Amazon didn’t get to be one of the biggest companies in the world by accident. They reported $576 billion in revenue for 2023. Clearly, the way they run their business is working out pretty well for them and it certainly looks like Jeff Bezos doesn’t have much to complain about. But, if you’re making that kind of money, there’s a good chance somewhere in the chain things go wrong every once in a while. In Amazon’s case, one of the weakest links seems to be their warehouses where every story has a little bit of nightmare sprinkled on top.
10. Bear Repellent Has Exploded in More Than One
One thing people really love about Amazon is that you can buy just about anything there. Outside of a handful of really niche items, there’s a good chance some version of what you want is going to be on the site. The downside that most of us don’t see at home is that all of those things need to be stored in an Amazon warehouse somewhere.
If you’re buying pots and pans, or maybe a box of vegan mac and cheese, that’s not a big deal. But what if you want to buy bear spray? You know, those spray cans of bear repellent that are meant to scare away actual bears out in the wild?
Amazon warehouses carry bear spray for people who want to order it online and, more than once now, those cans have exploded in a warehouse. If you can use it to force a bear away, imagine what it does to the average warehouse worker.
In 2018 a can of bear repellent was knocked off of a shelf at an Amazon warehouse in New Jersey. One of Amazon’s robots accidentally punctured the can, releasing the spray which is capsaicin-based. 24 employees had to go to the hospital.
That story in New Jersey was fairly well publicized, but less well known was the same thing happening in 2015 at the Amazon warehouse in Haslet, Texas.
9. Workers Pee in Bottles
The Rock would make a great Amazon employee because, like some of them, he’s been known to pee in bottles at work. In 2021, Amazon was dealing with a lot of bad PR about the conditions in its warehouses. They were being accused of being exploitative and dangerous and at one point they officially denied accusations that employees were attempting to save time at work by peeing in bottles instead of going to bathrooms.
The basic idea here is that Amazon expects its employees to meet quotas for picking items off shelves. According to these online rumors, if you needed to take a bathroom break you were wasting so much time that you would never be able to make your quotas by walking all the way to the bathroom and back. As a result, some people opted to pee in bottles to save time. Amazon denied this ever happened.
After Amazon’s public denial, numerous journalists who had done reports on their employment practices and had been in their warehouses and interviewed their employees clapped back. Multiple sources provided testimonials and other evidence indicating yes, many employees pee in bottles to skip bathroom breaks.
8. Numerous Workers Suffer Injuries and Exhaustion
The demands of working in an Amazon warehouse have proven to be brutal. Injuries are very common and extreme exhaustion is rampant, By the numbers it’s quite staggering. As many as 41% of Amazon workers have reported being injured on the job while 69% had to take unpaid leave because of how absolutely exhausted and in pain they were. 34% of workers had to do that three or more times.
The data came from a survey that covered 42 states, 451 Amazon facilities and nearly 1,500 Amazon workers.
7. The Company Has Been Fined for Excessive Surveillance
You might be wondering what it is that’s going on in an Amazon warehouse that could lead to so many people being injured, exhausted, and having to pee in bottles. Part of the problem is that Amazon is always watching you. In fact, the company has been fined for its excessive surveillance habits in the past.
In 2024, France fined Amazon €32 million, or about $34 million for its illegal surveillance tactics. The company tracked employee movements so precisely that every single break they took had to be justified.
Employees are subject to three different layers of tracking that monitor short breaks, long breaks, and even how quickly they scan different items which can flag you if you scan something too fast, not just too slow.
The system was deemed to be far too intrusive and led to mistrust and micromanagement. In the UK, similar research has led to the company’s surveillance technology being accused of causing extreme stress and anxiety.
6. Amazon May Be Replacing Humans with Robots
When Amazon isn’t being accused of treating its human employees unfairly, it’s looking to replace them entirely. The company has been fairly proud of its efforts to introduce robots to the workforce. In 2023 they began trials with humanoid robots called Digit that the company says will “free up employees to better deliver for our customers.”
While the cost of building and rolling out a robot workforce is arguably going to be high, the plan is for these things to only cost $3 per hour to operate in the future. Employees have long feared that these robots are going to end up taking all of their jobs, but Amazon keeps saying that they’re only there to help the employees not replace them entirely.
Time will tell how this one pans out, but it’s hard not to appreciate the fears of somebody who’s now being set to work right beside a robot that never needs to take a break.
5. Amazon Raised Wages in 2018 But Cut Benefits to Do it
For the past few years, it’s been almost impossible to avoid stories about minimum wage, livable wage, and the cost of living in general. Many jobs that were once extremely low paying are now paying significantly more, although since everything is more expensive now it doesn’t really make that big of a difference.
