Warehouse Diaries: The Automated Ghost of Christmas Peak

It was October, at the beginning of Amazon’s “peak season”— the long run-up to the holidays when package volume begins to swell. It was my second night working as a “jam breaker” in a facility known as PIT9, an automated sortation center located in the woods near Pittsburgh International Airport. I was standing alone on a mezzanine high above the warehouse floor, watching a robotic sorter direct thousands of packages through five induction stations, where packages emerged onto a conveyor belt that circled the facility, dropping boxes down chutes to be placed in bread carts and loaded back onto trucks. Nobody ever told me what I was supposed to be doing. My training had consisted of two half-shifts watching corporate videos about how to flirt with a co-worker without committing sexual harassment. Now I was alone, surrounded by loud machines and watching a stream of packages roll past.

Occasionally, the boxes came through bunched too close together, causing the belt to briefly stop and reverse, dumping the packages into a large plastic bin. Since the bin seemed to exist for this purpose, I let them collect there. After an hour of staring at my phone, I grew bored and started placing the fallen boxes back onto the belt, which would whisk them away. It dawned on me that I had discovered a job function. 

Two hours into my shift, the belt stopped completely. I waited. After 15 minutes, still nothing. Rather than risk being asked to do something else, I stayed put and kept quiet. My bottleneck was so dense that it had inhibited the upstream flow, forcing the line behind me to a standstill. Even the people unloading the truck had to stop. In the distance, I could see them standing around, shuffling their feet. The mechanical hum was now an eerie quiet, punctuated only by distant voices on walkie-talkies and the rhythmic beeping of jam alerts. Without trying, or even quite knowing how, I had brought the machine of holiday consumption in this corner of the country to a grinding halt.

This is not the first Christmas that I have turned to Amazon to supplement my income as a freelance journalist. A few years ago, I worked as a delivery driver for an Amazon courier contractor. We were encouraged to drive too fast, forgo seatbelts and — as you may have heard — use Vitamin Water bottles instead of restrooms. A few years before that, I worked at PIT5, one of Amazon’s “legacy” sortation centers, where humans did all the work. Unlike the automated wonderland of PIT9, my colleagues and I at PIT5 unloaded and scanned packages, built pallets and loaded everything onto trucks. This was the old Amazon of countless labor horror stories, of constant pressure and process assistants monitoring scan rates in real time. Time Off Task was the hammer. If you spent too long in the break room or stood idle for more than a few minutes, the system flagged you. Enough flags, and you were gone. The job demanded full attention and full effort, every minute of every shift. 

The new generation of Amazon warehouses, however, is a very different beast. Modern sorting centers like PIT9 are not monuments to Taylorism, ruthlessly squeezing machine-like efficiency from human beings. Rather, they are designed for human labor to be as minimal, and ultimately as unnecessary, as possible. 

The obviousness of this — of my intentional disposability, of my witness to the end of human warehouse labor — dawned on me as the shutdown I had caused dragged on. With the induct at a halt, I realized that my sense of superfluity was the product of intelligent design. 

When a process assistant in his early 20s finally arrived to restart the system, he evinced no concern over my error or obvious lack of training. Honestly, he seemed surprised to find anybody standing at my station at all.  

“Do you know how to reset this?” he asked. 

“No,” I said. 

Under his instruction, I pressed two buttons: “RESET” and “START.” The boxes started moving again.

For years, analysts have been watching Amazon scale its automated logistics technology with an increasing sense of marvel. One layer of that system is what Amazon calls the “middle mile,” a stretch of its logistics network that sits between fulfillment centers and last-mile delivery. Greater Pittsburgh is a dense hub in that middle layer, home to multiple sortation centers as well as PIT10, an office focused on Alexa and machine learning, where the algorithms that govern Amazon’s next-generation warehouses are developed. My job at PIT9 gave me a front-row seat to how that system functions — and the future it heralds for seasonal labor in places where thousands of people have grown to depend on it.

