Spoke with someone who recently spoke with an Amazon worker. She does the mailer envelopes, and over the course of a 10 hour shift with 2 30 minute breaks, she is expected to process 600 items an hour! That is one every 6 seconds! (And she thinks it is a great job!).
Are you familiar with any other “production type” job where you are expected to move that quickly and process as many items over the course of a shift? Maybe mail sorters in a post office?
I’m not thinking about keystrokes on a keyboard. Or number of objects passing past the eye of an inspector. Things you have to place your hand on and do something to.
I shared this story elsewhere on this board but it applies here. There’s a reason I only worked there for less than a month.
"It’s fast paced assembly line work producing several type of engine and industrial filters. Parts move past me on a conveyor belt and I have to stack/assemble them at the rate of 32 parts per minute. On top of this, every five minutes or so, I have step back and lift a 20 kilo tub of components and dump it into a feeder hopper that’s just above eye level. The belt doesn’t stop to let me do this. If unassembled parts get by my station, I’m wrong. If the hopper doesn’t get filled, I’m wrong. The floor supervisor knows we’ve been running under staffed but he just parrots management’s instruction to cope as best we can while making our weekly quotas. To compensate for under staffing, they’ve been doing outrageous amounts of overtime. Five 10 hour shifts per week is the bare minimum. Supposedly, management does try hard to get us one full weekend off every month but you can pretty much count on working three out of four Saturdays plus the occasional Sunday.
Around 1973 I worked making metal folding tables (for minimum wage). There were foot-actuated riveting machines, and two workers would lift a table, align parts, and stomp the switch as fast as physically possible. In an 8-hour day there was a 30-minute lunch break and two (federally mandated?) 15-minute breaks.
I didn’t mind the work much because I was young, and had been taught that employers were always right. But eventually I’d lie in bed at night, fall into a twilight state, and rivet tables in my mind. It gave me the motivation to leave my hometown and head for the Big City.
I don’t know how many pieces an hour I processed, but I was going as fast as I could.
I worked at a McDonalds when I was in college in the 1980s. It was the closest McDonalds to the university stadium in a large college town (20,000 residents, 20,000 students in a typical year).
When a game at the stadium let out, there were so many people in the lobby that you couldn’t see the front doors from behind the counter for about 3 or 4 hours.
McDonalds used grills back then. We had two grills that could each cook 40 hamburgers at a time. After games, we ran both grills full out, so we were cooking 80 hamburgers every 3 minutes, for about 4 hours straight.
It was like an assembly line. One person would run the grills. Put the burgers on, press the button to start the timer. Put the burgers on the other grill. By then the time would beep and you’d flip the burgers on the first grill. Finish that and the timer would beep to flip the burgers on the second grill. Finish that and the timer beeps to take the burgers off the first grill and put new ones on. Repeat, over and over, every 3 minutes.
I put the toppings on. There was a lever-activated ketchup and mustard dispenser. Put it over the burger and squeeze the lever, and just the right amount of ketchup and mustard squirted out onto the burger. Pickles had to be put on by hand. Big Macs had a secret sauce dispenser but had more hand-assembly than a hamburger or a cheeseburger. You had to move quick, because you needed to get all of the toppings on and the burgers assembled and wrapped before the next batch of 40 hamburgers came along (every minute and a half with two grills running since each grill took 3 minutes and they’d interlace them so one would finish when the other was halfway through).
It paid for my second year of college. And it wasn’t my worst college job.
My wife worked on Malley’s candy packing line for a short time. Her descriptions sound like the I Love Lucy episode. They had one reliever for quite a few workers. If you needed to go to the bathroom or even turn around and sneeze you had to call for the reliever. They hot swapped into your position without missing a bon bon.
My dad thanks to the army ( I learned “combat engineer” was a very flexible title especially if you were a good mechanic) made a career out of being that person but for the whole entire gm/Delco plant and was paid so much that eventually, he became the only salaried and highest paid assembly line worker they ever had there and by the time he retired 40 years later I was told he could do any job in the plant including management positions
Apparently, up until about 2005, he could dissemble a Delco car stereo and put it back together in 15 minutes
I loaded trucks for UPS while in college, in San Francisco. These were the gray trailers for the semis, some were 40 feet long — the “feeders”, in UPS-speak. Not the small brown “package cars”. Each box can be up to 70lbs and we had to load them at something like 800 boxes per hour.
It was a workout! Dripping with sweat, deep inside a dark trailer, you are moving fast! You build ‘walls’ with the boxes, one row at a time, from the floor to the very top while box after box after box is pushed in by the guy and conveyor belts out side the trailer.
