Ever wondered how Amazon really works? The linked article gives you an insider’s look at all the moving pieces that work together to let you buy practically anything you’d ever want.
Shoppers take for granted that Amazon will have what they want. The only time they notice is when Amazon doesn’t. “The biggest failure you can have is not to have what they’re looking for,” says Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor, which makes cloud-based software for third-party sellers to analyze their sales and marketing campaigns on Amazon, eBay, Google, and elsewhere.
Starting in 2006, the rate of Amazon’s sales growth took off, an upswing Wingo credits to the launch of unlimited 2-day shipping through Amazon Prime the previous year alongside the rise of the company’s third-party marketplaces. The arrival of third-party sellers fueled an “explosion in selection,” Wingo says, that also gave Amazon a powerful way to hedge the risk of stocking products too far out along the long tail of marginal popularity. Instead of sinking its own money into inventory that might sit for 60 days, Amazon could let someone else fill in that gap.
Lest you think this is merely a puff piece:
Such power and speed can come at a grave price. Amazon is facing a federal investigation into the death of a worker at a Pennsylvania fulfillment center who was reportedly struck and pinned by a pallet jack she was operating. Much has also been written about how the unrelenting nature of Amazon’s fulfillment system can foster exploitive, sometimes hazardous working conditions that have become the target of at least one set of class-action lawsuits.
This is news? This known about Amazon for at least two years.
i didnt know about the death until this link. thus, it offered value to me.
The article is weird. How is a worker death caused by – admittedly dangerous – equipment related to the way that Amazon runs it’s fulfillment centers?
We’re left to assume that their policies regarding speedy shipping, etc. affected this, but I don’t see evidence of that in the linked article or any deeper links.
That’s why the Feds are investigating
It was a critique of the article more than a critique of the handling of the situation. I’ve personally been involved with equipment like the one the lady had her accident with. It’s dangerous to be moving hundreds possibly thousands of pounds around on pallets.
I don’t like it when articles hint that a company’s policies are at fault for something like this, especially when they don’t provide proper justification.
Who knows, the company may be at fault, but I didn’t see the evidence in the article to justify that.
“Amazon is facing a federal investigation into the death of a worker …”
Google seems to be quite interested in robots these days. Maybe they’ll use them to display ads somehow. Who knows. Google does lots of dumb things with all that ad revenue.
But Amazon is the company that actually needs robots. To work in their warehouses.