I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine • Hacker News Board

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#91

Post by potatolicious » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 4:58 AM UTC

rabidsnail wrote: post #76

ricardobeat wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like an opportunity for a standardized, flexible industrial robot platform geared towards rentals.

Why not go one step further and have elastic fulfillment centers? Nobody keeps inventory around for that long. Unless you're speculating on the future supply of a product you're only keeping stuff in stock for the buffer between when a whole palette comes in and when you need another one. So you can rent "fulfillment instances" as you need to order more inventory.

Combining my replies:

> "Sounds like an opportunity for a standardized, flexible industrial robot platform geared towards rentals."

This would work if different businesses have significantly different seasonalities - but on the aggregate in North America this is not true. Amazon gets the same Xmas rush as Wal-Mart, along with Target, Macy's, and whatnot. The number of businesses whose rush season is out of sync with Xmas is quite low. In fact, on the whole, retail basically rises and falls all at once throughout the year.

> "Why not go one step further and have elastic fulfillment centers?"

AFAIK Amazon already does this :) Look up "Fulfillment by Amazon".

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#92

Post by bigiain » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 4:59 AM UTC

ricardobeat wrote: post #58

potatolicious wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diapers is not a seasonal business. The problem with full automation is that your capacity has to be whatever peak load is - and peak load can be two orders of magnitude above your normal steady-state. That's a lot of robots sitting around doing nothing, whereas manual labor can be just as seasonal as the demand they are meant to fulfill.

Sounds like an opportunity for a standardized, flexible industrial robot platform geared towards rentals.

Maybe, except presumably a lot of the "seasonal retail" stuff would require all the "spare" warehouse-picking-capable rental-robots at the same time.

Unless you can make something generalized enough to do _other_ (profitable for the rental robot owners) tasks outside the BlackFriday/Xmas shopping season, you've still got the same problem (though more power to you if you can make that problem become the robot rental industry's problem instead of yours…)

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#93

Post by joe24pack » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 4:59 AM UTC

jfoutz wrote: post #23

nostromo wrote: post #7

It strikes me that these sort of manual warehouse picking jobs will be completely gone in a few years as robots automate the picking process (as seen here with Diapers.com: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zXOW6v0c8s )

Indeed. 4000 people @ 11/hr for a month? even without overtime that's 1.7 million. The automation can't be nearly that expensive.

How much automation do you need and how "bulletproof" does it have to be? What's the up time? What sort of rates does it have to handle average and peak? How accurate does it have to be? Does your control and execution software have to be custom (since you business model and methods are oh so different than your competitors) or will the standard be good enough? Trust me automation and the software to drive it can be quite expensive.

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#94

Post by kijin » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 5:00 AM UTC

chii wrote: post #77

kijin wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machines have been replacing jobs for over 200 years now, but I don't think there's been a huge increase in unemployment over that period. We've always managed to invent more meaningless and repetitious tasks for ourselves to do. One might say that most office jobs nowadays are like that, too. Factories replaced farms, cubicles replaced factories. But usually this happened over generations, so people had a chance to…

"we might finally get a chance to rethink the age-old rule that a person must work in order to survive." i m a stern believer that people has to produce value. And until a person can produce value merely by living, people will have to work to survive. Value right now is measured by money, and money has a limited capability in measuring things that are very subjective (how do you measure the value a nice person brings…

Well, there are two different issues at hand:

1) Will there ever come a day when people can produce value merely by living? That really depends on what "value" is, and as you said, the standards of the day may differ from ours. Under some circumstances, merely being a consumer might be enough to contribute to some overall good. If energy becomes cheap enough, even a tiny benefit might be enough to offset a person's energy consumption.

2) Should we let a human being's survival be taken hostage to whether or not he or she produces what other people perceive as value, provided that there is leftover capacity to give them a free ride? This is more of a moral question, and your answer may vary according to your ideological commitments.

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#95

Post by marquis » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 5:04 AM UTC

Permit wrote: post #21

nostromo wrote: post #7

It strikes me that these sort of manual warehouse picking jobs will be completely gone in a few years as robots automate the picking process (as seen here with Diapers.com: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zXOW6v0c8s )

Wow, that's truly incredible. I didn't realize anyone had reached this point. I'm excited to see this stuff progress, but I can't help but wonder what sort of social problems this might create as the unskilled jobs of an economy are slowly chipped away at. This sort of work surely creates more jobs in tech sectors and in maintenance, but skills learned in boxing are not transferable to any of the jobs that might be c…

To be fair, this has been happening for quite a while and it's nothing new to modern society:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

Still, this article disturbs me and I will be making more effort to shop locally (I am lucky to live in a massive city however, where I have access to most things a short metro ride away).

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#96

Post by cornell532 » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 5:04 AM UTC

scarmig wrote: post #14

ericd wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unions are disastrous for the competitiveness of a company on the global market. We do need worker protections of some form (perhaps greater informational transparency about working conditions would help?), we don't need the techniques that unions use to obtain unsustainably high wages for their workers.

