Peak Begins

It’s Black Friday, the first day of Peak 2021. Banners across my fulfillment center, BFI4, celebrate records broken in past Peaks using euphemisms like “Peak Fest 2020,” making it sound more like a music festival than a period when all vacations are banned and mandatory overtime is required, totaling five eleven-hour days a week.

Black Friday also happens to be my first payday, a great time to reflect. If you think $18.55 an hour is a low wage, you might be surprised that I’ve twice held jobs that paid below minimum wage, one of which I was even fired from.

Welcome to Peak Salvation. Today’s episode: Peak Begins.

The first job I ever had was delivering newspapers. I was twelve when my brother and I began sharing a route delivering The Washington Post to fifty-six houses in Hyattsville, Maryland. At 4:30 a.m. every day, a truck would drive by and deposit a pile of newspapers on our driveway. Before we could even start our route, we’d first need to assemble the papers and bind them with heavy-duty rubber bands. On rainy days, we’d instead insert them into plastic sleeves which the Post provided. We’d then split up and work our way through the dark neighborhood, going house to house until the job was done, seven days a week, rain or shine. It was nothing like the movies, where a boy pedals his bicycle through an idyllic suburb in the sunshine, grabbing small, bundled newspaper rolls from his basket and effortlessly tossing them this way and that, to the occasional thanks of an elderly man watering his lawn or a young mother ferrying groceries. First off, you could fit at most two copies of the hefty Washington Post into even the largest of bicycle baskets. You’d also twist a wrist trying to toss it one-handed anywhere. The Post was definitely a two-hander, with the Sunday edition requiring more of a hammer-throw wind-up if you truly meant to cover distance.

No, I remember being scared of the dark: dark streets, dark windows, dark shadows, dark animals scurrying in dark bushes. It wasn’t sunshine and sprinklers. It was misery. I remember one day calculating the wage, which back then was equivalent to walking house to house collecting two to three pennies on each doorstep. I hated that job. It was the first time I realized that people are paid very differently for rather similar-sounding jobs. I had friends whose parents would drive them through the neighborhood on their route, whereas my brother and I pushed a shopping cart filled to the brim with newspapers. I most envied those who got routes in large apartment buildings, where you could just use the elevator going floor to floor, walking a mere dozen feet between each delivery, grabbing the same two to three pennies a door but at a much faster pace in the comfort of heated, well-lit hallways. I couldn’t take it and quit after a few months.

I got my first real job, however, when I was fourteen. I worked at the same Subway sandwich shop that my cousin had gotten a job at in Beltsville, Maryland, and was paid $3 an hour, cash, under the table, at a time when Maryland’s minimum wage was over $4. This was during an era in the early ’90s when the official Subway sandwich policy was not to cut the bread in half, as you’d naturally do for a sandwich, but to instead carve a valley into the bread from the top as if hollowing out a canoe. And I could hollow canoes like the dickens. I was courteous to customers and fast at making sandwiches. But I was also young and naive, having never held a job before. During slow times in the restaurant, when there weren’t customers, I would simply stand behind the counter at attention, waiting for the next sandwich order to walk through the door.

One day, my cousin spoke to me before I headed to work. “You … uh … maybe you don’t need to go in today.”

“What do you mean? My shift starts in an hour.”

“I mean, uh, perhaps you, uh, never need to go in again.” At this point I was thoroughly confused. “The boss told me to, uh, tell you that you, uh, don’t have a job anymore.”

This, it turns out, would be the first time I got fired — though unexpectedly, by my cousin. The owner of the store didn’t like confrontation, so she thought it’d just be easier to ask my cousin to fire me instead. My cousin told me that the boss wasn’t happy with my performance — something she never once indicated, but had been apparently harboring inside for a while. She wanted me, when the store was idle, to mop the floors or clean the tables, things that I would have been more than glad to do, but things that, once again, she had never mentioned. Hers was more of a “management by expectation” approach; she expected you to do things, and when you didn’t figure out those were her expectations, she’d find a relative of yours to fire you.

