You may not know how you know it, but you probably know today is Amazon Prime Day—a 30-hour-long made-up shopping holiday from the online retail giant, where 85 million Prime subscribers get access to hundreds of thousands of discounts through Amazon’s site.
After an unsteady start three years ago, as an experiment to drum up online orders during the slow summer retail period, Prime Day has gone mainstream in the grand tradition of corporate holidays like Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba’s Single’s Day (which is a thing) and nadir of American consumerism, Black Friday. With no end in sight to Amazon’s ambitions—whether in dominating groceries or providing the backend infrastructure that runs so much of the internet today—it looks like Amazon Prime Day is here to stay.
According to analyst estimates, 2016 Prime Day sales totaled between $500 million and $600 million, about 2 percent of the company's third-quarter sales. (Amazon does not provide total sales for the day, favoring qualitative descriptions.) That pales in comparison with the $3.34 billion Americans spent online last Black Friday, but you can bet Prime Day will do even better this year. For consumers, it's a great convenience. For Amazon, Prime Day is an enormous logistical challenge that must be solved without you noticing. How does it do this? With human labor.
Getting you that discounted hand blender you suddenly realize you've coveted requires an intense logistical ballet. First, in a massive warehouse (Amazon has 150 million square feet of fulfillment capacity worldwide), someone has to find your item and pick it out—sometimes robot-assisted—from thousands of shelves, then pack it in a box and sort it according to your address. If you live out of state, your blender goes to an Amazon pilot, who flies it to the nearest airport, after which the blender gets handed off to a delivery driver, who gently plops it on your doorstep. Yes, there are robots in Amazon warehouses that help shuttle packages from place to place, and Amazon also routes packages through traditional carriers like UPS and the US Postal Service. But Amazon heavily leans on a network of smaller subcontractors and independent gig workers—and there are many (many) benefits to bringing this logistical network in-house.
Some of these people are full-time employees, some are independent contractors, and some work for other companies altogether. Getting your goodies in two days or less may feel like magic, but it requires some major choreography—and causes no small amount of strain.
Fernando, a 40-year-old former warehouse associate who worked at Amazon’s fulfillment center in Robbinsville, New Jersey, expects the job to get hectic during Amazon’s third Prime Day—just as it was during the Christmas holiday season he worked in late 2014. (WIRED spoke with several workers who were not authorized to speak about Amazon's logistics system, and as such we are using their first names only.)
“Personally, I was in awe of how many items Amazon went through daily,” Fernando says. “Per shift, and per fulfillment center, it was a target count of over 240,000 items per day." And this was three years ago. "The sheer volume and how processes were optimized with machines and manpower was amazing.” As with all new associates in the warehouse, Fernando started as a packer with a target item count before he was given new assignments. Eventually, he did three jobs inside the warehouse—he was a packer, a picker (picking the right items from the shelves), and a sorter (sorting customer orders from bins and putting them into the correct cubbyholes).
With maximum efficiency also comes maximum security, as Fernando learned. “No phones were allowed beyond the gate; if there was an emergency family call, they used a hotline to reach you,” he says. “Thievery was dealt with very severely, too. Workers could be arrested and charged for theft.”
Fernando says a good majority of the workers inside Amazon’s fulfillment center were in between more permanent jobs or had no better-paying opportunities elsewhere. “I started because I was bored and had just immigrated to the US then and had no marketable skills on paper,” he says. After three months, just when he received an offer to become a full-time employee, Fernando decided to leave: “I was offered a better-paying job elsewhere.”
From the warehouse, the packages generally head to Amazon-contracted cargo planes, whose pilots have vocally pushed back against what they call substandard pay. On July 6, pilots from Atlas Air and Air Transport Services Group, two companies with Amazon contracts to fly 40 planes carrying the retail giant’s packages through 2018, aired their grievances in a nationwide advertising campaign. According to Atlas Air pilot Michael Griffith, the pilots are paid 40 to 60 percent less than what they could make flying planes for FedEx or UPS. “The industry has a huge pilot shortage,” Griffith says. “We’re not here to boycott anything, but this represents a big, huge push on an already stressed system.”
Griffith concedes that the problem stems from the airlines that Amazon contracted for the job, not Amazon itself. But the pilots hope that their continued protests—they held another at Amazon’s shareholders meeting in May—could help spur customers to ask Amazon executives to raise the pilots’ pay. In turn, Griffith argues, this could help keep the pilots loyal to Amazon’s subcontractors and Amazon itself, as Amazon’s ambitions continue to grow.
Amazon referred all questions about the pilots' campaign to Atlas Air.
Once your blender has arrived at a facility convenient to your location—in many cases, given Amazon's sweeping warehouse infrastructure, it may have started there—the delivery logistics kick into high gear. “Morning routes have 10 hours (from 7 am to 5 pm) to complete. And evening routes have five (4 pm to 9 pm) to complete,” says Kevin, an operations and logistics coordinator based in the San Francisco Bay Area who works for an Amazon subcontractor to plan out delivery routes for couriers. “But that's where I come in. I set up the routes according to each driver’s strengths and weaknesses. Then we deal with any on-road problems that may arise.”
These drivers are the only human faces of Amazon you might see as your blender finds its way to you. Ironically, this courier is not a full-time Amazon employee. Rather, the person delivering your package either works for a subcontractor or as one of thousands of independent gig workers taking on-demand work through an Amazon app, à la Uber. The program is called Amazon Flex.
Time limits for deliveries are strict, and the job starts as early as 6:30 in the morning, says Hasan, a driver in San Antonio who works four days a week for an Amazon subcontractor. “You have to complete your route in the given duration they give you,” he says, adding that the shifts are 12 hours long. Though Hasan calls the routes “generally easy,” he says he often cuts his breaks short out of necessity. “We have 30-minute unpaid breaks for lunch and other needs,” he says. “I generally use 15 minutes and keep moving. Otherwise I will not be able to complete the route on time.” That’s especially true during busy retail seasons like the holidays, Hasan says, with packages coming at nearly twice the usual rate.
Peter, a 70-year-old semiretired restaurant consultant who picks up Amazon Flex shifts in San Diego, loves his job. “Sometimes there are glitches in the app where the way it dispatches me has me going around in circles—especially in areas with new developments,” Peter says, but he adds that Amazon’s app continues to get better as it ingests the data from new maps. The more inconvenient problems on the job, Peter says, are finding parking when he happens to be assigned to a downtown route, finding single apartments in massive complexes, and gated communities with fussy door codes. But Peter says he has been able to tap “package cannot be delivered” or a support button within the app to get help in every situation he’s faced so far.
One time, Peter recounts, he was carrying a box down to a family’s house when it started to leak. The family was on their way out the door. Peter pinged Amazon support in the app. The family opened the box and found that a couple of juice boxes in a 36-pack were leaking; Peter suggested to the Amazon representative on the support line that Amazon send another 36-pack free of charge, and both the rep and the family accepted.
The thing that strikes Peter the most about the job is how excited Amazon customers are to come face-to-face with someone wearing an Amazon lanyard and a bright orange Amazon Flex badge. “It happens every single day on the job from one or two or three customers,” Peter says. “‘Amazon? Isn’t this cool?’ I think this is part of what Amazon is counting on—the positive customer reaction of having someone wearing an Amazon badge handing them an Amazon package in person.”
So when your hand blender in that brown taped box arrives on Thursday, keep in mind that it did not get there by magic. It was rather passed, hand to hand, in a human chain all the way to your door.