Just because it's hard to monetize and profit from concepts like the health and well-being of employees doesn't mean that we as a society should put that value at zero. The "competitiveness of a company on the global market" isn't the be-all, end-all. The phrase itself belies your point: if we as a society wanted to, we could place tariffs equivalent to the cost of providing a humane workplace for packaging workers,…

Move to France.

You'd find their backwards, less competitive economy to your liking.

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#97

Post by cynicalkane » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 5:07 AM UTC

Steko wrote: post #79

cynicalkane wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's being downvoted because knee-jerk unionism is bad for discussion, just as any other kind of knee-jerk politics is bad for discussion.

There's nothing knee jerk about his comment, he's pointing out that there's a middle ground between these warehouses and Soviet bayonets.

> a unionized workforce similar to what we had in the US 30 years ago before Democrats gave up the fight and American capitalists started shipping jobs overseas in order to break up unions.

This post is almost content free and to the extent it has content, it's somewhat inaccurate. Unions are just one part of why globalization saves costs. Worse, it's an inaccuracy committed for the sake of injecting politics.

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#98

Post by lukifer » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 5:09 AM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #69

lukifer wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The economic system is the only KEY differenciator to build an economy Are you kidding? Socio-cultural values, religious beliefs, natural resources, foreign policy, domestic policy, monetary systems, infrastructure, none of these things matter at all ? Your inferences from history might have value if we had a reliable World Simulator, where we could change and control variables at will and observe the results. But…

Socio-cultural values. Japan has totally different values from the US. China, same.Apparently that does not prevent them from all being prettu successful economically speaking. Religious beliefs. Huh ? Japan, China, same as previous point. Totally different from Europe or US. But otherwise pretty successful countries. Where's the correlation between economy and religion? Natural resources. Japan has no access to natu…

You're implying direct causal links. I'm talking about synergies, all the components I mentioned (and many others I didn't) operating together as a system.

Religion affects how people vote. Voting affects foreign policy. Foreign policy affects international trade. And on and on.

For a more concrete example: American capitalism isn't composed just of our currency and the laws on the books regarding incorporation, property, etc. It includes our belief systems about capitalism: the American Dream, Horatio Algers, Ayn Rand, "greed is good", the invisible hand, build a better mousetrap, and on and on. It includes the moral values of consumers, who might make a purchasing decision based on whether it has a green label, or says "Made in the USA". It includes the expectations of workers regarding conditions: Chinese workers put up with the conditions at FoxConn, whereas most Americans would quit or strike (for now, anyway).

> But policies which do not support free exchange of goods tend to do rather badly.

I challenge you to give me an example of a society that engages in a completely free exchange of goods. Even proto-libertarian countries like Switzerland still outlaw trade of certain things (drugs, organs, humans), levy taxes of some kind, and socialize some economic activity (health care, public safety). The only countries that do not are those without a functioning government, in which case trade cannot be free, because there is nothing stopping someone from taking what they want by force.

That said, I agree with the notion that societies do better when they allow people to become rich. But I take umbrage with the idea that our flavor of capitalism is inherently the best one, and the only other alternative is to become Cuba.

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#99

Post by moldbug » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 5:12 AM UTC

JohnnyBrown wrote: post #53

ekianjo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the reason US has a slightly more advanced economy than, say, Sweden, is not due to harsh working conditions. It's has more to do with human capital, a large unified market PLUS tons of military might abused to ensure cheap oil and resources. Russia: huge human capital. Check. Large unified market. Check. Tons of Military Might abused to ensure cheap access to ressources. Check. Oh wait, I can do the same thing for…

Another key difference is that the set of thoughts whose public expression could get a person killed, and the actual danger from expressing them, has been much smaller in the US than in those two countries for the past hundred years or so. We've had our inquisitions here, but I think people tend to recognize them and call them what they are pretty quickly. See Eleanor Roosevelt's very public comments about McCarthyis…

Good thing you're not a racist, JohnnyBrown. I take it the name "James Watson" doesn't ring any instant bells for you.

It's very easy to confuse an absence of persecution, with an absence of people who agree with you being persecuted. That just shows that you're on top and your enemies are on the bottom. Ie, all's right with the world.

Of course Eleanor Roosevelt didn't like McCarthyism - it was an attempt to persecute people like her. Eleanor Roosevelt was the alpha queen of the purge of the "isolationists." Not to mention the McCarthyites, who got purged pretty good themselves. You'll note that there's not a lot left of them. There's a lot left of Eleanor Roosevelt, however.

It's true that America doesn't generally shoot the people it purges, work them to death by forced labor, etc. We don't need to. Our methods are much more efficient than that.

Re: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: Inside the online-shopping shipping machine

#100

Post by fleitz » Tue, Feb 28, 2012, 5:19 AM UTC

Honestly, the article sounds pretty good for warehouse work.

About 12 years ago I was working in a warehouse at -25 C slogging sides of beef at 25 to 50 Kg for at least 10 hours, my record shift was 26 hours. The pay was even less, $10/hr. It had to be -25 in the freezer because there was ice cream in there too and if it didn't leave at -25 it would melt by the time it got to the destination.

The only odd thing about the job was the look I got like I was crazy when I left to work tech support in the city for a dollar an hour less.