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Comment by pranjalv123 | Hacker News Reader

Is stuff like "your workers shouldn't collapse of exhaustion because you don't want to air condition your warehouses" something so difficult to achieve at scale? Is it even a particularly high standard?

Maybe before talking about high standards, we should start with low standards.

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People on HN like to talk trash about Amazon and that's fine. All that I ask is that you don't do an AMZN_warehouse_worker == AMZN_SDE / AMZN_SE kind of argument. Warehouse work is boring, it's low paid, at the end of the day you're tired and you're dirty, and you didn't make a lot. During the winter it's cold and during the summer it's going to be hot - logistics companies heat warehouses just enough to keep product from freezing. The closest thing to a computer is a hand-held wireless barcode scanner. Them's the breaks of being a box b for any large logistics / supply chain company. UPS, FedEX, DHL, or UP, none of them are tech companies so we don't talk about them but the reality is supply chain is very price sensitive, the industry is low margin and competitive, it's not romantic, and it's classist. No one turns down Stanford to work the graveyard shift unloading tires. The people there will be randomly drug tested and they will be checked on occasion when they're leaving. Argue there is honor to any job done well and I'll agree with you but stop with this Amazon Logistics goes out of it's way to be cruel narrative.

While I agree with your underlying point, Amazon does deserve special attention because it tries to win hearts and minds, in fact it's the backbone of their branding operation. This letter is a perfect example.

FedEx does not have the hearts and minds of customers, everybody expects their employees to piss in bottles and would switch to the first lower cost provider available. Amazon is turning into a larger and much more ruthless FedEx, yet somehow gets a free pass and is allowed to spout this bullshit with a straight face about how 500.000 bottle-wielding Amazonians are making the world a better place.

> Amazon is turning into a larger and more ruthless FedEx, yet somehow gets a free pass

They're not getting a free pass. I've been reading about Amazon abuse stories non-stop for ten years in the mainstream media, as it pertains to their treatment of labor in logistics.

We're discussing this right now on HN, and every big story about this sort of thing re Amazon shows up on HN, precisely because they have not been getting a free pass. It's closer to universally understood that Amazon doesn't take good care of its logistics workers (and it may be wider than that based on some past stories). Every time something happens in that segment of Amazon's business, it makes the NY Times and the frontpage of all US media (just as the bottle pissing did, or the building air conditioning story did before that, or the employee cancer story).

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