In the old “legacy” sortation centers, human beings would palletize packages by ZIP Code at the end of chutes. It was mind-numbing, repetitive and exhausting work. But it produced a lot of jobs. According to Marc Wulfraat, director of the logistics consulting firm MWPVL International, PIT5 employed 500 full-time workers and 200 seasonal employees. PIT9, by contrast, handles about 80% more volume with 323 full-time employees and 159 seasonal workers. 

“What you’re seeing in PIT9 is the latest generation of sortation center technology,” says Wulfraat, who maintains a database of Amazon’s 3,000-plus facilities around the world. “Labor’s disposable. Just train them to do one thing. Don’t spend too much money or time.” 

As one of those 159 seasonal workers, I was not necessarily complaining. The work is physically easier in the new, automated warehouse. At PIT5, my shifts were relentless because the system could not function without constant human input. At PIT9, labor is intermittent, because the system is designed to handle surges and gaps on its own. Excess capacity is baked into the workings of a warehouse built for peak volume. Humans are present mainly to scan odd-sized boxes, push carts, clear sporadic jams and press the occasional button. Training is deliberately minimal; turnover, no longer a concern. As Alessandro Delfanti writes in “The Warehouse: Workers and Robots at Amazon,” “Workers do not take care of the whole process.” Instead, they “perform individual tasks strictly dictated by algorithms.” 

Idleness at PIT9 is not a managerial failure, but a feature of the design. Humans do not work the machines so much as monitor them, in advance of a day when they won’t need monitoring at all. 

Until then, most of the job is spent waiting for something to happen. On slow nights, packages arrive at PIT9 in bursts. You can stand around for minutes watching the HIPPO (High Input Parcel Process Operation) loop spin overhead, its carriers empty. If you’re standing near someone, you can talk. If you aren’t, you are free to wander around, perhaps over to another station to see if they have “volume.” But most likely, you just look at your phone, a way to pass the time that is technically against the rules, but generally tolerated. After weeks of this, some employees welcome the arrival of peak season, when more packages arrive and more jams occur — requiring more buttons to be pushed — which provides the illusion of doing something and alleviates the tedium.

The absence of pressure is one of the most striking differences between the legacy PIT5 and the automated PIT9. At PIT5, you stayed visibly busy or got into trouble. At PIT9, I was explicitly told that “your time is your own.” A process assistant once thanked me for taking voluntary time off because it saved him from having to find something for me to do. The facility relies on unpaid time off as a buffer: If someone wants to knock off early, they do. As long as their balance doesn’t hit zero, no one intervenes. 

One of my PIT9 co-workers, whom I’ll call “AB,” had been there long enough to understand and accept the “hurry up and wait” rhythm of the job. After being passed over for a union apprenticeship (too many skilled applicants, too few jobs) he came to Amazon to work five hours a night, four nights a week, and approached the job as we all did: as a low-commitment income stream. “It’s mindless,” he told me. “We’re just here to make sure the machines keep running.”

Still, there is some room for initiative. When a station opens up, you can step in and volunteer. But nobody cares, and there’s no reward. You do it because standing around and doing nothing feels worse than working. In the context of so many grinding self-operating belts, this impulse feels touchingly human and incredibly sad. 

It is easy to see employee indifference as another goal of PIT9’s design. As Amazon’s automated warehouses produce fewer jobs, they also generate less grievance. People show up, work when there is work to do and leave. They don’t organize or complain, because the jobs aren’t punishing enough to resent. Organizing requires friction — shared resentment, sustained contact, a sense that the job is asking something of you, taking something from you besides your time. But at facilities like PIT9, nothing holds you tightly enough to push back against. It is just a decent paycheck for observing machines do most of the work.

Five years ago, I interviewed Chris Smalls during his effort to organize Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island. This was at a moment when the company still relied more heavily on human intensity, endurance and speed. Even then, Smalls described a system governed almost entirely by metrics. “The system runs strictly off the numbers,” he told me. “Everything they do is ran off of numbers.” When workers attempted to introduce friction into that system, the response was swift. After Smalls began warning co-workers about unsafe conditions in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, he was isolated and removed from the building. “They only decided to quarantine me,” he said. “To silence me.”

