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Amazon Is Hiring Fewer Workers This Holiday Season, a Sign That Robots Are Replacing Them (qz.com)
Amazon is hiring around 100,000 additional employees this holiday season, which is fewer than the company added in either the 2016 or 2017 holiday seasons, when it brought in 120,000 additional workers. "Citi analyst Mark May says he thinks the reduction in seasonal hiring is strong evidence that Amazon is succeeding with plans to automate operations in its warehouses," reports Quartz. From the report: "We've seen an acceleration in the use of robots within their fulfillment centers, and that has corresponded with fewer and fewer workers that they're hiring around the holidays," May told CNBC. He added that 2018 is the "first time on record" Amazon plans to hire fewer holiday workers than it did the previous year. "Since the last holiday season, we've focused on more ongoing full-time hiring in our fulfillment centers and other facilities," Amazon spokesperson Ashley Robinson said in an email, adding that the company has "created over 130,000 jobs" in the last year. "We are proud to have created over 130,000 new jobs in the last year alone."
Amazon bought robotics company Kiva Systems for $775 million in 2012, and began using its orange robots in warehouses in late 2014. By mid-2016, it had become clear just how big a difference those robots were making. The little orange guys could handle in 15 minutes the sorting, picking, packing, and shipping that used to take human workers an hour or more to complete. In June 2016, Deutsche Bank predicted Kiva automation could save Amazon nearly $2.5 billion (those savings dropped to $880 million after accounting for the costs of installing robots in every warehouse).
Amazon bought robotics company Kiva Systems for $775 million in 2012, and began using its orange robots in warehouses in late 2014. By mid-2016, it had become clear just how big a difference those robots were making. The little orange guys could handle in 15 minutes the sorting, picking, packing, and shipping that used to take human workers an hour or more to complete. In June 2016, Deutsche Bank predicted Kiva automation could save Amazon nearly $2.5 billion (those savings dropped to $880 million after accounting for the costs of installing robots in every warehouse).
Wait until Amazon starts replacing their customers with robots...
when the world doesn't need ditch diggers? Pretty obvious that it's time to figure that out.
And for all that say they'll be new jobs, what? I want specifics. Following the last big industrial rev there was about 80 years of joblessness until new tech came along. Anyone want to live through 80 years of abject poverty so your grandkids can someday have a job you can't even imagine after you've died?
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Oh right, it's supposed to be a puff piece, I forgot.
Even quicker than that comes a point where your above generalization bullshit is obvious, and your single line of "advice" to "employees everywhere" goes from "common sense blathering" to "pedantic retard explaining how to breathe air"
Coffee is for closers, fuck off in your Hyundai.
well student loans used to have bankruptcies now it's just about unlimited loans
I've worked in various Amazon DCs for 9 years. Their robotic facilities demand the same headcount as a non robotic site, they just stick more people in the boring pick/pack cells to get more shit out the doors. The reason for this is the state of the economy... Too many people have full time jobs that pay more or the same as what Amazon is willing to offer so they need to resort to hiring people who have no GED (which is fine) or even with a criminal history. Also in the market I'm in they've exhausted a pool of nearly 800,000 workers, people have tried the Amazon way over the years and feel no need to go back.
Rumors that humans are being replaced are false
Rumors that humans are being replaced are incorrect
Rumors that humans are being replaced are not true
Rumors that humans are being replaced are false
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
All this robotics and they still can't get my packages to me on time.
Fewer workers due to automation or lower sales?
The stock pulled back $426 in the last few weeks and recovered $151 of that.
It's consistently under the 180-hour (approx 1 month) simple moving average for the last 20 days.
Then why do we need migrants if robots are taking their place?
ERR NEEERRR!!! The Robutts are replacing us!! Seriously though why don't these people learn a trade or something? Most places will start you around $10-12/hr not knowing shit. Obviously depends on where you live. But they obviously have no career path they should pickup any trade they have an interest in. Don't have a job you don't like enjoy even if it pays more money.
... wouldn't that allow you to NOT hire so many PART timers?
LOL you have no idea robots are the culprit. Amazon could be distributing larger nalgene bottles too pee in, increasing productivity by 20% resulting in fewer new hires needed.
Or programmers.
I do a lot of CRUD-centric applications (tracking, work-flow, reporting, management info systems). With a good stack I'm quite productive and spend more time on analysis than diddling with code. With bad stacks I spend way too much time diddlying with code, and more stacks seem to be like that these days, partly because the choice of JavaScript widgets available makes PHB's crave ever fancier eye-candy that makes for ever more fragile/leaky systems that need ever more people to fix.
If automation either takes over the grunt work or creates more logical standards with fewer parts, a good many programmers will be let go since fewer are needed for the same position. The analyst/coder hybrid will disappear or shrink, leaving just analysts. 2 analyst/coder hybrids can then be replaced by 1 analyst.
