The moment you hit that “Place Your Order” button, a chain reaction sparks, sending a team of warehouse workers and delivery drivers into the frenzy of activity to get your package to your door before the end of the day.

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For those of us sitting at home at our computers, Amazon is one of the modern world’s great luxuries — but for the people who make up the cogs of the machine that make it possible, it’s a grueling push in sweatshop-like conditions that wreak havoc on their bodies and their health.

Amazon has been called one of the worst places to work in America—but to see just how bad it really is, we took a deep dive into life is like working inside one of their warehouses.

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Inside of an Amazon warehouse, it’s sink or swim. Amazon wants its workers to be as productive as their colleagues—and they’re not afraid to fire them if they fall behind.

Their employees track their work with scanners—not unlike the ones you see in grocery stores—that are equipped with a program called “ADAPT”. It tracks how many items they’re scanning, and if you pause even for a second, it tracks it and pushes into an algorithm that can get you fired.

On average, employees are expected to scan a new item every 11 seconds — which adds up to more than 300 items an hour. If you take a break—even to go to the bathroom—the machine starts adding up your “time off task”, and if it gets too high, you’re gone.

Warehouse workers say they’ve seen colleagues who gave five years of their lives to the company sent packing because of their numbers.

So how many people get fired by ADAPT? One warehouse was forced to report its numbers during a lawsuit, and their figures are staggering. That one warehouse alone had let their efficiency program fire 300 full-time employees in a single year.^[1]

9 Workers Pee In Bottles And Trash Cans

When pausing your work for a second can cost you your job, taking a bathroom break can be career suicide. It’s especially bad if you’re nowhere near a toilet — and so some Amazon workers have admitted that, to keep their jobs, they pee in bottles and trash cans.

Not everyone’s willing to take those kinds of drastic measures, but the people who hold it in suffer in their own ways. Some have admitted that they don’t drink a drop of water for their entire 10-hour, physically-demanding shift, while others have held it so much that they’ve developed urinary tract infections.

Delivery drivers are pushed just as hard. They have to deliver so many packages that some have admitted that, to make their orders in time, they defecate in their delivery vans.

Others just speed.

“I had to, the way it was designed. You’re going to have to do that,” one Amazon delivery driver told the press after admitting to driving 120 mph to finish his route before nightfall. “I had a few crashes… but not bad crashes.”^[2]

8 Amazon Workers Get Injured At 4X The Normal Rate

As high as the risk of getting fired might be in an Amazon warehouse, the risk of getting injured is even higher. One warehouse has reported having 422 injuries in a single year — which is more than 4X the industry average.

Amazon’s high injury rate is directly linked to their intense quotas. Demands on workers are so high that many don’t see any way to meet them without taking short cuts — and so basic safety guidelines are ignored just to get those packages out faster.

But in an Amazon warehouse, getting injured is no excuse for taking a break. That’s why their factories come equipped with vending machines that dispense free pain medication to anyone with a work badge, so you can pop a few pills and get to work.

One worker admitted to a reporter that she’s started “popping [Advil] like candy” because of the aches all over her body. It’s probably unhealthy — but before she started popping pills, she says that she’d end up in such horrible pain that she’s collapse onto the warehouse floor and cry.

Another worker, whose on-the-job injuries have left her bulging discs, back sprain, joint inflammation, and chronic pain put it like this:

“I’m still too young to feel like I’m 90 years old.”^[3]

7 A Man Having A Heart Attack Wasn’t Given Help For 25 Minutes

When Thomas Becker had a heart attack in an Amazon warehouse in 2017, he begged his colleagues: “Do not let me die.”

But they did.

His coworkers immediately called their supervisors and asked them to call 9-1-1 for help, but the Amazon warehouse’s management was more concerned about the security of their building than they were about the man who was dying on their concrete floor.

Management demanded everyone present give them their personal information, including their social security numbers and dates of birth, before they called for help.

In the meantime, nothing was done to help Becker. There were defibrillator boxes around the warehouse that could have saved his life — if they defibrillators in them. But instead, they were empty, just pasted onto the wall for show, and so nobody could do anything for him until the emergency responders arrived.

It took 25 minutes for anyone to call 9-1-1 — and when they did, management refused to let them in through the loading dock door that would have brought them directly to Becker. Instead, they had security question the responders at the door, then walked them the long way through the facility, adding another 7 minutes to their response time.

By the time someone finally reached Becker, he’d already stopped breathing.^[4]

6 Amazon Had 6 Deaths In A Year

Becker’s death wasn’t a one-off incident. Two years later, another worker had a heart attack — and once again, the Amazon team left him dying on the floor for 20 minutes before doing anything to help.

Between Nov. 2018 and Nov. 2019, the company had 6 deaths within its warehouses, and they’ve managed to brush off the blame for every one.

The only time they were ever even briefly charged for an employee’s death was after an Indiana worker named Phillip Lee Terry was crushed to death by a forklift in 2017. Terry was a former marketer with no experience with heavy machinery, but when he got a job at Amazon, he was almost immediately put in charge of riding and repairing forklifts.

He was given no training. A co-worker gave him brief, verbal instructions, but that was done entirely off-the-record. Terry didn’t know the proper safety precautions required to work on a forklift — and so, when trying to repair one, he ended up crushed by a 1,200-pound metal platform.

