r/Glasgow Tools

I worked at the one in dunfermline and my experience was less than enjoyable, but perhaps I'd put it down to a couple of issues that maybe you didn't experience. I was coming through from Glasgow and didn't drive so my only option was an agency provided staff bus which was both pretty unreliable and extortionate (you had to pay up front rather than it be deducted from your salary) and I was doing night shifts.

The biggest problem this caused was that at the end of your shift people would be scrambling out the door to try and make sure they were the first on the coach home because naturally the first thing they wanted to do was get to bed, this led to a lot of fights and arguments and it took a lot of persuasion to try and get them to create a more orderly system rather than folk just standing out in the car park waiting for the coaches to rock up. Then the fighting would begin.

Couple of times they would show up sporadically so if people didn't get on the first one to arrive they'd be throwing elbows to get on the second one. It was absolute chaos and the agency reps would usually be sure to finish a good fifteen minutes before we did just so no one was there to ask if for any reason they didn't show up at all.

That was always my biggest issue with the job and to be honest, that was largely the fault of the agencies they hired and not amazon directly.

The job itself, as you say, is pretty straight forward. Picking for a full ten hour shift is easy, almost too easy as the scanner tells you where to go and tells you if you've scanned the right item, so you can become pretty automated when doing it. The biggest thing for me is that in a factory with that amount of staff, of that size, you can go almost your entire shift and never say a word to anyone. For some people that's ideal but I found it to be torture to go that long just doing a monotonous task. Sometimes I found myself just coasting through the shelves feeling like I was going a bit mental and talking to myself.

Some of the other tasks were slightly better. Processing returns can be a bit less of a hassle because you're largely just standing at a console, inspecting stuff and then deciding whether it can be resold at a discount or if its a write off. Just that little bit more actual cognitive work made the shift go in a lot quicker.

The one area where I thought amazon were a bit shit was when it came to breaks. There really weren't that many for such a long, physical job. Or at least the ones you were given felt that they weren't long enough to actually do anything. If you were a smoker you essentially had to choose whether you wanted to smoke or to eat. If you wanted to eat you were basically wolfing it down then getting back to it.

Then you had the issue of going through the security scanners, which you only go through after you've scanned to go on your break. So if there were big queues or you were unfortunate enough to have them randomly go off as they sometimes do, then that eats into your break time, and that was pretty much just tough.

I get it's an easy job in terms of responsibility, and it pays pretty well at this time of year, but it's easy to see how it's known to be quite dehumanising. Personally I'd only ever recommend people do it if they're only planning on being there a couple of months or so.