Admit it, there's a lot of redundancy, BS, & bloat in most our stacks/techniques that can be factored out yet still do the necessary job. AI may have less incentive to add or keep unnecessary bloat; bots aren't biased for job security like we are.
Sorry, but humans unconsciously make selections/recommendations that make themselves more "needed". It's seen in the medical field also. I cannot predict what future AI will look like, but there's a decent chance it won't have this same bias, and thus factor itself better. Genetic algorithms may "evolve" stacks to fit company conventions tightly based on existing applications, for example. Fewer humans would then be needed to program with it. Our current stack manager stuck us with bloating microservices even though we don't need them because he thought it was "cool". AI probably won't. He should be fired by bots.
Field info (DB schema) is often replicated all over typical stacks, for example. DRY Principle says I should only have to state field info in ONE place, not ten. There are tools that duplicate the field info into the parts of the stack, but duplication only simplifies creation of code, not maintenance.
(I've kicked around ways to factor such, but most code tools are too file-centric or too hierarchical. Files are obsolete, I believe. Better code repositories would look more like RDBMS's so that we can use set theory on field info, UI layout, and event code instead of hierarchies. Set theory is more powerful than hierarchies and OOP inheritance. The future will eventually take us there, I believe. We are doing it wrong; stuck in the "tree past" out of habit. The Sets are coming. AI may discover this fact and our existing tools will dumped into landfill to be ridiculed the way we ridicule vinyl records and the ET cartridges. Field info/changes can then be entered into one place, and Boom! done. Go home and have sex and don't come back to work: a Set bot is in your chair now.)
Table-ized A.I.
If nobody is hired for the holiday season, who will buy stuff for holidays?
Maybe that is why Amazon is in favor of higher minimum wages. It is a competitive advantage for them. Robots don't have a minimum wage ;-)
Another possibility is Amazon's recent starting pay increase. Very simply that means each employee costs more. And the budget for this year might provide only a certain amount of money for the work force. IOW, they don't want to exceed their budget.
lgw's comment is correct:
All these robots do is move shelves full of bins around. That's it. They don't sort. They don't pack. They don't ship. They help with picking (and stowing) by bringing the shelves to the human who does everything except walk to the shelves.
We know people who work in a distro center near us. People handle the products in all phases. I think some automation is used to pull the inventory (off the high shelving), but then the robotic pallets simply move the bins around the warehouse.
FWIW, here's one video of ops inside a "fulfillment center."
Behind the scenes of an Amazon warehouse
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
Video from a Wired Business Conference
How the Amazon Warehouse Works
Or a series of pics from Business Insider.
See what it's like inside Amazon's massive warehouses
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
That'll show 'em!!!
Don't you think a bean counter business like Amazon will possibly decide its better to pay over time to current employee's then hire new ones. Considering that unemployment is so low. Might be difficult to even find good workers now? Interesting though, that Amazon PR says its new HQ will employ people who will average over $100,000 a year. Remember Amazon raised the hourly wage for warehouse people, so its possible Amazon is trying to reduce adding to its holiday labor costs.
teachers unions and unlimited student loans will keep schools as is and make the piece of paper from an MOOC useless.
by State & Federal Governments. Now we've got 100% out of pocket for students.
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Believing that it is is a "conservative" rule of thumb which works pretty well most of the time, but obviously it's an oversimplification which has exceptions where it's completely the wrong way to analyze.
The reason that sales are projected to decline this time is that the premise is that there is a shrinking human job pool for automation-displaced workers to move to. And the reason for the shrinking job pool hypothesis this time is that automation and AI are gradually but inexorably superceding human capabilities across the board this time, and that has never happened before.
So employment income will shrink this time around, as will mass market demand.
Two scenarios are plausible then:
1) The heavily defended exclusive economy of the 1%. In this scenario, the vastly enriched automated-production owners continue to sell to each other and their tiny cadre of remaining human helpers/consultants. Everyone else is left to rot in a subsistence economy, and the elites defend themselves and their possessions behind increasingly impregnable walls, and/or with automated weaponry.
2) Profit from automated production (or value-add by automated processes) is more heavily taxed than now, and the proceeds are distributed in a UBI scheme. The economy changes shape somewhat but is more similar to how it is now. People need to figure out why they exist and what to do with their time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
and certainly have faster access to more information than any one of us.
robots are already stronger. They're getting more versatile and dexterous year over year as well.
Judging by your lack of insight into this and lack of judgement, they are particularly getting smarter than you.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
"why do we need me?"
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
A human is just as inferior at the job at $10/hour as $15/hour.
At best this will mean a few years difference in when given job categories are replaced.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
not fuxing holiday season.