#AIRPORT SPEEDINESS FULL#
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She started the job in April 2018, and within two months, or nearly 100,000 items, the lifting had destroyed her back. Amazon handed out T-shirts celebrating their induction into the “Million Unit Club.”īut Dixon, 54, wasn’t around for that. She knew, like the thousands of other workers there, that if she didn’t hit her target speed, she would be written up, and if she didn’t improve, she eventually would be fired.Īmazon’s cutting-edge technology, unrelenting surveillance, and constant disciplinary write-ups pushed the Eastvale workers so hard that in the last holiday season, they hit a coveted target: They got a million packages out the door in 24 hours.

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Dixon had to scan a new item every 11 seconds to hit her quota, she said, and Amazon always knew when she didn’t.ĭixon’s scan rate-more than 300 items an hour, thousands of individual products a day-was being tracked constantly, the data flowing to managers in real time, then crunched by a proprietary software system called ADAPT. The clock was always ticking on Amazon’s promised delivery time. The moment an Amazon customer clicked “place your order,” a robot would haul one of those racks to a picker, who would grab the right item for the order and send it on a series of long conveyors to a packer, who would stuff it in one of those familiar, smiling cardboard boxes. As soon as she’d filled a rack, she’d press a button, and one robot would zip it away while another robot would bring a new one to fill. For heavy items-she remembers the cases of pet food in particular-she’d have to squat down to hoist them in, then pop back up to grab the next item. She’d use a stepladder to put things on the top of the rack. She’d grab each item out of a box, scan it, lift it onto the rack, and scan its new location.

Another worker, known as a “water spider,” would bring her boxes upon boxes of goods-jars of protein powder, inflatable unicorn pool floats, laptops, makeup, Himalayan sea salt, vibrators, plastic toy cars.

#AIRPORT SPEEDINESS FULL#

To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.Īs a stower, her job was to stand in a spot on the floor, like hundreds of others in that million-square-foot warehouse, and fill an unending parade of merchandise racks.

Airport speediness