I didn’t eat at Subway for seven years after that experience. Not because I was hurt, confused, and ashamed about my firing, but because there are some things in the back room of a Subway that you will never unsee. To this day, I take three things from the experience. First, when you’re on the clock and find yourself a bit idle, you should always think about what else you could be doing that would advance your boss’s goals. Act and think like an owner, not an employee. Second, ask directly for feedback. Some managers won’t feel comfortable giving their honest feedback to you. The easier you make it for them to give you feedback — for instance, by creating opportunities for doing so and by listening to and accepting the feedback without getting defensive — the faster you’ll learn and grow, or perhaps at least not get fired. By your cousin. The last thing I’ve never been able to shake, ever since being paid $3 an hour under the table, was the mathematical gymnastics I still often do whenever purchasing something, by mapping its cost into the number of hours I’d have to work. In my Subway days, a Big Mac meal, Value Meal #1 at McDonald’s, cost $2.99. So I’d think of it as an hour’s work. Even years later, many things seem cheap or expensive to me based on mapping their cost to my hourly wage, no matter what I’m doing. These past few days, I’ve been finding that I’m thinking about my daily purchases in terms of the $18.55 I make per hour. These hours are hard. The value of money is real.

Back at the end of Day Six, leads dropped a bit of realism on all the associates. Starting Black Friday, and extending to Christmas, several things will be in effect. You might remember from BFI4’s HR newsletter that vacations are, of course, categorically prohibited during this period. But all shifts will now be eleven hours instead of ten for the rest of Peak, with the exception of one week where shifts will be bumped to eleven-and-a-half hours. Furthermore, every week will entail a mandatory extra day of work. For me, this will be Saturday, making my work week a total of five eleven-hour days. That’s fifteen hours every week over what I’m already doing, the equivalent of nearly two extra workdays on top of a typical forty-hour week, from now until Christmas. My days will start by clocking in at 6:30 a.m. and clocking out at 6:00 p.m., five times a week. I’m frankly more worried about the longer day than I am about the extra day being added, because I suspect it’s much tougher to go an additional hour after a ten-hour shift than it is to rest one evening to return again the next morning. But I signed up for this with the goal of making it through Peak, to experience the absolute worst of what Amazon has to offer, to understand on a personal, visceral level what it would be like if I couldn’t quit this job, if I had to stick it through like everyone else no matter how many additional requirements they added.

At the end of the shift in which these announcements were made, on the Tuesday of Thanksgiving week, I exit BFI4 to find many leads from various departments, recognizable by their blue safety vests, handing out pumpkin pies from Costco to every associate exactly as the HR newsletter had promised. First, how does Costco produce an unreasonably large pumpkin pie — truly a pie larger than many pizza establishments’ so-called “large” — for only $5.99 when I can’t even ship, say, a TV remote for that much? Second, what must it have been like to place that call from Amazon to Costco? “Uh, we’re going to need three thousand pies on Tuesday.” In my past workplaces, employees would have thought a Costco pie too cheap of a holiday gift; no doubt others would ask about gluten-free options or whether the pie was produced in a factory that also shelled tree nuts in the Reagan era. But here, having done this job for less than two weeks, I accept the pie as happily as any other associate. I’d have to otherwise work nearly half an hour pre-tax — loading, at my peak rate, perhaps 190 packages — in order to afford this caloric colossus of the squash family. Perhaps management’s not so bad after all. I could tell my friends over Thanksgiving that, you know what, Jeff Bezos not only launched himself into space three months ago in the most overtly phallic rocket imaginable — he also gifted me this pie, the very pie you’re enjoying right now, as a special thank-you for working at Amazon’s flagship fulfillment center during the four weeks of Peak, where vacations aren’t allowed and overtime is mandatory.

Things taste better when you make $18.55 an hour. I’m convinced of this. There’s truly plenty to be thankful for this year.

