Here's the deal... my friend used to be a happy Amazon fulfillment center worker here in Tukwila, WA. (Or maybe it's Renton. Hard to know where to draw the city lines in the urban sprawl of southside Seattle.)

He liked his job. It was a lot of work, but he liked it, and worked there for the better part of a decade.

The problem is that it is hard work. And many people are not very good at hard work.

When someone is on the 15th minute of their bathroom break, for the 5th time this week, you start to monitor how long people spend on ALL their breaks. And how do you monitor that? Hire someone to sit outside the bathroom, or have people clock in and out of the bathroom using their badge?

There will always be shitty jobs. Working in any fulfillment center is a shitty job, Amazon is just bigger, and therefore all the typical shitty job problems are even bigger.

Kirby put in more than 7 years in an Amazon warehouse, and then "retired" to the easy life working at Home Depot. He LOVED that job. Easy-peasy in comparison to Amazon.

Nobody is looking for a long-term career in an Amazon warehouse. So turnover is constant. And when a few people act poorly/irresponsibly, it makes the environment measurably shittier for everyone else, because - as a manager - you either ignore the 30 minute bathroom breaks and take on the ire and dissatisfaction of that person's coworkers picking up their slack, or you install a monitoring system so EVERYONE knows they are being watched and that their time in the bathroom is being logged.

Even then, people will get fired for spending too much time in the bathroom.

So imagine a new worker, walking in tomorrow, and seeing that every second of their work life/environment is measured to the smallest detail, and their performance is being measured against a human ideal backed by more than a decade of detailed record-keeping and analysis of tens of thousands of other humans.

The simple math says that if you are average, you are going to have to work VERY hard to keep your job. And if you are above average, you will quickly get tired/fed-up and leave to go to Home Depot...