Amazon Unbound

by Brad Stone

  He also boosted his own visibility. “Dear Amazonians,” he wrote in a letter to the whole company on March 21. “This isn’t business as usual, and it’s a time of great stress and uncertainty. It’s also a moment in time when the work we’re doing is its most critical…. People are depending on us.” The letter outlined a few of Amazon’s early preventative health measures, such as increasing the frequency of cleanings, and the attempts to buy masks for employees amid an overall shortage. It also announced that Amazon would hire one hundred thousand employees in the warehouses and temporarily increase pay by two dollars an hour, along with increasing overtime wages and giving employees unlimited unpaid time off. “My own time and thinking is now wholly focused on COVID-19 and on how Amazon can best play its role,” he wrote.

  After years of keeping many of his daily activities at Amazon private, Bezos was now heavily promoting them. On March 26, he posted a photo of himself to Instagram from his ranch in West Texas, video chatting with Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization. The following day, he posted a picture of himself talking with Washington governor Jay Inslee. On April 8, Amazon tweeted a video of the CEO walking through a fulfillment center and Whole Foods near Dallas, wearing a mask and with his sleeves rolled up—the first time he had toured a warehouse in years, said several operations employees. Meanwhile, he skipped his Wednesday meetings at the Washington Post and Blue Origin. Executives there said they didn’t speak to him for weeks during the early stages of the pandemic.

  The increase in Bezos’s public prominence was partly the work of a CEO trying to demonstrate leadership at a challenging time. As the virus spread, anxiety followed. Absenteeism in the fulfillment centers soared; by some estimates, 30 percent of Amazon workers failed to show up as they got sick with Covid or heard about colleagues, friends, or family contracting the disease, fearing that they might be next. This time, the long-term goals of the Climate Pledge weren’t going to cut it. Amazon needed to add fresh workers amid the overlapping challenges of high absenteeism and exploding customer demand while changing, on the fly, many of the deeply ingrained processes in the vast Amazon supply chain.

  In this respect, Amazon was in an enviable position. Dave Clark, the bespectacled former middle school band teacher, had proven himself uniquely capable of developing large, complex systems, like the network of warehouses using Kiva robots and the in-house transportation division, Amazon Logistics, which was now responsible for approximately half of all Amazon deliveries globally and two-thirds in the U.S. If supply chains win wars, as the old military proverb went, Bezos had one of the most accomplished generals in the world by his side.

  By April 4, as Lipkin had advised, Clark and his team introduced temperature checks inside fulfillment centers, sortation centers, and transportation hubs. Instead of widespread use of handheld infrared thermometers, which would require PPE-clad temperature takers to stand in close physical proximity to workers as they entered a building, Amazon spent millions to acquire thermal cameras, and then stationed them at entryways to remotely scan employees for fevers. Executives also put in a massive order for masks, sorting through hundreds of emails from entrepreneurs who were all trying to exploit the corporate world’s sudden needs. “It seemed like everybody had a cousin, uncle, aunt, or family friend who had a manufacturing site in China that made masks,” Clark recalled.

  To complement its supplies, Amazon also looked inward, redeploying the 3D printers in its Prime Air drone lab to make plastic face shields. By early April, Amazon said it had distributed millions of masks to employees and was donating N95 masks to frontline health-care workers. “It was a crazy environment,” Clark said. “Every day lasted at least a week.”

  Amid the tumult, the company was forced to act in ways that were contrary to its well-honed instincts for growth. It withdrew Mother’s and Father’s Day promotions and the recommendations on its website that showed customers what others with similar purchase histories had bought. It also postponed Prime Day until the fall to relieve pressure on the warehouses, and it announced that for several critical weeks over the spring, it would only accept “household staples, medical supplies and other high-demand products” from independent sellers who participated in Amazon’s third-party shipping program, Fulfillment by Amazon.

  The prohibition alienated some sellers who depended on FBA and elicited charges the company was unfairly advantaging itself by continuing to sell its own stock of nonessential items, like hammocks and fish tanks. (Amazon later conceded to the Judiciary Antitrust subcommittee that selling those items was a mistake.) The ban lasted until mid-April, when Amazon announced it was hiring yet another seventy-five thousand workers to help satisfy the additional demand.

  Clark’s biggest challenge was preventing workers from clustering in the FCs, which were built for maximum efficiency, not rigorous social distancing. Teams charged with enforcing the new guidelines to stay six feet apart wandered the warehouses, monitoring for distancing and mask compliance, while hazmat-suit-wearing cleaners in the FCs sprayed hospital-grade misting disinfectant. But most of Amazon’s solutions were technological. The robotics group built a system called “Proxemics” to analyze security camera footage inside facilities and track the distance between employees. The system used AI algorithms to identify problem areas and generate data-rich reports for general managers about how well their buildings were responding. With another program, Distance Assistant, Amazon deployed additional cameras and TV screens to warehouses to monitor employees as they passed by. If workers were walking too close together, their images on the screen were overlaid with red circles.

  Not everything that Amazon’s operations division tried ended up working. An autonomous cart designed to roam the aisles of Whole Foods supermarkets and blast shelves with disinfecting UV light, for example, was discontinued after public health officials concluded that surface transmission of the virus on grocery items wasn’t a serious risk. Another project to regularly test the oxygen levels of FC workers with pulse oximeters didn’t meaningfully identify anyone with Covid-19 and was also abandoned, as was a trial to track the location of employees inside warehouses using their personal cell phones and their facility’s Wi-Fi network.

