At Amazon, We Are the Robots

Next time you’re feeling like an anonymous robot at work and zone out by ordering a few surprisingly affordable art and photography books on Amazon, spare a thought for those in the warehouse picking said books… In Amazon’s new warehouse and distribution centre in the former English coal mining town of Rugeley, workers often walk up to 24 kilometres in a single shift and are not allowed to talk, to maximise efficiency.

Photographer Ben Roberts was sent to the new facility by the Financial Times for an article exploring the financial impact and local’s reaction to the mammoth new facility, in a town still struggling economically after losing its coal mining industry in the 1990s.

Inside the cavernous facility, which is the size of nine soccer pitches and lies adjacent to a powerplant, Roberts’ rather eerie photographs capture a stark, sterile  workplace where the only colour comes from the orange high-vis vests and life size cut outs of employees with speech bubbles proclaiming messages such as “We love coming to work and miss it when we’re not here!”

On Amazon’s pickers, who follow directions from a handheld device that calculates the most direct way to collect each item to fill a customer’s order, an Amazon manager asserts “you’re sort of like a robot, but in human form… It’s human automation, if you like”.

Read further commentary on: Co. Design 

Full set of Amazon Unpacked images at: Ben Roberts Photography