—

At BFI4, you can move to the night shift, which runs 6:30 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. during Peak, to earn $0.60 more per hour, effectively $6 a day. This may not sound like much, but someone on the day shift would have to work over a year in order to get raises that amount to a little less than that. The question is, would you turn your life around, sleeping in the daytime and working through the night — but only four to five days a week, mind you — in order to earn an extra $6 a day? You can bet that Amazon has fine-tuned the night shift pay differential very precisely, given it has nearly a million employees; so in the labor market, upending your days into nights and vice versa is, on average, worth $6 a day to most of its workers. Similarly, working weekends nets you a differential of $5.50 a day — just about the price of the free Costco pumpkin pie they handed out earlier in the week. Would you give up your weekends for two pumpkin pies? Apparently, the answer for Amazon’s workers is very much yes.

And here’s the real rub: although everyone who joined Amazon’s day shift with me during Peak 2021 is paid the same $18.55 an hour, our experiences of the difficulty and physical pain in our work can be radically different. When you join as an Amazon associate, you’re randomly assigned a department. You could be assigned to Picking, the job where you stand on a platform all day and pick items out of a grid of numbered bins spanning from just above your head to around your ankles. The good news is that there’s no heavy lifting; at any point in the day, you’re at most handling one Amazon product at a time. The bad news is that you’re graded on your speed — if you don’t maintain a pace of picking an item out of a bin every 6.5 seconds, you’ll be fired. One item per 6.5 seconds doesn’t sound too bad until you realize you’re doing that nonstop for eleven hours a day during Peak. Then again, you could be assigned to Packing, which is a great assignment for a new hire. In Packing, you assemble the right-sized box according to what your computer screen tells you, transfer the right items from nearby bins into the box, and finally seal the box. Similar to Picking, you’re measured based on your pace in Packing. You have the same benefit of only handling one item at a time, but mostly at waist height; more importantly, your work involves a broad variety of movements, making it less likely that you’ll get repetitive stress injuries from repeating the same motion all day. Or you could be assigned to Sorting and Ship Dock, where you lift boxes all day, each of which could contain many different items together, setting them anywhere from ankle height all the way to above your head.

Even within Ship Dock, there are gradations of work. Instead of lifting heavy packages, you could be assigned to handle only small packages in one of the Induction booths. Not only do you handle light packages or envelopes — everything is also at waist level all day. By warehouse standards, it truly is a great job. Then again, as if Amazon itself wanted to hammer home the vicissitudes of life, you could be assigned as a Raker working next to an Inductor. You stand in the same place all day — which, if you haven’t done it before, is much more painful than moving on your feet all day; you cantilever a four- to eight-foot rake slightly above your head all the time, which is incredibly hard on the back; and, to top it all off, the Raking job is essentially useless and completely unnecessary, adding a mental element on top of the physical punishment. I’ve never watched a clock as closely as I have when raking in BFI4. Though interestingly, towards the end of my time at Amazon, I come to learn that being a Raker is actually preferred by many associates if your goal is to avoid work, because it’s one of the least accountable jobs. The inductor is measured on their rate, but who’s to say whether the raker was helping or hurting, or frankly, whether the raker was even there? Many days you could find rakers who would disappear for long stretches of time. On top of that, the raking job, as with inducting, stands above the warehouse floor on its own elevated platform. It’s even a bit hard to see what’s going on up there. My comments on raking make more sense if you’re trying to do a good job as opposed to living off the fat of the land.

All of these jobs pay $18.55 an hour. In none of them can you make more money by being faster or better. Some are self-evidently much more demanding than others — but once again, with no variance in pay. And the key is that you’re randomly assigned. It’s as if Amazon wanted to create a diorama of human existence and cruel fate within the walls of its ironically named “fulfillment” center, driving home a hard lesson about the unfairness of life itself.

Then again, not everything is random. There’s perhaps even one worse thing: within Ship Dock, job assignments are made by a sort of foreman called a Process Assistant. Outbound Ship Dock’s foreman is Angelo. Every morning, Angelo sticks everyone’s magnetized name tags onto a whiteboard where various Ship Dock roles are arranged by column.

