A portion of the article speaks of an Amazon fulfillment center:
“The top floor on which I worked was a gloomy place, with the only natural light coming in through small rectangular windows located far above on the high ceiling,” he writes. “Most of the light was provided by grey steel lamps the shape of rugby balls and about the same size. These were dotted about the ceilings on every floor and cast a peculiar yellow glow about the place. During the course of the night … many of the motion-sensitive lights would malfunction, meaning a dozen or so workers would be left scuttling around in the dark on the top floor of a warehouse at three o’clock in the morning. Who, when they purchase an iPhone charger or an Adele album with a click on Amazon’s website, imagines anything like this?”
Who wouldn't imagine something like this ?
What else could it possibly look like ? Regional shipment centers predate Amazon (and the web) and one would have to be comically out of touch with reality to not understand what a time sensitive shipping facility would look like ...
The lighting issue is pretty surprising, if only because making people pick goods in the dark sounds like it would decrease efficiency far beyond any money motion sensing lights might save.
The rest is pretty unsurprising, although if the lights did work right, there's still a very special misery associated with being in a large space that has only motion sensing lights. Something about being surrounded by darkness while you're perpetually under a light is very strange, and it's made even more disconcerting because motion sensors on their associated lights don't trip until you're getting into the space where you need that light. It feels like constantly walking into dark rooms and then having somebody flip the light on unexpectedly.
You'd be surprised. I don't think the large majority of the population thinks about the logistics involved at all, except insofar as it directly concerns them (ie. the last link in the chain, or when there's a problem in fulfilling the order). Retail is an abstraction that conjures products into consumers' hands as if by magic. This permits them to stay conveniently ignorant of the ugly parts of the supply chain, whether it's torturing and killing animals on factory farms, inhumane working conditions at a sweatshop in a faraway country, or the labor-laws-dodging gig economy of couriers and fulfillment center workers.
> This permits them to stay conveniently ignorant of the ugly parts of the supply chain
Yes, but it also leaves them completely ignorant of the extent to which modern capitalism is an unprecedented miracle of human cooperation and effort, which results in a lot of very silly rhetoric about the evils of corporations that wouldn't survive the slightest contact with the realities of running a business.
Me. The many warehouses and such I have been to, though not Amazon, and perhaps smaller than an Amazon building, have been lit with artificial daylight levels of brightness. Hard to be sure but it sounds like it's describing sodium lights. I would expect fluorescent tubes, floodlights, or LED equivalents.
Even the damn lorry bays and car parks outside such things are usually spitting out far too much light.
The one thing I'd absolutely not imagine or expect would be "gloomy". That I would imagine for a mushroom farm and precious little else. How the hell would they pick the correct product in what sounds like gloomy yellow sodium lighting from years ago?
+1000. Working in the warehouse at the bottom of a hospital would get weird sometimes because you had absolutely no indication what time of day it was -- working third shift could feel like the middle of the day since it was always so well lit.
In my experience, good lighting is pretty much the only thing you're guaranteed at various warehouses. Heating huge spaces effectively is basically impossible, rugs and other "soft" surfaces are out since they just wear down too quickly, equipment will be used continuously until it's simply unsafe... but you need good lighting to know what you're doing and keep yourself out of harm's way. As noted, even the parking lots and immediate exteriors will be very well lit as a physical security measure.
Bad lighting is the exact kind of thing people complain about when maligning "hot shots who think they know everything" and all those etceteras. It ends up being penny wise and dollar stupid when you factor in both logistical mistakes and pay outs to worker's comp when people injure themselves on the job. The equivalent in programming would be making all your developers use laptops from 12 years ago running Windows XP because you know someone who got you a really good deal.
I find this very odd. Decent lighting is so cheap that even minute increases in efficiency would be worth it. You'd expect all of those warehouses to be bathed in crisp blueish white light to keep people alert and avoid costly mistakes. Maybe amazon isn't as efficient as they're cracked up to be.
Bright blueish light is also what I'd expect for that kind of thing, since it's such a simple way to keep people more alert when they're physically tired.
I think the point is that, if you click through a checkout funnel, you should try to keep at the front of your mind, a musty, industrially lit concrete warehouse, and not the graphical elements presented to you within the DOM of an HTML page.
The quote attempts to paint a gloomy picture, but honestly, I don't conceptualize anything more terrible than a Home Depot. As a geek, I've loitered in the unfinished environs of warehouses for longer than might be considered practical, and never found it to be torture precisely. But, you know, some people get really uptight about uncarpeted indoor expanses that don't have windows with fashionable dressings to draw closed.
Not sure what it is about planned interior decor, versus unfinished construction. Some people tend toward comparisons of urban blight, versus parks and recreation.
I will say this, though. Fuck open office floor plans, for entirely different reasons.
