Yo, former IND1 worker here. I’m more than happy to help answer and elaborate. Fair warning; haven’t touched Amazon in almost 6 years so I may be forgetting things.
So if I remember right, stowers are the people that take these rickety ass carts loaded up with 20 or 30 bins of product sent to the warehouse up to the bins in the warehouse floor and put shit in the bins. These carts are about five feet long and two feet wide. When they are in an aisle, it fucks everyone up cause it’s hard to get around them.
Rebin would be the people that have to go wander the floor and put wrongly picked items back into their original bins, sometimes after has had to do some work on the product because it’s been damaged. Or maybe rebin is the people that put shit together for an order as described below. I forget.
I forget inducting.
AFE is the department that is the second to last spot the giant penised blow up doll you ordered “totally as a gag for a friend, bruh” ends up at before it’s packed in a box. Basically it’s an area with about 20-30 lanes of conveyors. Big ass bins of product picked by pickers rolls down the main conveyor path to AFE. There, it’s sorted to individual lanes so all product in an order can be sorted and grouped together. Someone sits at a small counter and takes the big bin of a dozen plus items that was picked and puts one item into another bin and sends it up the conveyor coaster. The conveyor coaster takes it to the person whose job it is to stand there and grab each item, send the bin back to the counter area, and store the item in a little cubby hole in a wall for packers. When all items are there, you hit the button to push it through to the backend of the wall so the packer can turn around and grab it all and dump it in a box.
There are definitely better jobs than some at Amazon, but a large majority of the jobs are pickers. There are teo main issues with being a picker; one, Amazon wants you as a picker if you can make rate. If you make rate and want things like a department transfer or promotion, you will 1000% be relying on your connections with your manager and other managers to make a case for you. I got lucky initially and had a manager who saw how hard I worked and worked with me to get me on a career track with the company. Part of that includes diversifying your skillset. My last role at Amazon was in AFE. The AFE manager was working with my pick manager to train me. One day, the AFE manager vanished and was replaced with a ditzy eye-candy girl out of college. What was supposed to be a three week study and training in the department became a year long sentence until I left.
It’s also important to add to the person talking about how Amazon is better than medical work: they mentioned this and that and beneifita on day one, blah blah. That is specifically only if Amazon hires you directly. At IND1, to get around this, they outsource hiring to a temp agency so you get all the stress of Amazon and nothing but a paycheck. You have to go the standard 3 months before you’re out of the “we’ll fire you for any reason” status, and then another 3 months before you can apply to be shoe-horned into being a blue badge. During that total time, you better have been making rate in order to even be considered.
Another fun fact: one thing Amazon loved to do is overhire for the holiday season, typically between the second week of November and the first full week of January. That’s peak season, and during that time you work 10-12 hour shifts 6 days a week. You wanna know how they let the holiday hires know they no longer needed them for peak season? They let them show up to work Monday morning to find their badge was deactivated and security telling them to leave the property.
Darksoulsborne8 karma
Yo, former IND1 worker here. I’m more than happy to help answer and elaborate. Fair warning; haven’t touched Amazon in almost 6 years so I may be forgetting things.
So if I remember right, stowers are the people that take these rickety ass carts loaded up with 20 or 30 bins of product sent to the warehouse up to the bins in the warehouse floor and put shit in the bins. These carts are about five feet long and two feet wide. When they are in an aisle, it fucks everyone up cause it’s hard to get around them.
Rebin would be the people that have to go wander the floor and put wrongly picked items back into their original bins, sometimes after has had to do some work on the product because it’s been damaged. Or maybe rebin is the people that put shit together for an order as described below. I forget.
I forget inducting.
AFE is the department that is the second to last spot the giant penised blow up doll you ordered “totally as a gag for a friend, bruh” ends up at before it’s packed in a box. Basically it’s an area with about 20-30 lanes of conveyors. Big ass bins of product picked by pickers rolls down the main conveyor path to AFE. There, it’s sorted to individual lanes so all product in an order can be sorted and grouped together. Someone sits at a small counter and takes the big bin of a dozen plus items that was picked and puts one item into another bin and sends it up the conveyor coaster. The conveyor coaster takes it to the person whose job it is to stand there and grab each item, send the bin back to the counter area, and store the item in a little cubby hole in a wall for packers. When all items are there, you hit the button to push it through to the backend of the wall so the packer can turn around and grab it all and dump it in a box.
There are definitely better jobs than some at Amazon, but a large majority of the jobs are pickers. There are teo main issues with being a picker; one, Amazon wants you as a picker if you can make rate. If you make rate and want things like a department transfer or promotion, you will 1000% be relying on your connections with your manager and other managers to make a case for you. I got lucky initially and had a manager who saw how hard I worked and worked with me to get me on a career track with the company. Part of that includes diversifying your skillset. My last role at Amazon was in AFE. The AFE manager was working with my pick manager to train me. One day, the AFE manager vanished and was replaced with a ditzy eye-candy girl out of college. What was supposed to be a three week study and training in the department became a year long sentence until I left.
It’s also important to add to the person talking about how Amazon is better than medical work: they mentioned this and that and beneifita on day one, blah blah. That is specifically only if Amazon hires you directly. At IND1, to get around this, they outsource hiring to a temp agency so you get all the stress of Amazon and nothing but a paycheck. You have to go the standard 3 months before you’re out of the “we’ll fire you for any reason” status, and then another 3 months before you can apply to be shoe-horned into being a blue badge. During that total time, you better have been making rate in order to even be considered.
Another fun fact: one thing Amazon loved to do is overhire for the holiday season, typically between the second week of November and the first full week of January. That’s peak season, and during that time you work 10-12 hour shifts 6 days a week. You wanna know how they let the holiday hires know they no longer needed them for peak season? They let them show up to work Monday morning to find their badge was deactivated and security telling them to leave the property.
Amazon gives zero fucks.
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