Member-only story
Convenience Has a Human Price
We should proceed with caution as we educate ourselves on what it takes to make our lives easier
When I worked at Amazon over the summer, I realized the price of convenience — making sure warehouse workers worked faster to fulfill quotas and making sure drivers got enough deliveries done to get a message in time. To have a convenient product means someone needed to work harder and faster for that product.
I worked as an Amazon warehouse picker over the summer. My quotas included picking 350 items per hour to get shipped off to packers, and it was a very stringent requirement that managers had to talk to me a couple of times to get closer to. I worked as hard and fast as I can for three-hour blocks and ten-hour days, but whether I could hit my quota was often very variable. If I had a big item jammed into a bin, it hurt my quota. If the machines didn’t work, it hurt my quota.
It wasn’t that bad, but there sure was a lot of pressure to meet the quotas.
It’s not something I saw when I was a consumer, but something I saw when I worked in an Amazon warehouse. My former employer in Amazon constantly promises fast, two-day shipping to its customers, and well, that convenience has a human cost.
