On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane

by Emily Guendelsberger

Blair says it’s nice to talk to me even if I am a journalist, because she hasn’t bothered to make many friends during peak. “I’d heard they had a crazy turnover rate because of the workload and the long hours, so I was, like, ‘Don’t get attached.’ I got buddy-buddy with one girl in my training session because I could tell she was serious, like me—but nobody else. And we were looking around at standup yesterday, like, ‘Where is everybody?’ She was, like, ‘Do you see anyone else from our training group?’ And I was, like, ‘No one.’ Not one person from our entire group of—it was over five hundred people.” I raise an internal eyebrow at the idea that Blair could remember the faces of more than five hundred people in her training group. But that level of turnover does sound plausible. Darryl’s* the only other person from training I see around anymore, and I barely recognize any faces at standup after two weeks. The Amazon newsletters posted weekly on the bathroom stall doors have sidebars of fun statistics, including how many new hires there were the previous week. Even during these final few weeks of peak, it’s been around twenty-five new blue badges and between four hundred and five hundred new white badges hired every single week. A 99 percent turnover rate for pickers since Thanksgiving isn’t that implausible.