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Comment by gnatman | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty easy to imagine both of these things being true, and the one fulfillment center you visited having substantially less than 13k disciplinary notices. I worked 7 years in industrial staffing for a variety of large distribution centers (not Amazon), and the automated discipline systems in place around voice-pick efficiency were borderline draconian.

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The real question is, are there any examples of companies achieving what Amazon is achieving at its scale, *without* employing these techniques? And if so what are they doing differently?

I think the closest you’ll get is Costco, but obviously their distribution model isn’t super comparable. (They do have some similarities though, especially in how they make a lot of their profit from a yearly subscription)

That’s not the the real question. The real question is “what is the maximum amount of productivity that our culture will accept beyond which it considers the burden inhumane?”

For example, in antiquity, slavery was acceptable.

Even more recently, Taylorism. I mean, yeah, it's good for robots but not for people.

When people design systems they should consider the humanity of such systems despite the issue of people knowingly and maliciously short-circuiting things.

Even if the answer is a clear "no" that doesn't make this case acceptable.

What do you want to achieve? Inhumane world for the sake of tiny productivity gain?

I never said that the punishments are not possible, just that the processes in place and just the basic way Amazon FCs work prevents the picking issues from happening.

I've never worked for Amazon but have worked in a couple of warehouses, I'm trying to envision any system that involves a lot of humans working as quickly as possible while still making it impossible to have out of place items...I'd love some more detail on how this works.

There are TONS of videos and photos leaked by workers that demonstrate how much of a disaster some of the Fresh warehouses are, e.g. a particularly egregious example where there are dozens if not hundreds of products fallen from bins, smashed to bits in the aisle by picker foot traffic: https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonUFF/comments/skmtto/so_disgus...

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