Permanently Deleted
Returning products is going to be the next personal responsibility scold.
Seeing all these Amazon commercials about how they’re going green and transitioning to only electric vehicles and zero emission deliveries and I’m just staring at the screen and thinking “Making an entire fleet of electric vehicles wasn’t carbon neutral, the metal, the water, the lithium in the batteries isn’t renewable, and the vehicle is being used to deliver more plastic junk.”
Not to mention the wear on the roads, the rubber tires that need to be replaced, the oil needed to keep the vehicle running.
It’s deeper than you think. I’ve been working at an Amazon DPS (wearhouse) for like a month now and the waste is astounding. Because of COVID, the water fountains are off limits so the company has to bring in palettes and palettes of plastic bottled water because employees all need water. Working hard, I’ll drink at least 5 or 6 a day. Multiply that by the hundreds of people that work with me and it’s so much fucking plastic it defies imagination. Oh, and only one specifically marked Recycling receptacle in the whole building so that’s nice.
Not to mention that story from a few days ago about how plastic recycling was basically a sham narrative pushed forward by the plastic industry to relieve consumers’ guilt :stalin-stressed:
Of course. The old chant was “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!” and all the corporations realized that the Reduce and Reuse parts would fuck up their bottom line so they plaster RECYCLE all the time everywhere on everything, in your face 24/7 so you don’t think about reducing consumption.
Oh shit, I used to work at Kohl’s. Blast from the fucking past. Now I work for Amazon, go figure. Hang in there, fam. Retail is hell
Well I can only speak to my individual experience, at the specific type of warehouse I’m in. There are fulfillment centers, where individual orders are picked and packed in boxes/envelopes. These are the places I’ve heard most of the horror stories about I think. I work at a different kind called a DPS which are smaller. No one pees in bottles but it can be intense. Lots of different tasks and some you have to be legit fast at, or they pull you off and get you to do something simpler. I’m pretty good at the task I do so I’ve never learned what happens if you’re just not fast enough/ good enough to keep up. There are cameras everywhere and I’m not exactly sure who is watching but I don’t think it’s anyone who is actually in the building which is kinda disconcerting. They’re taking COVID pretty serious, there are literally people walking around with bullhorns screaming “6 feet” and that’s their whole job. You can’t get too close to anyone for too long without someone yelling or telling you “Don’t get too close, the cameras are watching”. Literally I can’t even walk around Wal Mart anymore without inwardly freaking out for a couple seconds every time someone gets too close to me because of the conditioning.
It could be worse. 15.35/hour, full time, lots of overtime, 401k. 3 am to 11:30 (which I like way better than 9-5 but not everyone’s cup of tea). The job is a good fit because of how my mind works; I like my work simple and fast paced. Point me at a palette of boxes and I’ll throw that shit on the conveyor like a man possessed. If I do well, the other people on my team down the line from me can do their jobs well and that’s rewarding for me. I’m lucky though, I’m strong enough to keep up and I have family support as a safety net. If I was on my own, having to pick up loads of over time just to make ends meet, wearing myself out, I don’t think I’d be as satisfied with the job as I am.
At the end of the day, if you can move pretty fast, follow orders, and are good at anticipating the desires of your higher ups, you could do way worse than Amazon. I know I like it better than Kohl’s. I could rant about my time at Kohl’s. Or my time at Sport Chalet. God I hate retail
Consumer culture is shit, but I don’t know if this is meaningfully worse than people buying things at a mall.