Courts briefly ruled that Amazon was at fault, and, for Terry’s death, fined the company — which had made $72.4 billion in profit that year — $28,000.

But even that was brushed aside. Amazon appealed to Gov. Eric Holcomb, who was trying to convince them to bring their next headquarters to Indiana, and — hoping to lure in their business—he waived the fine and absolved them of all blame.^[5]

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5 Amazon Robots Have Sprayed Workers With Bear Repellent Multiple Times

An Amazon warehouse made national news in Dec. of 2018 when a robot punctured a bear repellent can, spraying every employee within range with a type of mace meant to be used on a 600-pound beast.

50 workers got sick, 24 of whom were sent to the hospital and one of whom was brought into intensive care. It was horrifying — but as reporters started looking into it, they quickly realized that it wasn’t even the first time it had happened.

Earlier the same year, another bear repellent can had been dropped to another Amazon warehouse floor, once again exploding and spraying an entire team. And a few years before that, a robot had sprayed its colleagues by running over yet another can of bear repellent.

That’s three times in just a couple of years that a factory full of Amazon workers just trying to make a paycheck got bear spray in their eyes — and every time, it was because of a robot that just wasn’t programmed to be careful enough.^[6]

4 Amazon’s Pickers Walk 20 Miles A Day

“Stowers” and “Pickers” — the people who collect the merchandise and bring it to the conveyor belts for packaging — have to do a lot of walking. In fact, it’s pretty normal for them to walk up to 20 miles a day.

Amazon’s tried to sell that as a positive. They even have a training video in which an employee boasts that she’s lost 20 pounds from all the walking — but for the workers, it’s not exactly fun. Most of the walking is done on concrete floors, leaving employees in so worn down that they tend to rely on the pain meds in those vending machines to get through a day.

“I feel like I’ve been hit by a garbage truck,” one worker told a reporter, before admitting that she takes a minimum of four pain pills a day.

Amazon’s defense is that they’re trying to do away with these jobs and replace them with robots — but the statistics show that the robots just make things worse. In factories that have robot stowers and pickers, the employees packaging are forced to put through items three to four times as quickly, putting intense strain on their bodies.

Keeping up with the robots is even more brutal than all that walking — and, as a result, injury rates are even higher in Amazon factories that use robots.^[7]

3 Workers Put In Mandatory 60-Hour Weeks

During the off-season, Amazon workers have fairly normal hours. They usually put in four 10-hour shifts each week, giving them a standard 40-hour work-week. But when the holidays come, work becomes nothing short of brutal.

From mid-November to the end of Christmas, Amazon workers are required to do mandatory overtime, working 60 hours a week.

There’s no way out of it. The warehouses put a freeze on time off requests when the holidays come near, and anyone who tries to call in sick can get fired for taking too much unpaid time off.

Injuries skyrocket during these holiday rushes, according to an independent study of Amazon’s injury claims. The workers are pushed so hard and given so little time to rest that their bodies just can’t handle the strain.

“It’s like doing 11 1/2 hours of cardio five days a week,” one worker has said. “You’re going up and down stairs, squatting down, getting on your knees, getting back up.”

“For the 60-hour workweek,” another says, “you’re a slave.”^[8]

2 Amazon Workers Demonstrate Suicidal Tendencies

Reporters for the Daily Beast reviewed 9-1-1 calls from Amazon warehouse and found that, between Oct. 2013 and Oct. 2018, emergency responders were sent to Amazon warehouse to intervene in suicide attempts at least 189 times.

The key word there is “at least”. Their investigation only looked at call logs for about ¼ of Amazon’s warehouses in the US, and it didn’t look at any in other countries — and so 189 is only a small fraction of the real number.

These workers get suicidal for a wide variety of reasons, but almost every one can be traced back to Amazon’s quota system.

One call came from a woman in Florida, who said she was “going to go home and kill herself” because she’d been fired for inefficiency; another came from a man who was considering hurting himself because of “all the demands his employer has placed on him”; and a third just outright told police she was planning on either “[running] her vehicle into an 18 wheeler or cutting her throat.”

“It’s this isolating colony of hell where people having breakdowns is a regular occurrence,” one former employee told them. “[It’s] mentally taxing to do the same task super fast for 10-hour shifts, four or five days a week.”^[9]

1 Amazon’s Solution Is To Replace Everyone With Robots

So how’s Amazon going to deal with being called one of America’s worst workplaces? Simple — by firing everybody and bringing in machines.

Amazon is actively working to replace their staff with machines. They recently announced a set of robots designed to replace their packers, and they’re already planning on using them to get rid of 1,300 warehouse workers in American alone.

But that’s only the first step in a bigger plan. Down the road, Amazon’s actively looking into just replacing every single human being in the entire factory. One Amazon Director told a business magazine that the company is “10 years away” from being able to create “lights-out”, human-free warehouses.

The only reason they haven’t done it already is that the technology doesn’t exist yet.

“There’s a variety of technology that’s come out,” the Amazon director bemoaned, “but it’s not close to where we need it.”

But in another 10 years or so, all of these Amazon complaints will finally go away — because all of the workers will have been replaced by machines.^[10]

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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.