John Harris is one of the few journalists at The Guardian I have respect for. His series "Anywhere but Westminster" is very good. He also did a smaller "Anywhere but Washington" series.
What I'm still not clear on is in these "Dark Kitchens" are the chef's provided by the restaurants or Deliveroo? As in does McDonalds (for lack of a better example) send a chef to one of these kitchens or is a chef trained on McDonalds practices work there?
Business has always been about putting on a pretty front at the retail side that faces the customer, while squeezing the back end for efficiency.
In traditional restaurants, there is an often repeated quote: if you like a restaurant, don't look in the kitchen.
A retail store will often have pretty displays while the conditions in the warehouse are more, hmmm, pragmatic.
Nowadays, we find that the retail interaction consists of a web app or mobile app for purchasing, and a delivery man for receiving of an order.
Customers will be ignorant of the backend. Rarely are people really aware what is necessary to enable them to buy the things they buy.
There is nothing surprising that there is a discrepancy between the customer-facing side and the behind-the-scenes operation. What is important is to treat employees as people, regardless of whether they work in a stock room 10 feet behind the display, or 1000 miles away in a order fulfillment center.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 50.8 ms ] thread“The top floor on which I worked was a gloomy place, with the only natural light coming in through small rectangular windows located far above on the high ceiling,” he writes. “Most of the light was provided by grey steel lamps the shape of rugby balls and about the same size. These were dotted about the ceilings on every floor and cast a peculiar yellow glow about the place. During the course of the night … many of the motion-sensitive lights would malfunction, meaning a dozen or so workers would be left scuttling around in the dark on the top floor of a warehouse at three o’clock in the morning. Who, when they purchase an iPhone charger or an Adele album with a click on Amazon’s website, imagines anything like this?”
Who wouldn't imagine something like this ?
What else could it possibly look like ? Regional shipment centers predate Amazon (and the web) and one would have to be comically out of touch with reality to not understand what a time sensitive shipping facility would look like ...
The rest is pretty unsurprising, although if the lights did work right, there's still a very special misery associated with being in a large space that has only motion sensing lights. Something about being surrounded by darkness while you're perpetually under a light is very strange, and it's made even more disconcerting because motion sensors on their associated lights don't trip until you're getting into the space where you need that light. It feels like constantly walking into dark rooms and then having somebody flip the light on unexpectedly.
Yes, but it also leaves them completely ignorant of the extent to which modern capitalism is an unprecedented miracle of human cooperation and effort, which results in a lot of very silly rhetoric about the evils of corporations that wouldn't survive the slightest contact with the realities of running a business.
Even the damn lorry bays and car parks outside such things are usually spitting out far too much light.
The one thing I'd absolutely not imagine or expect would be "gloomy". That I would imagine for a mushroom farm and precious little else. How the hell would they pick the correct product in what sounds like gloomy yellow sodium lighting from years ago?
In my experience, good lighting is pretty much the only thing you're guaranteed at various warehouses. Heating huge spaces effectively is basically impossible, rugs and other "soft" surfaces are out since they just wear down too quickly, equipment will be used continuously until it's simply unsafe... but you need good lighting to know what you're doing and keep yourself out of harm's way. As noted, even the parking lots and immediate exteriors will be very well lit as a physical security measure.
Bad lighting is the exact kind of thing people complain about when maligning "hot shots who think they know everything" and all those etceteras. It ends up being penny wise and dollar stupid when you factor in both logistical mistakes and pay outs to worker's comp when people injure themselves on the job. The equivalent in programming would be making all your developers use laptops from 12 years ago running Windows XP because you know someone who got you a really good deal.
The quote attempts to paint a gloomy picture, but honestly, I don't conceptualize anything more terrible than a Home Depot. As a geek, I've loitered in the unfinished environs of warehouses for longer than might be considered practical, and never found it to be torture precisely. But, you know, some people get really uptight about uncarpeted indoor expanses that don't have windows with fashionable dressings to draw closed.
Not sure what it is about planned interior decor, versus unfinished construction. Some people tend toward comparisons of urban blight, versus parks and recreation.
I will say this, though. Fuck open office floor plans, for entirely different reasons.
It's a great way to run an economy, if you're the owner and not an employee.
It's a horrible way to run a society, regardless.
In traditional restaurants, there is an often repeated quote: if you like a restaurant, don't look in the kitchen.
A retail store will often have pretty displays while the conditions in the warehouse are more, hmmm, pragmatic.
Nowadays, we find that the retail interaction consists of a web app or mobile app for purchasing, and a delivery man for receiving of an order.
Customers will be ignorant of the backend. Rarely are people really aware what is necessary to enable them to buy the things they buy.
There is nothing surprising that there is a discrepancy between the customer-facing side and the behind-the-scenes operation. What is important is to treat employees as people, regardless of whether they work in a stock room 10 feet behind the display, or 1000 miles away in a order fulfillment center.