In this system, you could easily see how favors could be requested, and how favoritism could lead to a terrible work experience or a great one. If, say, Angelo were interested in a young woman, and she knew he was the one making the assignments, he’d obviously think twice about putting her in a truck to stack boxes all day — easily the job that involves the most lifting. Or if Angelo were truly unscrupulous, that’s exactly what he’d do, hoping to drive her into that moment of desperation where she’d finally ask how she could be assigned to a less will- and body-shattering role.

I suppose that’s the thing with people making these decisions. In the best of worlds, human judgment would be exercised in assigning everyone to the role best suited to them. The nearly seventy-year-old man I keep seeing limp around Ship Dock would be assigned to Induct. The lazy guy who keeps checking his phone would be assigned to the busiest spurs. Better yet, people would be rotated every few hours between roles so that the best and worst burdens would be equally shared amongst the team and that repetitive stress injuries would be kept to a minimum. But it doesn’t seem to me that any of this is done, though some reassignments are done after lunch to give people a little variety. Instead, most assignments seem capricious and not at all strategic.

It’s become popular of late to highlight all sorts of algorithmic biases and failures, as well as situations where the implacable or unfeeling nature of algorithms seems potentially dystopic, like the nascent use of computer judges in China to adjudicate some civil lawsuits. But for all the anecdotal bad press they get, computer algorithms can actually be a lot more fair than humans in some situations; not everything about robot overlords is bad. I moved to London in 2012, a time when Uber had only a few thousand drivers there. Most private taxis, called minicabs, were instead run by tiny companies, each with a single dispatcher. By a few years into my time in London, Uber had over 40,000 drivers, overtaking even the number of official cab drivers in the city. When speaking with Uber drivers, I’d often ask them why they switched away from driving minicabs. One of the top reasons they always cited was that minicab dispatchers could be quite partial, showing favoritism to some drivers by giving them the most profitable jobs while giving drivers they didn’t like the very worst jobs. The Uber algorithm, instead, offers jobs to whichever driver is closest to the customer; the computer takes favoritism out of dispatch.

Similarly, I wonder if algorithms could take the favoritism, and frankly the sometimes seeming unreasonableness, out of fulfillment center assignments. You’d perhaps start by rotating people though various positions across the warehouse, measuring their productivity in each role. You’d maybe even ask associates to rank the jobs they’ve tried in their preferred order, and take that into account when assigning jobs. Finally, you could also work in a series of mid-day rotations to ensure that associates don’t overuse specific muscles or repeat certain motions overly much.

As it stands, though, Amazon currently relegates all this to Angelo. I approached him at the start of shift one day to ask when or whether I’d be assigned to other roles in Ship Dock — not because I didn’t like scanning and sorting, but because I wanted to learn all the various roles in the fulfillment center. He told me not to worry about things and just to continue doing my assigned job, and that “people” will teach me a different role when it was time. He seemed mildly miffed at the question. I wondered if he, funnily enough, was hoping for an analogous thing to what I was for him: that I, the associate with all the eagerness to learn other tasks, would one day be replaced by a robot who’d just quietly do whatever it was assigned without question. It’s a disturbing world where we find ourselves each wishing that the other were instead an automaton.

Learning, as with job assignments at Amazon, is highly variable and subject to chance. Kelvin, the Learning Ambassador assigned to onboard me on my Day One, seemed a nice enough guy. Over time, I’d come to see that he wasn’t great at onboarding. But it wasn’t just that. It was also his absenteeism. On Day Two, he cautioned us to return from lunch on time. He himself, however, basically did not return from lunch, leaving the four of us standing in the middle of the warehouse floor, looking every which way for over twenty minutes, trying to seem busy in an environment where everyone was measured on productivity metrics but unable to pantomime anything credible of the sort. By the twenty-fifth minute, the day’s Ship Dock manager, Aisha, dropped by to ask what was going on. She asked us to grab handheld scanners and just start working a spur. Kelvin ended up reappearing around forty-five minutes after lunch was over and didn’t mention his absence in any way. He just dropped by each of our spurs, made eye contact with a thumbs-up as a question, and waited for us to return a thumbs-up in acknowledgement that everything was fine.

