8/13/2023 0 Comments Amazon strike on prime day![]() 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. 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. 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. Getting you that discounted hand blender you suddenly realize you've coveted requires an intense logistical ballet. For Amazon, Prime Day is an enormous logistical challenge that must be solved without you noticing. (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. 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.Īccording to analyst estimates, 2016 Prime Day sales totaled between $500 million and $600 million, about 2 percent of the company's third-quarter sales. Therefore, the pressure faced by Amazon workers might grow before automation can take over the gruelling pace of shipping products.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.Īfter 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. This sale is also the first event the company is holding after offering Prime members one-day shipping on certain products. Last year, the number of Amazon warehouse hires plateaued for the first time ever, despite the retailer’s growing sales.Īccording to Coresight Research, 2019 Prime Day could earn Amazon as much as $5.8 billion USD. Although this would expose less workers to strenuous working conditions, it would also lead to job cuts that might affect the local economies of the towns where the warehouses are located. Amazon workers deserve safe working conditions, fair scheduling, and reasonable production demands.” tweeted Sanders.Īmazon is currently moving towards fully automating their warehouses, but they estimate it will take at least 10 years more to complete. “A higher wage is only one component of the fight for workers’ rights. In addition, democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have publicly declared their support in favor of the strike. The strike has also extended to other Amazon-owned services, such as Twitch, a live-streaming site in which several top users decided to blackout their channels in solidarity. ![]() ![]() Thousands of Amazon workers are striking in the US and Germany, while also holding protests in the UK, Spain, and Poland. “They’re treating us like machines.”įormer employees have stated that working in one of Amazon’s warehouses entailed walking over 15 miles per shift, having short bathroom breaks, and running for hours between halls to fetch products. “We’re humans, not robots,” William Stolz, an Amazon warehouse told CNN Business. Immediate shipping comes with a hidden costĪlthough Amazon offers their workers full benefits and a $15 per hour salary in all of their US locations, they have faced heavy criticism for the working conditions in which their staff is expected to work in their fulfilment centres. The pressure of fulfilling delivery orders at the current pace has convinced some Amazon warehouse workers to walk out in protest throughout the two days the annual event takes place. Prime Day is the equivalent of Black Friday for Amazon, the world’s biggest online retailer.
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