[Retric]

There warehouses are significantly worse than average in terms of injuries per hour. They also frequently sell fraudulent items directly harming consumers.

I can’t think of a metric where they aren’t worse than the average retailer.

[dsfyu404ed]

>There warehouses are significantly worse than average in terms of injuries per hour.

Per man hour? Amazon is rich and super high volume relatively speaking. I got the impression their warehouses were pretty damn good compared to other warehouses handling consumer goods because the cost of hiccups is so high and they have a huge target on their back.

[Retric]

They don’t seem to be very concerned about injuries. One example that comes to mind is storing 40 lb bags of dog food such that people had to duck and lean over and drag them under a low shelf, that’s practically designed to cause back injuries and in fact caused multiple in a single warehouse.

[super256]

> They don’t seem to be very concerned about injuries. One example that comes to mind is storing 40 lb bags of dog food such that people had to duck and lean over and drag them under a low shelf, that’s practically designed to cause back injuries and in fact caused multiple in a single warehouse.

I used to work for Amazon a few years ago. I'm uncertain whether it was 12 pounds or 12 kg, but when a *tote weights more than this, you are supposed to handle the tote with two people.

*A tote is a small container of items, like this yellow one: https://media.wired.com/photos/593256d9aef9a462de9820d8/mast...

[saagarjha]

Are there 2 people generally available to do work like this?

[super256]

Yes. The workstations in our receiving and sorting lanes were right next to each other, and people can theoretically interrupt their current task within a few seconds.

The bigger issue is that no one is actually asking for help because of culture.

[dsfyu404ed]

Yeah but are they actually worse than the competition though? The whole industry is rife with that kind of crap (not like you're expect otherwise for a razor thin margin industry). I once worked somewhere they'd crib between the ground level pallets and first level racking so they could overload the racking (but my immediate manager was good and they put me on a forklift so I didn't care).

If anything the dehumanizing algorithmic tracking and optimization crap they do annoys me far more than the safety stuff.

[Retric]

Actual comparison of injury rates show yes they are much worse than the industry average.

Amazon’s extreme turnover rate is also significant. Someone that’s been doing a job for longer has both the skill and physical capacity to avid injury doing the same tasks as a new employee. This compounds over long shifts as people get tired, so limiting new employees to 8 vs 12 hour shifts would make a real difference among other options.

[GoldenMonkey]

Workplace safety is 3x worse than the industry norm. And they recently got fined by OSHA, across 3 different states. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/amazon-osha-fines_n_63c84509e...

[phil21]

> I got the impression their warehouses were pretty damn good compared to other warehouses

This is the correct impression. Amazon warehouses are almost always a step up in both pay and quality of life vs. the other local employment options.

Source: many friends work(ed) the industry. Amazon was seen as trading your autonomy in for a better overall place to work.

The memes about their warehouses being the worst in the world only really exist in white collar circles.

I could never work for them in such a job, because I require too much autonomy to be happy. I don't deal will with strict metric systems that they enforce. However, others really do enjoy that aspect of not having to put an ounce of thought or problem solving into their dayjob.

[ROTMetro]

Ex con here, lived in the halfway house. No one, and I mean NO ONE took Amazon warehouse jobs. And that is saying a lot. We took jobs with metrics requiring we pull 60 pieces of cardboard per minute out of garbage and trash from a 75mph conveyor belt over working Amazon. We had to wear kevlar glove 'sharps' protection so the needles in the trash didn't poke us and give us HIV. This was still preferred over Amazon warehouse jobs. Just saying....

[phil21]

I've noticed two personality types on this one. Those that don't mind trading one sort of "shitty" working conditions like you describe (challenging/dangerous work), because for lack of a better term you are treated like actual human beings.

The other personality I've noticed is someone who prefers a much more "sane" (boring but very predictable work) working environment with a ton of rules around it. They enjoy being treated more like robots.

I could be projecting here, but I've seen more than a dozen or so datapoints - of course directly connected to my personal bubble so there is bias at play.

I'd absolutely never take an Amazon warehouse job. I'd be looking at jobs like you describe.

[giantg2]

Injuries per item picked or per capita might be a better metric. It's pretty easy to say the injuries are higher if you have more employees and higher volume than the competitors. Same thing with fraudulent items on Walmart.com.

[rat9988]

The hour is a way better metric. It already takes into account the capita. It's a work hour.

[fleetwoodsnack]

Injuries per item picked is obviously the inferior of the two, and fairly poor on its own as well.

[sebzim4500]

Inferior in what way? If you are trying to do some kind of moral calculation to figure out how many marginal injuries you are creating by ordering an item, then injuries per item picked is probably the right metric.

[giantg2]

If I sit on ass all day, I assume my injury rate will be lower. Using an injury rate on items picked (or items picked per man hour) could at least show the correlation between increased productivity and injuries.

[jiminymcmoogley]

That's a good point, but if i put myself in the shoes of one of Amazon's warehouse workers, i would probably weight not being injured more heavily than being more productive, so for instance if i had an opportunity to double my productivity at the cost of doubling my likelihood of injury, i'd choose to be less productive if that decision were up to me. However I'd imagine corporate would look at it differently, where injuries are liabilities for the company but productivity is the end goal, so a situation that increases employee productivity proportionately greater than it increases probability of injury might be looked upon more favorably. I am trying to come across as neutral as I can here but bringing it back to the previous commenters' discussion on "the good of the world", I'm finding it hard to defend the injuries/item picked metric here

[rat9988]

The point is that then you'd have a job that would let you sit on ass all day in this case. if Amazon warehouse workers could sit their ass half the day or have better working conditions, their injury rate would be lower too.

