The Amazon Diaries

Warehouse Worker: “I Don’t Have Energy to Do Much Else Aside From Amazon.”

’I am totally in favor of the automation in the warehouses.’

Brendan O'Connor
OneZero
Published in
8 min readMar 11, 2019

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Illustration: Glenn Harvey

Valued at nearly $1 trillion, Amazon is one of the most powerful companies in the world. The Seattle-based retail giant employs more than 600,000 people and operates 100 sortation and fulfillment centers in North America, sometimes sending out as many as 1 million items per day to customers. But Amazon does more than just retail. Amazon publishes its own books and comics, finances TV shows and movies, operates a Texas wind farm, builds robots, streams music, delivers prescription medications, and operates web services for everyone from Medium to the CIA. And that’s not even counting its high-profile acquisitions, which include Twitch, IMDb, Zappos, and Whole Foods, among countless others.

Nearly all of us use Amazon in one way or another. But what is it like working inside the beast? Over the next few weeks, we’ll be talking to workers at every level of the Amazon empire to find out.

Welcome to the Amazon Diaries.

AAmazon’s warehouses are the backbones of its retail operation, the real-life nodes between the billions of items sold on its digital marketplace and millions of customers…

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OneZero
OneZero

Published in OneZero

OneZero is a former publication from Medium about the impact of technology on people and the future. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

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