After this story ran, Amazon spokesperson Ashley Robinson reached out with a statement that pushed back against The Verge‘s reporting — but failed to provide specific examples of inaccuracies. “Similar to many companies, we have performance expectations regardless of whether they are corporate or fulfillment center employees,” read the statement. “We support people who do not perform to the levels expected of them with dedicated coaching to help them improve and be successful in their career at Amazon. We would never dismiss an employee without first ensuring that they had received our fullest support, including dedicated coaching to help them improve and additional training. Since we’re a company that continues to grow, it’s our business objective to ensure long-term career development opportunities for our employees.”
Yeah the bottom line is that Amazon has made no efforts whatsoever to make their fulfillment centers even vaguely human. It's pretty clear that they don't expect the humans to be there very long so they're using them to the nth degree for so long as they have to keep paying salaries. "Rank and yank" is one thing if you're talking about managerial employees or tellers or people who work in an office. It's quite another when you're talking about itinerant homeless drifting from hookup to hookup and working for not-quite-long-enough to catch up on the medical bills they incurred at their last stint working for Amazon.