Amazon and the Psychic Toll of the Modern Labour Market
An insider account by a former warehouse employee shows that delighting consumers comes at the expense of the lowest-paid workers
By Sarah O’Connor
When Jeff Bezos started Amazon in the mid-1990s in the converted garage of his house in Seattle, he built the company’s first desks out of cheap doors he bought from Home Depot. It was a moment that would come to carry “almost biblical significance” at the ecommerce giant, “like Noah building the ark”, according to Brad Stone, who charted Amazon’s breathtaking ascendancy in his book The Everything Store.
Two decades later and half a world away, when the protagonist in Heike Geissler’s book, Seasonal Associate, goes to a selection day for a Christmas temp job at an Amazon warehouse in Leipzig, eastern Germany, the first thing she notices in the lobby is a desk made of a door on trestles. It seems to fit with the shabby feel of the place: the layer of dust on the leaves of a potted plant; the grey patina on the wall above the chairs where countless heads have rested. Later, her enthusiastic Amazon trainer Robert explains that the door-desk is an homage to Bezos and a reminder that “the customer is king”.
