the stress that comes from living paycheck to paycheck, teetering on the brink of mounting credit card debt and the possibility of foreclosure. “Money issues” are cited as the main reason for 22% of divorces in America. There’s just no way that someone making $18.55 an hour isn’t having money issues pretty much constantly, so the resultant stress, not only about the money itself but the strain it puts on relationships, must be tremendous.

So it’d seem the Amazon job may well be perfect for upper-middle-class Americans. It resets their hedonic treadmill, allowing them to once again enjoy everyday things in life. It has a legally capped maximum number of hours a week that may be fewer than what they work in their current job. And it lets them drift off easily to stress-free sleep, knowing that everything will ultimately be OK, that the hardest thing they’ll have to do is figure out how to put this all in an amusing podcast for their friends.

—

At the close of Cyber Monday, I get a text message from Amazon: “Black Friday and Cyber Monday were a huge success because of you! Thank you for your hard work and commitment to customers.” Throughout Peak, Amazon’s messaging has always focused on making customers happy whenever discussing mandatory overtime days, longer shift hours, or the categorical instant denial of any vacation requests. Two weeks into Peak, I was still getting text messages framing Amazon’s demands as benefiting the customer: “Congratulations on one month with Amazon. Thank you for all that you do to deliver smiles for our customers. Because of you, we are able to innovate on behalf of our customers. Always Day One!” It’s never in terms of Amazon as an employer squeezing its employees; it’s always been in terms of satisfying its apparently voracious customers.

Are eleven-hour shifts and mandatory extra overtime days truly necessary? My mandatory hours now total fifty-five a week, with Amazon texting me every few days about additional what they call “opportunities” to accept even more shifts. Last Sunday morning, on my only weekend day off, Amazon texted me this: “You have two new shifts available to add.” When I clicked the link, I found out those shifts were for that very afternoon, 1 to 6 p.m. Accepting a shift would push me to the brink of Washington State’s statutory limit of sixty hours a week for any hourly employee.

Instead of pushing current employees to work fifty-five or sixty-hour weeks from Thanksgiving to Christmas, Amazon could, in theory, hire extra seasonal employees so that current employees could continue working forty-hour weeks. But it doesn’t. It’s unclear to me why this is, but I’ll posit a few possibilities.

First, every full-time employee requires benefits. Here in Seattle, an HMO like Kaiser, cheaper than premium health care plans, would cost our family around $1,500 a month, or nearly 60% of my take-home pay. If it were legal to push employees to work eighty hours instead of sixty, it’d make even more financial sense — the fewer total employees you have each working ever longer hours, the less you pay in benefits.

Second, perhaps recruiting costs are high. During 2021’s Peak, Amazon was hiring an additional 45,000 employees a week. To do so in the current environment, where restaurants and other businesses also need to hire, Amazon has bumped wages up by a few bucks an hour. But even that’s not been enough to hire all the people it needs, especially as it chews through employees. If it ever truly wanted to help employees maintain a reasonable work life during Peak, it’d bump wages even further; for a company that earned $21B in profits in 2020, there’s plenty of room to do so.

Third, it’s possible that its fulfillment centers and all of its workflows are built to accommodate a fixed number of workers with longer hours than a larger number of workers with reasonable hours. As a made-up example: perhaps Amazon has a fixed number of trucks, which makes it easier to ask the existing drivers to work longer hours rather than buy more trucks so that drivers don’t have to do overtime. Even if this were the case — and I don’t know enough to say that it is — I’d argue that Amazon, of all companies, should build their logistics infrastructure to anticipate the guaranteed peak in demand that happens every winter. It, of all businesses, should have accommodated for this phenomenon from the beginning.

So I’m left with the conclusion that Amazon simply doesn’t want to let its employees work reasonable hours during Peak. It’s exploiting its advantage by pushing its existing employees to work longer instead of increasing its costs in order to preserve employee happiness. And when I say Amazon “pushes” employees to work fifty-five or sixty hours a week, I should define what I mean by “push.” When I worked at Microsoft or Facebook, or even when I was CEO of Audere, “pushing” employees meant that you explained the reason that the company was undergoing a crunch and you asked employees to put in more hours during crunch time. Most employees would oblige out of a spirit of teamwork or a belief in the importance of the work. But when I say Amazon “pushes” warehouse employees during Peak, what I mean is that anyone who refuses is fired. They make an offer you can’t refuse.

All of this is framed in epic language, like the quote plastered across the entrance to BFI4: “Work Hard. Have Fun. Make History.” It’s increasingly a trend in modern companies to frame their purpose in ever-grander terms. Microsoft’s corporate vision when I started there in 1998 was “A computer on every desktop running Microsoft software.” That last bit was parenthesized and never spoken outside the company, but everyone within Microsoft knew it. It was a vision that plainly articulated Microsoft’s reason for existing: to completely dominate the software world by being required on every computer. But by the time I left Microsoft twelve years later, it had jumped on the bandwagon of phrasing its vision in grandiose language: “Your Potential. Our Passion.” It was no longer about making money or being successful: Microsoft was somehow about the latent human potential in every one of its customers; the vision required not just dedication from its employees but a passion within them to help humanity realize its fullest through the miracle of ones and zeros.