Amazon tried to get ahead of the curve back in 2018 by boasting about how it was raising wages for warehouse workers. At that time it had boosted the minimum wage for its workers to $15 per hour. Back then the federal minimum wage was $7.25 an hour and Amazon had been starting new employees at $11 an hour. So $15 an hour seemed great, right?
Less well publicized until the press looked into it was the fact that, to accommodate this wage increase, Amazon got rid of benefits to pay for it. Previously, employees were given stock In the company as well as bonuses based on attendance and performance. All of that was cut for the wage increase. The same thing happened in the UK where the company said employees just preferred to have immediate cash.
4. Amazon Forces Employees to Work a “Megacycle” 10+ Hour Shift
Even without context if you hear about something called a megacycle, you’re expecting it to be dramatic. In 2021, workers in Chicago were told to either sign up for a megacycle 10-hour graveyard shift or face the possibility of losing their jobs entirely. The company was shutting down their warehouse and employees were going to be able to move to a new warehouse as long as they took the 1:20 a.m. to 11:50 a.m. shift.
For Amazon, this was all about efficiency and being able to get products out to customers more quickly. The warehouse in question was a facility that dealt with last-minute deliveries. It is smaller than a typical Amazon warehouse. The extra long overnight shift supposedly allows products to get out to customers more quickly.
The downside, of course, is that the hours are not ideal for pretty much any worker. And remember, this was in the height of the covid pandemic so working regular shifts was essential for a lot of workers with families.
Workers are given very little warning of the shift change but Amazon maintains no one is “forced” onto the shift. That said, most new facilities run on this schedule and some employees have stated they’ve ended up working 57-hour weeks this way and can’t get out of bed for three days afterward.
3. There Have Been Numerous Accusations of Racism
With everything Amazon has going against it already, workplace harassment is one thing that employees could definitely do without. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case. There have been serious allegations of racial harassment in Amazon warehouses.
In 2022, employees at an Amazon warehouse in Illinois filed claims of harassment and even death threats that were racially based. The complaints included photos of graffiti in the bathrooms to support the claim.
26 employees filed the complaint together and stated that, when they asked for extra security on site, they were told to go home and not get paid or just deal with it. One worker said she was fired for saying she’d go to the authorities about it.
Elsewhere, when Amazon tries to stop unions from forming, it has been accused of racism again as it spends literally millions of dollars and focuses strongly on warehouses that are predominantly employing Black workers.
Even the location of Amazon warehouses is suspect. They build 70% of their warehouses in neighborhoods that are predominantly populated by people of color, and 57% are in low-income areas. The side effects of this are huge increases in traffic, noise, and pollution from fleets of delivery trucks.
2. They Are Extremely Anti-Union
One thing you’ll notice about companies that are criticized for their poor labor practices is that they tend to not be in favor of unions. Amazon is no different. That said, Amazon will go the extra mile to try to keep their employees out of unions. They’ve been accused of paying their employees $5000 to quit before a union can even form.
The pay-to-quit program is supposed to actually be about employee engagement. It weeds out people who don’t want to be there. But Amazon’s timing, right before major union votes, seems targeted and an attempt to weed out the sorts of employees who would want a union.
In addition to payoffs, Amazon will hold warehouse-wide anti-union meetings that are mandatory for everyone to attend. There were 25 meetings per day in Staten Island leading up to a union vote there. That was non-stop from eight in the morning to four in the afternoon, every day, for six weeks. Employees attended in shifts and had to be at two per week.
1. Amazon Offered Zen Booths For Mental Health
So you just experienced nine harrowing tales of what can happen in an Amazon warehouse. The picture painted so far has been pretty grim. But, as we all know, you have to pay your bills. People are always going to be working at Amazon, at least until those robots take over. But in the meantime, does Amazon do anything to help out its overly stressed employees? You bet they do. They have “Mindful Practice” rooms, aka AmaZen.
In 2021, Amazon rolled out the mindful practice room as a place for tired and stressed-out workers to take a break. The rooms described were as “coffin-like” in one story, were outhouse-sized booths in the middle of the warehouse that allowed employees who felt they were having a mental or emotional issue to sit and watch corporate-produced mental wellness videos. Just imagine that stress washing away from you.
The tiny booths featured potted plants, a fan, and a fake skylight to soak up some stress-reducing fake sunshine. After being thoroughly mocked on the internet, Amazon took down any promotional material about the idea and it’s unclear if the booths are actually in warehouses now or not.