At the time, I didn’t realize the gesture was also his form of silent farewell. Several hours into our “training” — and here I stretch the definition of that word quite broadly — Kelvin got off the skiff. It’d be the last time I’d ever interact with him at Amazon. We were on our own.

It’d take several days before I realized just how abnormal our onboarding was compared with others. Around Day Four, I froze, gobsmacked, as a different Learning Ambassador, Gabe, gathered his five trainees around a spur and began explaining the entire outbound shipping system. There apparently are the original spurs here in the rear of the building, then eight new spurs that we call “East.” Gabe went on to explain how to load carts, stack boxes strategically, scan labels quickly, and find empty carts aboard docked trucks. All this, interspersed with Q&A, was conveyed at a volume and with enunciation so clear that I had learned simply by being nearby. Then, as if Kelvin weren’t already enough of a foil for him, Gabe proceeded to rally his underlings in hands-on exercises, prompting each in turn to scan and load their package round-robin like a high school basketball coach, pointing out their mistakes, suggesting better form. You could nearly imagine the whistle around his neck.

Not all Learning Ambassadors are as good as Gabe, of course. But many are good, quite willing to answer questions. I was once rolling an empty cart from under a stairwell towards my spur when Marsha stopped me mid-stride. She was a Learning Ambassador who always wheeled her laptop around the warehouse atop a small metal desk on casters, presumably to keep track of new associates’ job performance. This time was no exception. “Do you know why carts are under the stairwell?” she asked. I paused a moment to gauge whether it was rhetorical, perhaps a moment of Socratic instruction amidst the din of commerce. When it became awkwardly clear that this was instead a pop quiz, I confessed.

“I’ve never actually been told that. I don’t know why some carts are under the stairwell.”

“It’s because they’re each broken in some way,” she answered. “We put them there so that the right people can repair them soon. If you need a new cart, you should grab them from the back of a truck parked in the dock.”

“Which truck?” I asked, eager to learn more now that I was finally being taught something.

“They change throughout the day. Just look around, especially for the direction where others are coming from with empty carts.”

I thanked her for her help and also asked that she please point out other things to me if she saw me doing anything that I could improve. I then leaned in and confided, by way of explanation, that Kelvin hadn’t been teaching me much. She nodded in recognition and used Kelvin’s favorite word in knowing reply: “Yeah.”

From then on, I set my mind to asking questions more proactively of other employees — not only the Learning Ambassadors, but also any employee who seemed to really know what they were doing. It turned out most were quite willing to explain, so I began to pick things up a bit more quickly.

Another option if you’re ever confused is to ask questions of any manager on the floor. They, too, have special vests — solid blue with the words BFI4 Leadership across the back. This has usually worked for me, except for the one time it backfired. I had logged into a computer on the spur used to scan packages, but had pressed a wrong button along the way such that the screen was now stuck in a way that I couldn’t figure out how to exit. It just stayed on a completely white screen with no Back or Close button, and no obvious way to resume scanning. So I started to walk around Ship Dock looking for any manager to ask for help on how to get things working again.

After walking about a minute, I came across two women wearing blue leadership vests and approached one to ask my question. She quickly understood that I was asking about the computer on the spur and stopped me, explaining that she didn’t know the answer because she was “from Corporate.” This is what Amazon means when a white-collar office worker from one of its sleek downtown Seattle buildings comes to visit the shop floor to observe and comment on what’s happening. Why give them the blue vests, then, if the vests are meant to identify leaders so that associates can ask them for help? Sure, they’re probably leaders of some sort in the software department downtown — but on this shop floor, they’re even more useless than associates on Day One. I find that even within two weeks of working in the warehouse, I’m beginning to develop a sense that Those Folks in Corporate don’t really understand what’s going on, but want an honorific vest to indicate they’re not plebeian. But that vest, on this floor, only serves to cause confusion. They’d be better off wearing a red vest that means, “Don’t ask me questions because I don’t know the answer. Watch out because I might accidentally get in the way and pose a danger. And I miss air conditioning.”

