The "Create your own schedule!" promise is ultimately a lie, because the system for it is a miserable mess. Every thursday at 4:18pm PST sharp, shifts are added to a poorly-optimized site called CSSM (which has to be provisioned out to a single phone or computer per employee using a code that can only be reset from the warehouse, not remotely). Within about 5 minutes, almost every shift available will be snatched up by people who were waiting and constantly refreshing on higher-end devices that were able to access the site with no delay. They're free to request every single shift if they want, and then drop the ones they don't want, as long as they give three days warning. What's more, the company over-hired massively during the holiday peaks and never laid any of them off as temporary/seasonal. Somehow despite never having enough time blocks to go around, there's invariably a call every friday or so, begging people to pick up the 'additional shifts' that were added, because somehow demands are higher than expected every single week.
You may be wondering what happens if you don't work shifts? Well, that's easy - if you don't work enough hours a month, you start getting borderline-threatening emails demanding a reason why ( the reason is usually because getting a shift that lines up with my schedule is nigh impossible!), and threatening to fire you if you don't respond in 2 days. And then you respond, and won't hear back again for two days while you sweat wondering whether you keep your job.
And that's just my complaints re: the scheduling system. The actual working conditions are pretty bad, too.
In the grocery-store portion of the service, you're left sitting around with no proper chairs or seats in a disused corner of the store, just waiting for orders to come in so you can go shop them. You're expected to communicate shortages to customers via an outdated and frequently damaged iPhone that you scan the goosd with (which sometimes there aren't enough of!), but while that interaction generally requires real conversational texting or calling, you're only *supposed* to use pre-written script lines. No one actually complies with this, though. As a Prime Now fulfillment worker in-store, you're expected to do all the menial labour and hard work and customer service, but even if the customer wants to tip you for your help, they can't - that tip goes only to the driver that brought them their bag.
In the warehouse, it's even worse. Where the grocery-store service can be a little sluggish, the fulfillment center warehouses are nearly nonstop work. Breaks are generally frowned upon even if you're working long enough to deserve one - they make you sign a document when you're hired saying that you can waive your breaks, and when I've asked when I should take my break because I'd like one, I was looked at funny, because they just... expected that I would waive that break period. The warehouses are dingy, labyrinthine and unorganized, and hard to reach via transit. You've no way of knowing whether you'll be assigned to picking from the shelves to fill orders, stowing shipments onto the shelves, or receiving shipments from the trucks, until the "stand-up meeting" at the start of your shift, which just keeps you up in the air until the last minute.
Complaints, concerns, and questions to management rarely get answered, and if they do it's not in a timely manner. The avenues for suggested improvements to functionality and efficiency do exist, but if changes are accepted (or added to the app as happened a few times with me), it feels largely thankless.
Honestly, it just feels like Amazon doesn't really care about the fulfillment associates and other low-rung employees. While the Amazonians who work over in the South Lake Union district and the other bigger buildings get treated great and enjoy that cushy corporate lifestyle, the pickers and stowers like me get treated like faceless cogs in the machine, despite the fact that cogs are what makes clockwork run smooth to begin with.
Oh, and despite working for Prime Now, we get neither access to Prime, or does our scrawny 10% discount apply to Prime Now. Heck, that 10% is limited to 100 dollars/year of savings.