[Aunche]

Or maybe they're just a lot better at reporting minor injuries. In the same vein, countries with stronger women's rights have higher rates of rape and sexual harassment.

[Retric]

These aren’t the kind of injuries you can hide.

[Symmetry]

They pay a lot more than the average retailer, which is why they feel they can work their employees so hard. I think they also tend to see less employee on employee violence.

[harvey9]

The latter is an astonishingly dystopian metric. Is the data published somewhere?

[giantg2]

"I think they also tend to see less employee on employee violence."

Increased shared hatred of the employer leads to increased employee cohesion?

[Spivak]

Shared hatred of <outgroup> leads to increased cohesion among <ingroup>. Tale as old as human civilization. Maybe one day we'll be able to hack this quirk of humanity on a large scale without needing <vulnurable marginalized population> to be the artificial outgroup.

One I've seen that I think might have promise is "white people" being the outgroup for "white people." Any collection of white people forms an ad hoc in group where some nondescript "everyone else" is the outgroup. Now everyone has a shared thing to hate but everyone you interact with becomes temporally part of your ingroup so you're never hating an specific person or group of people. And even though it's impossible to actually become part of the outgroup you still have some of the fear that if you embody the negative traits that are ascribed to the outgroup you might join them so it also gradually norms.

[Symmetry]

More that employees who show up to work drunk or high can be easily fired and replaced, while more normal warehouses usually start the shift with people who just don't show up and are stretched enough as it is.

[vineyardmike]

Price and convenience are probably better than average.

[satellites]

But that price and convenience is at the cost of quality and employee safety. And honestly not even worth it as a consumer even if you don’t care about the ethical issues. I’ve been severely disappointed with the quality of the average item on Amazon over the last few years, to the point that I have stopped using them completely. Even Walmart is better, which is saying a lot.

[giantg2]

I don't think I've had too many quality issues. The vast majority of the brands you buy at Amazon are also at Walmart or Walmart.com. If you're having issues, then you probably need to start evaluating brand vs seller. For your current discussion, you need to compare buying the same exact item from each. The big win in my eyes is being able to buy from Amazon Warehouse for a big discount.

[vineyardmike]

I haven’t had too many (any?) quality issues with Amazon I’m no shill - I don’t advocate for them since I’ve heard about plenty of quality issues, but I’ve never actually gotten the wrong product or a fake (unless the fake was so good it was equal to original… which is fine?).

What is everyone ordering that is subpar? Do people not just buy the same brands they’d buy at Walmart or target?

If you buy cheap stuff that was drop shipped off AliExpress, but reputable name brands from walmart… why not buy reputable brands from amazon?

[ROTMetro]

I ordered a pair music monitoring speakers. Only one came in the box. Amazon wouldn't accept my return because I only returned one speaker, not two. I had to fight them on the weight of the 'two' speakers they shipped me and finally they realized they were hit and that based on weight the package they sent me couldn't have contained two speakers. The amount of time that took locked up a fairly large chunk of my funds for way too long. I will never make a high dollar purchase on Amazon again.

[Retric]

Price comparisons assume you get the actual product you ordered.

[tootie]

Unless you have metrics for the average retailer, that's probably not true. Local corner shops vary widely, but are not the least bit shy about hiring undocumented workers, stealing wages, skimping on safety and avoiding taxes. They just do it at such a small scale, it doesn't make the news.

[Retric]

The statistics I gave where in comparison to the average. They also have higher rates of injury and pay less in taxes.

Amazon has had wage theft issues, but I don’t know how they stack up on undocumented workers or the average retailer which includes Costco etc not just tiny corner stores.

Wage theft: https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/2/22262294/amazon-flex-wage-... more wage theft: https://www.wweek.com/news/2022/11/15/murmurs-amazon-settles... you can find a bunch of these going back years but this is what I was initially thinking of: https://www.fastcompany.com/3020175/employees-sue-amazon-ove...

[tootie]

I don't doubt that Amazon has abused workers in various ways, I'm just saying the headlines exist because of their massive scale and visibility. EPI estimates (which are probably a bit aggressive, but backed by sources) say of 2.4M workers in the 10 most populous states, $8B/yr are lost to wage theft. Amazon, with about 1M employees, is not stealing billions per year. In fact, they consistently pay well above minimum wage. My point here isn't that Amazon is great and we should stop complaining, but rather that worker abuse is rampant across all industries and Amazon is likely exceeding what is a very low bar.

https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-fro...

[Retric]

You are misusing that statistic the average of all employers would include all workers not only those workers that experienced wage theft.

If the US labor US labor force is ~161.2 million workers and had 8B/year in wage theft then the average per 1 million workers is ~50 million. Seeing multiple payouts well over 50 million suggests Amazon could be worse than average here.

[giantg2]

Where were those stats? I didn't see them in your comment history.

[Retric]

So wait you searched by comment history rather than say Google: https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/12/tech/amazon-injury-data-study...

[bhelkey]

> The statistics *I gave* where in comparison to the average.

If you say you linked a statistic, it seems reasonable to me to assume that you linked a statistic.

[Retric]

Gave a statistic isn’t the same as linking to a statistic.

Also, statistics include facts like more than average not just specific numerical values.

PS: Though I have also linked to the numeric value before just not in this comment chain.

[giantg2]

So wait, you lied about providing prior metrics.

It's important to be looking at the same numbers when having a discussion about those numbers.

[Retric]

No, facts like more than average are statistics. You seemingly misunderstood the term and then tried to derail an argument which I find hilarious.