As I walked away to find help elsewhere, I heard her say to her coworker, “So — this process we’re looking at here is an experiment, right? Do you think we’ll keep it?” She must be referring to something they’re trying out on a spur. It’s in a way too bad that people who can’t even answer basic questions about operations in the warehouse are designing ways to optimize it. I reflect more on the times when I’ve done the same in various office jobs I’ve held. I sense that I’m doing so even now, with this job, with this podcast, criticizing Amazon’s methods as a newcomer based on initial observations, having worked there only two weeks so far. Perhaps the things that seem maddening, and at times inane, are actually born of much experimentation and hard-won experience. Maybe Amazon’s approaches — completely random job assignments independent of ability, managing towards the lowest common denominator as opposed to incentivizing top performance — are all part of a well-designed system whose logic my novice eyes cannot see.

—

Thanksgiving at BFI4 started like any other day. I guess I wasn’t sure what I was expecting would be different. I certainly didn’t expect people dressed up as Pilgrims or turkeys, though there was a plausible chance some associates might protest the concept of the holiday itself. But in the end, there were only two notable differences from regular days. First, we were offered what Amazon euphemistically calls “voluntary time off,” or VTO, which is unpaid time off work. On Thanksgiving, with low purchase volumes as customers waited for Black Friday sales, the manager that day, Aisha, offered everyone VTO starting noon. We could choose to go home after working just five and a half hours. I, like the complete newbie I was, leapt at the opportunity along with several other associates. I had been disappointed by the original requirement to spend all of Thanksgiving at work, getting home only around 7:00 p.m., so I seized the chance to leave early and to join my family for Thanksgiving dinner. But I should have been suspicious of why the only other associates to also accept VTO were all new associates, including the three others who started with me on the same day. It turns out choosing family over Jeff Bezos on Thanksgiving is something that only fools do. First, the entire Thanksgiving shift is paid at double overtime. Second, additional overtime is only paid for the rest of the week if total hours exceed forty — which they would have, if I hadn’t left at noon on Thanksgiving. Third — and this is the insidious part — Amazon only offers VTO when it doesn’t need all the laborers it has and would like to instead not pay some of them. By staying, I would have been paid double during a time when, by definition, there was less work to go around. So VTO is ultimately a way for Amazon to not pay its full-time employees when purchase volumes are lower than expected. And I, like the doofus I was, did my best Oliver Twist and pleaded for my beloved employer to please not pay me so that I could eat dinner with my family on Thanksgiving. “Pleaded” might be overdramatic — but Amazon is smart about making VTO sound like a treasured privilege instead of a means for them not to pay you when they’ve made a mistake in estimating consumer demand. Managers never tell you how many associates they need to take VTO; instead, they always announce that you can now join a waitlist of associates to see if you might be “awarded VTO.” You end up feeling lucky if you’re selected for the privilege of letting them not pay you for a shift you were required to show up for.

The second difference with Thanksgiving from any other day at BFI4 was the handing out of the aforementioned pumpkin pies. They were the perfect gift because most associates would only be let off their shift at 6:00 p.m., just in time to arrive at Thanksgiving dinner, perhaps at seven-ish, to present a generously oversized dessert after everyone else had already finished their holiday meal. I fared much better because VTO allowed me to show up on time at Thanksgiving with friends, pie in hand. I didn’t stay late, however, because I’d need to get up even earlier the next day for the start of Peak.

I looked forward to Black Friday not only because it’s my first payday, but because it’s the first day that eleven-hour shifts become the norm every day until Christmas. This means waking up at 5:40 a.m. when my usual software developer schedule might have averaged around 9:30 or 10:00 a.m. for many years. I went to work that day unsure of what it’d feel like to work my first eleven-hour shift and also curious what it’d be like to see America’s largest shopping day from within the bowels of its largest online retailer.

