Shawn Hubler: How to think about Amazon - Sacramento Bee (blog)
Jerry Brown after losing a fight over sales taxes, Amazon built a massive warehouse – a million-square-foot colossus that rose up out of the fields near the farm town of Patterson like something beamed in from the future. One is JonPaul Elemen, a 34-year-old pallet dock worker. Two years ago, I met him in the Amazon parking lot at quitting time. It was Christmas week, and the “fulfillment center,” as Amazon calls its warehouses, had been open for just three months. He was sitting with his buddy Scott Wilson in Wilson’s 2001 Mitsubishi Eclipse. “We got lucky,” Elemen told me. “We heard there were over, like, 6,000 or 7,000 applicants. “Lucky” was a word I heard a lot in the parking lot that evening. Elemen talked about his Amazon benefits like a lottery winner describing a fully loaded Mercedes. He rejoiced at the 10-hour days the e-commerce behemoth was “letting” him put in, compared to the scant, five-hour shifts he had to fight for in his last gig as a restaurant worker, and marveled at the Wii the company had raffled off that week as... This week, Amazon is presenting a somewhat less awesome future, one in which the corporation and capitalism in general mainly just take care of themselves. In a blistering New York Times story , scores of white-collar employees described a thrilling but Darwinian workplace full of relentless demands and grinding turnover, one where gifted workers. Source: www.sacbee.com
