Amazon warehouse what is it

As for me, I'm pretty much convinced! Product Reviews. Home Ideas. United States. Type keyword s to search. Today's Top Stories. The Rise of the Cleanfluencer. What exactly is Amazon Warehouse? The Amazon Warehouse homepage. Lexie Sachs. For many of my colleagues, even the pay cheque is not enough.

In recent years, hard-pressed workers have been found camping outside warehouses in the UK to save money. Jeff Bezos has proven ignorant of public appeals to decency.

This will persist if its labour force remains invisible to society and if workers are kept atomised and unrepresented. In truth, I perceived that the total lack of internal worker representation at Amazon is due not just to thin union density, but also to the structure of the workplace itself. Now that COVID has necessitated the introduction of PPE and physical distancing, communicating and organising in the warehouse workplace is basically impossible.

The largest in the UK covers one million square feet — or 14 football pitches in size. These warehouses consist of so many identical floors of shelves, conveyor belts and parcel chutes that it is physically disorienting. An Amazon fulfilment center at Baltimore. This is where workers push a trolley over distances upwards of 25 kilometres across worn linoleum and concrete floors, which they load with products pulled from shelves for hours at a time.

I was always surprised by how numb I felt and far I had walked at the end of each shift. Any sense of progress is eliminated. It does wear you down. With social distancing in place and plastic walls separating each canteen seat, workers hardly communicate. If you are determined, you can make a friend at break times. If you are exhausted, the isolation is intense. Sometimes you can hear the echoes of the radio playing from speakers across the warehouse.

If it happens again someone from the employment agency, Adecco who Amazon uses to rotate its temporary workforce , approaches you with a clipboard and asks you to sign a warning. The effect of this time pressure is that it keeps employees busy, while quickly draining their mental and physical energy reserves. Perhaps you are beginning to understand the loneliness of working for Amazon.

We have to look at why people work for Amazon to understand how it maintains a workforce subject to such conditions. Who needs the original wrapping anyway? Make no mistake, Amazon can sell your products under these conditions without even so much as a by-your-leave. The default for unfulfillable and reimbursed items in Seller Central gives permission to Amazon to repackage and resell the product.

No matter how closely you guard an exclusive product, you can very well end up competing with your own product for the Buy Box.

What you may not be seeing is the next step, where you have lost control over the customer experience. Once that product is sold through Amazon Warehouse Deals, you are out of the picture. They make mistakes. Because Amazon Warehouse Deals sells discounted product, the pricing of the Amazon offer is usually affected. This means tougher competition, and at the same time, reduced control over the product. Moreover, Amazon Warehouse Deals can list the product as a special offer, which will most likely lead to winning the Buy Box.

Amazon Warehouse Deals is part of Amazon, so it gets precedence as the dominant seller. You are essentially competing against yourself with a disadvantage right there. If you are dealing with a customer return, know that Amazon may not actually dispose of it in the way you think. If a product is lost or damaged in an Amazon warehouse, you may want to reconsider simply getting a reimbursement. Opt out and have unfulfilled or damaged product returned directly to you.

You will have to pay for the cost of returns, but you will save a lot in opportunity cost down the line. Figure out the value of lost Buy Box potential plus brand control and carefully compare that to return shipping.

Remember, you can always resell those items on another marketplace where you retain control over the process and the customer experience. You can suggest changes to offers on your products listed as Amazon Warehouse Deals where you see incorrect information.