Eleven hours, in truth, is not much worse than ten hours. There’s a way in which you expect nearly all of your waking hours to be spent on work when you’re an associate. You leave the house before sunrise, and at the end of your shift, you exit the fluorescent lighting of the building back into darkness, this time way after sunset. On many nights, I’m incredulous when I realize that my little time at home has already passed, and it’s time to go to sleep so I can repeat the cycle the next morning. I had thought the bump to eleven hours would be much harder on the body, but when most of my waking hours already consist of walking on concrete, scanning and moving thousands of boxes, one more hour doesn’t make much difference. I wonder if I’ll feel any different in the coming weeks, when we’ve already been warned that Amazon will soon start mandating eleven-and-a-half-hour days. They can’t really mandate twelve because state law has a hard cap on that; if anyone were to punch in or out even a minute early or late on a twelve-hour shift, Amazon would be violating the law — although unpaid lunch will still push my time in the warehouse to twelve hours a day.

I reach the end of Black Friday without fanfare. My first eleven-hour shift is complete, and it’s time to go home and prepare for the next day’s shift. I launch my bank’s app on my phone to see if my paycheck has already landed, and it has. My very first full week at Amazon is rewarded with $605.90. That’s about $2,600 a month, or $31,500 a year. My wife and I bought a condo in Seattle a few years ago in hopes that my aging parents would one day move near to us from the East Coast. They’re not quite ready to move, so in the meantime we rent this condo out — for $2,700 a month. That’s $100 a month more than I make from working at Amazon. So, in effect, if you’re fortunate enough to be able to buy a condo outright and rent it out, you’d be making more on that in a year by sitting on your couch all day than you could by working crazy hours in a physically demanding Amazon warehouse job. It’s humbling to realize this, that there are inflection points in wealth that beget more wealth without labor, and that all my hard work at Amazon doesn’t amount to much when you compare it to the passive income of agreeing to let someone else live in our condo.

There’s something that doesn’t sit quite right about this. Perhaps it’s just my sore body talking. Or the thrill of my first hard-earned paycheck deflated against the backdrop of money I’ve been earning without laboring at all.

In the late 1800s, an economist and journalist named Henry George spent his life railing against rent as humanity’s greatest evil. Georgian economics, as it’s called, has fallen out of favor, but some of its core concepts are well worth considering. George saw the world of having three primary ways of earning money: through capital, which underwrites production, through labor, whether creative or physical, and through rent, the collection of money from others through government-granted monopolies on land, property, or any other natural resource (like portions of the radio wave spectrum). He viewed the former two as good and the latter as evil. Imagine a typical year in a strip mall in America, where several store owners invent new or better ways of doing things. The moment the store owners make more money from selling better products or creating greater efficiencies, the owner of the mall itself can, and almost always does, raise rent. In fact, the mall owner will raise rent as high as the individual stores can afford, which is effectively until all the stores’ profits go to the mall owner. Note the important point in all of this, which is that the generative work and innovation was done by the individual store owners or the workers in those stores; yet the profits are captured primarily by the guy who owns the mall, for having done no work of his own. This, Henry George felt, was a great evil, and he traveled the country shouting, to paraphrase contemporary politician Jimmy McMillan, “The rent is too damn high!” Not just rent in stores, but of course rent for homes and apartments. As a concrete example, if minimum wage is raised in a region without a commensurate loosening of zoning laws to allow for more dense housing to be built, what’s the only rational outcome? If one month everyone’s making $12 an hour but the next everyone’s suddenly making $15 an hour without additional housing supply, the expected and completely predictable outcome is that rent will become more expensive. In the extreme, if an area literally builds zero new housing but forcibly raises minimum wage, the only rational outcome would be for landlords to raise rent until landlords ultimately capture all the gains that workers nominally made in income. This outcome is exactly opposite of what most cities likely want when they consider raising minimum wage; but, to Henry George’s point, the problem is the evil of rent, which ends up rewarding those who already have real assets with monopolistic power to extract gains earned by others’ labor. Henry George’s solution to this problem was a system of “land value tax,” which is a tax on land whose proceeds can go to reduce inequality, a sort of progressive tax that many economists view as “the perfect tax.”

But there’s no time to think about this too deeply. Tomorrow we work off the backlog of Black Friday orders that still need to be processed through the warehouse. Then, after a day of rest, it’s Cyber Monday.

Coming next week: I live through the storm of Cyber Monday and experience the first signs of physical issues that could put an early end to my Amazon career.