Even though warehouse work is physical and fast paced, my only warehouse experiences include Amazon and a local grocery warehouse (where I’m currently working at)
In my experience, Amazon was slightly easier (for me) to make rates and complete daily tasks, despite longer shift times & mixed reviews on various employee experiences while working at Amazon.
However, I understand that warehouse work needs to be completed in a timely manner, but I’ve seen and heard of warehouse workers “cutting corners” and risking potential injuries while trying to work as fast as they can in order to make rate, which makes me wonder why certain warehouse jobs are “more strict” with rates and daily tasks when compared to other warehouse jobs?
I already know that it all depends on what type of warehouse it is, what type of work they do, and what type of equipment they use as well. My local grocery warehouse has traditional warehouse equipment: (forklifts & pallet jacks) which means we build our “orders” on wooden pallets & have plastic wrap machines for our convenience.
Furthermore, since our rate system is slightly inflated (IMO) they only give us so much time to complete orders (which vary in size) even though our supervisors accept delay sheets and understand that delays are inevitable while working in a warehouse setting.
On an extra note, depending on the size of our orders, it’s easy for most of us to make rate, but at the same time, bigger orders usually slow all of us down, which is why I appreciate it when I have a mixture of big and small orders, since it makes it easier (for me) to make rate, even though I’ve been “slowly” improving ever since I started back in January.
Why questions about jobs always come down to one answer:
Managers are morons who can make wide-ranging decisions affecting workers for any reason, no reason, or simply out of ignorant spite. And usually do.
Any attempt to think that a business is run logically is doomed to failure. And the farther down the food chain you are, the more this is true. It’s just spite, ego, and stupidity on the part of whoever is your boss, grandboss, and great grandboss. Nothing more, and nothing less.
All the monkey are in a tree, at their various heights. The monkeys up top look down & see a bunch of monkey looking up at them, smiling while the monkeys at the bottom look up & see nothing but a bunch of assholes.
I worked at meat warehouse which was fast paced but thank God they didn’t mention rates like Amazon. Every warehouse is different no one warehouse is the same. It’s mostly distribution type warehouses that have rates. Pharmaceutical warehouse, arms manufacturing warehouse and meat packing warehouse don’t have rates but all warehouse jobs are fast paced and you can’t hide in the bathroom all day.
That employees will do as little as they can get away with. Different managers have different systems for dealing with this fact. Some work better than others.
There are all sorts of directions to wiggle within a job description like warehouse order fulfillment/material handler. For example, a cashier at a Burger King has a very different experience from a cashier at JC Penney or a cashier at Aldi or a cashier at Ceasar’s Palace casino in Las Vegas.
Similarly, there are zillions of types of warehouses and different jobs within them. For example, some are freezers, nearly the entire building. Some maintain a low oxygen environment for fire risks. Some distribute armaments and munitions. They’re all very different workplaces and I don’t see how to easily generalize.
For the record, I dislike “incentivized” jobs like this. It just encourages sloppy work. But, I don’t have a perfect solution.
I hate it from the other side, too. I am in engineering, not labor, but we have (IMO useless) metrics we are tracked on, like drawing release cycle time. So what do we do? Learn to fudge the metric tracking! The work still gets done in the same time it would have, but now we look “better”.