It was very hard work. Many guys washed out. Couldn’t handle it. But I enjoyed that job, because I was young and strong, and the pay was good and on top of that I had health benefits for me and my young family.
Aah, to be young again…
Edited to add: ever since then, anytime any friend had to move, I was in charge of loading the truck. People would be amazed at how tightly I could pack a load.
Here’s a trailer load when we helped a church friend move. The top of the sofa on the top was about 8’ high. It was a secure load and we got to the destination, 5 miles away, without incident.
In my 20’s I worked in a paint factory. My job was to pack cans of paint on an “assembly line”. A never-ending, fast stream of 1 liter / 1 kg paint cans would be coming in from the left, and I had to whip out a standing box from a flat stack of disassembled boxes and put six cans of paint into it, all this in about 3 - 4 seconds, send the package downstream, and repeat the process throughout the eight-hour shift.
Had I had trouble performing at a sustained stage magician-level speed, within seconds the moving paint cans would have started gathering into a mass and begin dropping off the belt, making a huge mess and a costly delay.
The highest unit-per-second assembly style job I’ve done was dishwashing at a cafeteria, the one where the customers put their trays on a conveyor belt when they are finished. There was a constant stream of them, sometimes even getting backed up on the conveyor belt. One person took off the glasses, another the china, etc, and we put them into open containers of like 16 each to more easily slide into the industrial-strength dishwasher. At the fastest, you were doing one every few seconds in addition to moving the full containers down the line, but there were downtimes during the shift as well.
I also assembled finished newspaper stacks into larger stacks. They would get bundled up into packages of like 10 each, and I would have to throw them onto a cart, 4 to a layer, until the cart was full and then shove the cart out of the way and grab another cart, without missing a beat. They’d also come one every few seconds at the fastest.
That job was tough since not only were the packages heavy, sometimes they weren’t tied together very well so the individual papers would slip in the stack. And of course sometimes the correct bin wasn’t handy. And the best part was that occasionally, we would have to change types of newspapers because they had different ads for different areas. So someone would come up to you and very abruptly tell you to start putting things in another cart or let some of them continue down the line, and they didn’t inform you well enough to plan that ahead of time.
Same here. In my youth, was UPS unloader, loader, boxline sorter, and eventually driver. IIRC, boxline sort required 575 per hour, and unloader was 775/hour. These were minimums to keep the job. That’s why I’m not really clutching my pearls over the weekly Amazon horror stories in the media. Maybe there are differences I can’t see, or it’s harder to produce that level of throughput there, but the numbers aren’t out of line with my freight experience. I’d rate UPS the fastest pace of any production job I’m aware of, and the most demanding of my life. If you don’t keep up you can (literally) get buried in boxes.
Although the “rate” was slower, being a UPS driver was even more nerve-wracking. In the sort hub, conditions don’t vary much and you can control your level of output. On the street, traffic, other company’s union rules, and various business delays let the external world control your rate of progress. I rate it as the most stressful job of my career. Until I transferred to a rural country route, I was wondering how long I could endure it.
I also worked in a Hostess bakery (packing stuff off the line), on oil pipelines, and even EMS. None of those compared to the hustle at UPS. It was easy to keep up at the bakery, the pipeline was repetitive work, but just 2 minutes of hustle, followed by 3 minutes of standing around with a cigarette, over and over. EMS was literally hanging around the station playing cards interrupted by a an hour of frantic activity.
I realize the OP didn’t ask, but the most relaxing job in all my careers was being a crane operator. Even when a ship came in with a full load, it was easy and unhurried (swing over, follow the rigger’s signals - wait - lift and swing over there, lower - wait for rigger to signal done, then repeat…). In between ships, there was little to do but stare out at the ocean and read a book (foreman wouldn’t allow music in the cab or anything in your ears).
I’ve seen videos of quality assurance people at factories, watching stuff go by - ready to grab a weird looking item out of the bunch. I don’t have any examples ready to go but I can imagine a job like a peanut QA person, watching thousands of peanuts go by every few seconds. All they’re doing is grabbing stuff out but, technically, they are processing thousands of peanuts a second (assuming that my imagination is correct).
So, assuming that we wanted an actual factual answer to the question, I’d personally guess that a job of this style would be the winner. I don’t know if the OP would accept it, though?
We both worked at McDonalds in the same era with those same dispensers that you perfectly described. It sounds like you were running a turn-lay with the burgers.