Amazon’s vision is to be, and here I quote, “Earth’s most customer-centric company.” And I must say that as a customer who placed 129 Amazon orders in 2021, I’m very happy. The customer experience of shopping on Amazon is amazing — it’s both cheap and convenient. But after working in a fulfillment center a bit, I suspect my view of the company, as a customer, will always carry a bit of a shadow now, cast by my hard-earned personal understanding of what associates need to do and risk so that the whole system works. It’s not so much the things that cause physical strain, like the oddity where the warehouse floor doesn’t have chairs, even for people whose jobs it is to stand all day in front of a computer monitor that tells them when any spur malfunctions, as it is the lack of control of one’s schedule, which can at times pit concern about your safety against concerns about being fired. Ship Dock managers often repeat phrases like, “Your safety is the most important thing,” which I don’t doubt is genuine at some level; but at the same time, fulfillment centers are sometimes not closed during inclement weather until the situation has become manifestly untenable. Later during Peak, BFI4 would remain open for hours even as the roads leading up to it were unplowed, covered with a thin layer of packed snow on which even my all-wheel-drive car slipped multiple times. The only way to not be fired was to take PTO or sick time, assuming you had any left. If not, you’d be docked UPT for any hours not worked while BFI4 was not officially closed. And when UPT goes negative, Sauron himself is personally woken up by the nearest orc to take necessary action.

Things can get far graver than me boo-hooing about how my fancy all-wheel-drive car slipped on my way to work, though. Less than two weeks after the day this podcast episode recounts, six associates would die when an Amazon warehouse partially collapsed during a tornado in Edwardsville, Illinois. It’s not a freak occurrence, either — two associates had previously died in an Amazon warehouse in Baltimore, also during a tornado. But as I understand it, the Edwardsville case wasn’t in the strictest sense Amazon’s fault: the warehouse was built to code, employees were asked to shelter within the warehouse twenty-one minutes before the tornado hit, and laws don’t require that warehouses have tornado shelters in the first place. Amazon had done all that the law required of it. People die all the time from severe weather events, so perhaps in a way these deaths aren’t entirely exceptional. But I do wonder whether stronger protections are needed for employees —protections enshrined into law, especially in cases where employees can’t simply choose to work from home whenever travel is difficult.

More generally, I wonder if we’d feel more strongly about advocating for better worker protections if Amazon tried a page from Costco’s book by putting a more personal touch on packages. Like Amazon, Costco started in Seattle. And also like Amazon, Costco’s Seattle stores tend to try some experiments first before they’re adopted in the rest of the country. A few years ago, our local Costco started featuring photos, names, and brief bios of fruit pickers on its boxes of fruit. This was no doubt an attempt at improving over the impersonal “Quality Checked by #3” stickers you sometimes get on the inside of new Costco pants. A well-intentioned marketer probably thought that fruit would feel like it had a personalized touch if you featured the person who picked the fruit on the very box. Or perhaps it was an attempt to fan the flames of pride in a job well done as pickers filled box after box with their photo on it. But in actuality, this innovation backfired spectacularly. I found it hard to pick up a box of peaches prominently featuring José’s photo. I’d much rather have cheap peaches picked by nameless migrant workers than be confronted within my neighborhood Costco by the real human costs that went into making them so. Tying this back to Amazon: I wonder if I’d be just as happy of a customer if every Amazon box prominently featured the name, photo, and brief bio of one of its warehouse workers. I even have a specific proposal for how this would be done: right now, the tape used on Amazon’s boxes features big ads for Amazon Prime along with Amazon’s famous A-to-Z smiling arrow that reminds you that you’re happy. I think this tape could just as easily alternate between ads for Prime and bios of warehouse employees. I wonder if the end effect, just as with Costco, is that I’d think more about the human cost that went into cheap goods delivered next-day every time I cut through the photo of José in order to get to my six-pack of silicone holders for pot handles. I wonder if Amazon could truly become Earth’s most customer-centric company without changing how it treats its warehouse employees if customers were confronted with this truth every time they opened an Amazon package. When faced with changing its practices or hiding the truth, I know Costco’s answer: by the time I next looked for fruit there, Costco’s peach boxes were back to their pre-experimental packaging. José and all his friends were no more.

Coming next week: I reach the halfway point of my time at Amazon and the injuries aren’t getting better. No one intervenes or offers to help when a man inexplicably screams into a manager’s headshot. And a three-point basketball shootout arises spontaneously at work.