Investigative Classics is a weekly feature on noteworthy past examples of the reporting craft.
Once you get around the fact he charges a pretty penny for his presents then yes, Jeff Bezos is the modern day Santa and Amazon.com is his North Pole workshop.
Recent data shows that 76 percent of online shoppers in the U.S. spend most of their buying time on Amazon. Amazon accounted for 45 percent of all online purchases after Thanksgiving and 55 percent of online sales during Black Friday 2017.
But what about Bezos’s elves – the thousands upon thousands of full-time and seasonal workers who scurry through his massive warehouses filling boxes for the sleds led not by Dasher, Dancer and Blitzen but by FedEx, UPS and the United States Postal Service?
Here the Christmas story conjures images of the Grinch and old Scrooge, according to a series of recent stories, including here, here and here. Their descriptions of long, grueling shifts under watchful eyes are consistent with a 2013 undercover story reported by Carole Cadwalladr for the Guardian. The weeks she spent as a “seasonal associate” at a warehouse in Britain allowed her to witness how one of the marvels of modern business moves almost anything one can think of fast.
She reported:
Christmas is ... the kind of challenge that would make even the most experienced distribution supply manager break down and weep. In the past two weeks, it has taken on an extra 15,000 agency staff in Britain. And it expects to double the number of warehouses in Britain in the next three years. It expects to continue the growth that has made it one of the most powerful multinationals on the planet.
Right now, in Swansea, four shifts will be working at least a 50-hour week, hand-picking and packing each item, or, as the Daily Mail put it in an article a few weeks ago, being "Amazon's elves" in the "21st-century Santa's grotto." ...
For a week, I was an Amazon elf: a temporary worker who got a job through a Swansea employment agency – though it turned out I wasn't the only journalist who happened upon this idea. Last Monday, BBC's Panorama aired a programme that featured secret filming from inside the same warehouse. I wonder for a moment if we have committed the ultimate media absurdity and the show's undercover reporter, Adam Littler, has secretly filmed me while I was secretly interviewing him. He didn't, but it's not a coincidence that the heat is on the world's most successful online business. Because Amazon is the future of shopping; being an Amazon "associate" in an Amazon "fulfilment centre" – take that for doublespeak, Mr. Orwell – is the future of work; and Amazon's payment of minimal tax in any jurisdiction is the future of global business. A future in which multinational corporations wield more power than governments.
