Amazon Warehouse Tour

I just visited a local Amazon warehouse with a free guided tour. Managed to book a spot on one of the last tours before they start preparing for Black Friday and Christmas.

I wanted to learn what the work environment there is and how a large-scale warehouse operates.

Well, it’s a lot of repetitive low qualified work: scanning barcodes, taking some goods from shelves and putting them into boxes (when preparing customers’ orders) or taking goods from the box and putting them to the shelves (when processing incoming deliveries from vendors).

And the storage facilities are currently being modernized and rows of long shelves are being replaced by moveable towers and thousands of robots that look like an oversized robot vacuum cleaner. Robots pick up these square towers with shelves on all four sizes and move them between storage and operators. All movements there are fully automated and choreographed by an invisible algorithm. Looks mesmerizing. It is almost unbelievable that they don’t crash and don’t fall.

After the storage hall is rebuilt for robots, there would be even less work for humans. Ultimately, when robotic hands would be able to take items from shelves and put them in boxes, they could operate without humans at all. I guess, it is already possible, just not viable from an economic standpoint.

Overall, it was a sort of eye-opening experience. The operations there, at least on an off-peak day, were simpler than I expected. On the other hand, being used to top tech companies offices and their usual perks, I was surprised by a very primitive work conditions, in which many people outside of the IT industry work.

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