Adventures in the 21st century: Amazon warehouse a hellhole

This summer, an un-air-conditioned Amazon.com warehouse in Pennsylvania was so hot that the company stationed ambulances onsite to take workers stricken by the high temperatures to a local hospital. The hospital, for its part, was so alarmed at all the Amazon workers being dumped there that it complained directly to OSHA. Meanwhile, it seems the majority of the workers were $12-an-hour temps, and when one collapsed, there were always more to take his or her place. (I almost said "its" place.)

According to the local paper, the Allentown Morning Call:

Workers said they were forced to endure brutal heat inside the sprawling warehouse and were pushed to work at a pace many could not sustain. Employees were frequently reprimanded regarding their productivity and threatened with termination, workers said. The consequences of not meeting work expectations were regularly on display, as employees lost their jobs and got escorted out of the warehouse. Such sights encouraged some workers to conceal pain and push through injury lest they get fired as well, workers said.

During summer heat waves, Amazon arranged to have paramedics parked in ambulances outside, ready to treat any workers who dehydrated or suffered other forms of heat stress. Those who couldn't quickly cool off and return to work were sent home or taken out in stretchers and wheelchairs and transported to area hospitals. And new applicants were ready to begin work at any time.

An emergency room doctor in June called federal regulators to report an "unsafe environment" after he treated several Amazon warehouse workers for heat-related problems. The doctor's report was echoed by warehouse workers who also complained to regulators, including a security guard who reported seeing pregnant employees suffering in the heat.

In a better economy, not as many people would line up for jobs that pay $11 or $12 an hour moving inventory through a hot warehouse. But with job openings scarce, Amazon and Integrity Staffing Solutions, the temporary employment firm that is hiring workers for Amazon, have found eager applicants in the swollen ranks of the unemployed.

That's life in George Bush's America. Oh, you say Bush isn't President anymore? Well, he is -- anywhere workers are exploited and treated like firewood in a non-union workplace, where they are subjected to speed-ups and feel they can't even report injuries -- Bush is the President there.

Today's fake: Amazon astroturfs pro-Kindle comments

The blog Mobylives discovered some telltale similarities in comments to a post mentioning the Kindle, leading to the inescapable conclusion that the pro-Kindle comments were generated automatically by a program looking for blog posts about the e-reader.

The Mobylives blogger wonders why the behemoth would bother when the commenter names were obviously made-up monikers like Kendall Puddephatt and Sergio Rodenbough. Probably has something to do with search engines, which don't pay attention to commenter names but do pay attention to content.

I wonder if now I'll get a bunch of pro-Kindle fake comments. If I do, I'll be sure to approve them, so readers of this blog can see.

Analysis on 'Twitter storms'

The "digital" columnist at Advertising Age analyses the phenomena of "Twitter storms" such as the amazonfail debacle, saying in part:

By far the biggest issue most of the angry Twitterers had was that Amazon didn't respond until late Sunday and, when it did, the vague answer it offered to CNet -- the problem was a "glitch in the system" that was being fixed -- didn't satisfy the masses who had already spent the better part of Easter getting fired up. The next response from Amazon came Monday night, when it issued a statement calling the incident an "embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error."

Now, it's likely Amazon didn't really know what was going on -- at one point a hacker even tried to take credit for the issue -- but most social-media experts say that wasn't the problem. "A lot of people have this idea that you can only respond when you have every I dotted and T crossed and have figured out what's going on," said Jeff Rutherford, founder of Jeff Rutherford Media Relations. "It's perfectly fine if you say, 'We're aware there's an issue; we're not ignoring it, and we're working hard to get to the bottom of it.'" Amazon has always been tight-lipped from a public-relations standpoint and, in this case, it cost them.

I wonder how much it did cost them, or will cost them? Has anyone seen a dollar figure? Is it possible to ascribe a dollar figure to the loss of something intangible like reputation?

Two points: 1.) Amazon used to be known for fantastic customer service. I think they've lost hugely in that respect. 2.) In this economic climate it's difficult to determine how much business is lost from bad PR and how much can be blamed on slow spending. An NPR report this morning on plastic bottles quoted a bottled water industry spokesman as saying they blame any slowdown in sales on the economny, not on people seeking a less wasteful alternative to using all those plastic bottles.

technorati: amazonfail, Twitter, public relations

Amazonfail being put to bed for the moment

A day after learning, along with most of the rest of the English-speaking world, about Amazon de-listing LGBT and erotic books, I see that the rankings on my own books have been restored. Not that they're much to brag about -- they are numbers 704,277 and 1,436,221 at the moment -- but at least they're there.

Someday we'll know what it was all about. The technical explanation, that some guy in amazon.fr fucked with the code, makes sense -- but only if you ignore the explanations about "policy" changes that some inquisitive authors got. Man, what a clusterfuck this whole thing was.

technorati: amazonfail, books

Amazon pulls functionality for 'adult' books

Amazon.com arbitrarily de-listed hundreds -- possibly thousands -- of books for so-called adult content. They're still selling them, but no longer including the de-listed books in sales rankings. The de-listed books include award-winning gay-friendly books and general erotica. My own books are included, and they're definitely "gay friendly," but Stephen Elliott"s "My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up" is also affected, and it has practically no gay content.

Good coverage, comments on jezebel.com, Publishers Weekly.

Update: Associated Press is reporting that Amazon is now saying "There was a glitch in our systems and it's being fixed."

People on Twitter are putting up reaction using the #amazonfail tag.

technorati: amazonfail, amazon.com, books