Amazon Warehouses: Perfecting The American Plantation

From picking cotton to stacking boxes.

When I first rolled into the West Entrance of Amazon’s Baltimore Fulfilment Center, my Lyft driver said, laughing, that I was “going to see the slaves work.”

I was there to take a tour. The company was engaged in a PR blitz in the wake of reports of employees pissing in bottles and onsite deaths. I was guided through the vast warehouse that stretched on for miles.

I didn’t come across any outward abuse — the tour was far too scripted for that — but the sights I saw there still haunt me. As I stood back and watched employees picking boxes off an endless conveyer belt, I couldn’t stop thinking about that comment.

It really did look a lot like slavery.

The Exploitative Rise Of Amazon

Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos on July 5, 1994, as an online marketplace for books. It was originally filed under the name Cadabra, Inc. (as in, the magician’s phrase “abracadabra”). This name was allegedly tossed because it sounded too close to the word cadaver.

Jeff Bezos settled on the name Amazon both because websites at the time were listed alphabetically (see Apple vs. Altari), but also because he liked the metaphorical image of naming his company after the largest river in the world. As Jeff Bezos allegedly remarked to author Brad Stone in his book The Everything Store:

“This is not only the largest river in the world, it’s many times larger than the next biggest river. It blows all other rivers away.”

Jeff Besos was obsessed with growth from the very beginning. Infamously, one of the first names he considered before settling on Amazon was relentless.com (and as of writing this, the URL still redirects to Amazon’s homepage). His slogan in the early days of the company was “Get Big Fast,” which he was rumored to have printed on t-shirts that he then handed out for his employees to wear.

While the company did not make a profit until the final quarter of 2001, it was successful in achieving an explosive amount of growth. The company sold books to customers in over 45 different countries within the first month of the website's launch. Amazon rapidly expanded to sell…