Smalls stayed. He continued organizing outside the facility, and two years later those efforts culminated in a narrow but historic victory: the first successful union election at an Amazon warehouse in the United States. It took extraordinary circumstances — public scrutiny, sustained worker anger, years of pressure and a historic pandemic — to overcome a labor model built around turnover, deskilling and replaceability.

Facilities like PIT9 can be read as Amazon’s answer to JFK8. Automation here does not simply replace human labor; it redesigns the conditions under which labor exists at all. The work is intentionally thin, the shifts short, the relationships fleeting. Nothing accumulates: not skill, not attachment, not grievance.

This is not the end of work, but it is the beginning of a very different kind of work. In the warehouse of the future, the human role is small enough to be interchangeable, temporary enough to remain politically inert. The system does not need to discipline workers aggressively if it can design jobs that never ask enough of them to provoke resistance. Amazon’s wager is that a workforce with nothing invested will also have nothing to organize around. 

The hiring process at PIT9 was as frictionless as the job. My online application involved playing an Amazon video game that proved I knew the names of basic shapes and could read alphanumeric characters. An hour later, I received an automated email with an orientation date and a Zappos coupon for free steel-toed shoes. No human being interviewed me.

Leaving the job, I learned, is just as seamless. I opened the Amazon A to Z app on my phone and searched for an option to resign. When I couldn’t find one, I asked the app’s AI chatbot: “How do I quit?”

It replied that it was standard to give two weeks’ notice, defaulting to generic chatbot drivel because it didn’t know the answer. After arguing with it for a while, I gave up and drove to the warehouse, where I approached a human resources kiosk called PXT, a tortured initialism for “People, eXperience, and Technology.” Situated next to the break room on the warehouse floor, it was covered in plastic “jungle fauna,” an apparent reference to HIPPO, the automated, high-intensity conveyor belt/sorter that was both PIT9’s brain and arterial system.

“Hi,” I told a guy in a safety vest. “I want to quit.”

“Did you try the app?” he asked.

He walked me through the procedure, which did, in fact, involve a “quit” option in some out-of-the-way menu. I got the impression that most people didn’t bother resigning officially; they just stopped coming to work. Either way, there is no exit interview, no form to sign, no offer to explain the separation process. The interaction took less than two minutes.

After I turned in my badge, a security guard escorted me to the front door. I was allowed to keep my Zappos safety shoes.

On the drive home along Route 60, I passed Three Rivers Studios, a state-of-the art movie studio on a bland stretch of state highway. In 2022, this was one of the filming locations for the Amazon Studios reboot of the hit movie “A League of Their Own.” Amazon has been shooting all over the region for years, drawn mostly for its authentic backdrop of post-industrial decay and old-school brick architecture that has been scrubbed from most larger cities. 

The productions come here because western Pennsylvania still looks like mid-century America. The brick rowhouses, the steel bridges, the hills pressing in on narrow streets — the whole region is a standing set for period pieces and stories about decline. You can film 360-degree shots without seeing a glass skyscraper or a Whole Foods. When the steel mills closed in the ’80s, the younger generation fled, leaving the architecture intact.

For its gritty police drama “American Rust,” Amazon built sets, hired local crews, invested in the region’s economy. It is a rare example of the company choosing the harder, more expensive path, because the result looks better. They want real rust, real brick, real light coming through the trees along the Monongahela River.

It is ironic, then, that the America sought out by Amazon Studios, with its dense neighborhoods and corner bars, is the same country that Amazon, the logistics company, has done so much to erase. The warehouse economy — not the legacy version, and definitely not the nascent automated version — does not need walkable streets or town squares. It needs big boxes near highways and an increasingly disappearing labor force willing to work for $23 an hour and no benefits until the Christmas peak season is over. The company films here because the region looks like the America that people remember or want to believe in. It operates here because the same economic collapse that preserved the architecture also produced a workforce desperate enough to feed packages into machines for five hours a night.

PIT9 will still be there next Christmas. A new group of people, although almost certainly a smaller one, will stand sentinel at the induct, and learn how to reset the belt when too many boxes trigger a jam. But for now, the machines need a watcher, just in case. Somebody has to stand there, scrolling their phone and watching the HIPPO go round and round.