  Dr. Ian Lipkin had talked to the S-team about the urgent need for rapid testing, to address the issue of asymptomatic people who are infected and come to work, unknowingly spreading the disease. With the U.S. grappling with a critical shortage of Covid-19 tests and Amazon unable to procure a supply of its own, Bezos decreed that Amazon should make tests itself—even though it had no previous experience in the area. He was “dealing in the real world, which was, there is no vaccine and there’s certainly not going to be one in the immediate near term,” said Jay Carney.

  The resulting project was dubbed Ultraviolet. With Jeff Wilke leading the initiative, sections of Amazon’s Lab126 offices in Sunnyvale, California, and operations hub in Louisville, Kentucky, were converted into impromptu medical labs. A team of health experts, research scientists, and procurement specialists left their regular jobs and set about building a large-scale in-house testing capacity. By the fall, thousands of employees in Amazon warehouses in twenty-three states were volunteering to swab each nostril for ten seconds and send it to one of the two labs. The company said it was conducting thousands of tests a day across 650 sites.

  “If you’re a shareowner in Amazon, you may want to take a seat, because we’re not thinking small,” Bezos wrote in the first quarter earnings release in April, predicting that the company would spend billions over the summer in Covid-related expenses. “Providing for customers and protecting employees as this crisis continues for more months is going to take skill, humility, invention, and money.” Amazon would point to this large investment, and to its wide-ranging attempts to manage the pandemic’s risk, amid the unending criticism that was coming its way. “We did everything we could, taking all of the guidance that we had,” said HR chief Beth Galetti.

 
Jay Carney added, “I am confident that when both the early and long-term histories are written, no company of our scale will have done more, faster and better, than Amazon did.

  “Did we do it perfectly? No, absolutely not.”

  * * *

  As Covid-19 rampaged across the U.S. and Europe, many physical retailers shut their doors while essential items like toilet paper and disinfectant disappeared from the shelves of stores that remained open. Paradoxically, Amazon and other online retailers were buoyed by this tidal wave of uncertainty and fear. It was now safer for someone at home to click and buy from the comfortable and comparatively sterile confines of their living room. Online orders skyrocketed, and even the lagging parts of the Amazon empire, such as Amazon Fresh and its Whole Foods grocery delivery service, saw huge spikes in volume. One analyst said that Covid-19 had been akin to “injecting Amazon with a growth hormone.”

  Once again, Amazon’s achievements were accompanied hand-in-hand by criticism. The company could roll out as many protective initiatives as executives could conceive of, raise entry level wages for a few months, and temporarily boost overtime pay. But to continue to serve customers, it was going to be putting its employees at risk, even if part of the danger came with commuting to and from Amazon buildings.

  This was clear by March, when at least five Amazon workers in Italy and Spain contracted the virus. Over the ensuing weeks, cases popped up in Amazon facilities across the U.S. I asked Dave Clark if there was ever any discussion of resolving this deadly trade-off by shutting down facilities or suspending service altogether. “We looked at certain buildings and different parts of the world,” he said. “But people needed a way to get these items, particularly in the early days.”

  That angered many warehouse workers, as well as labor unions, which had long viewed Amazon as an avowed enemy. In mid-April, the French trade union Solidaires Unitaires Démocratiques sued Amazon in a Parisian court, calling for the company to shut its six fulfillment centers in the country. A judge ruled that Amazon had to limit sales to essential items such as health and food products or face a $1.1 million fine for each violation.

  That was easier said than done, since workers in the sprawling network could easily err and ship products that didn’t conform to the new rules. Amazon’s French operations team calculated that the liabilities could add up to more than a billion dollars. The directive then came from Seattle to shut down the French FCs. The judge’s ruling, along with the specter of massive liabilities, “made it not a hard choice,” said Clark.

  The French FCs would stay closed for a month and generate plenty of acrimony. Anne Hidalgo, mayor of Paris, called for a boycott of Amazon in favor of local shops while France’s culture minister inveighed, “Amazon is gorging itself. It’s up to us to not feed it.”

  The battle also took a toll inside the company. The European operations teams had labored for years to establish Amazon as a trusted employer; some executives now felt that insular, centralized decision-making from their colleagues thousands of miles away in Seattle was undermining that work. In the midst of the fight in France, Roy Perticucci, the longtime vice president of Amazon’s EU operations, abruptly left the company and was soon followed out the door by several other senior members of his team.

  Criticisms also flooded in from the hourly workforce in the U.S. Despite the company’s attempts at mandating social distancing, its work floors and break rooms were still packed with people, according to the photographs and videos that employees posted on social media. The company’s solutions were ineffectual, they charged, and it was prioritizing sales over safety. Workers at an FC in Southern California’s Riverside County grumbled they were only told about infections days after they were reported in the local press, and that hand sanitizer dispensers were often empty. Workers in other FCs and transportation hubs complained that they were given a single disinfectant wipe at the start of their shifts to clean their workstations or vans.

  These harrowing charges were anecdotal but raised the possibility that Amazon’s attempts at containing the risks to workers during the pandemic’s early days were more haphazard than executives might like to admit. At IND9, a 600,000-square-foot facility south of Indianapolis, workers complained that plastic shower curtains, prone to rips, were initially hung between tightly spaced inbound receiving stations as makeshift dividers (and only a few weeks later replaced by Plexiglas barriers). In a breakroom at CMH1, an 855,000-square-foot FC east of Columbus, Ohio, managers removed several of the dozens of microwaves in a well-meaning effort to increase distance between them. That simply resulted in crowding around the remaining units, workers said. At DEN3, a hulking warehouse alongside Colorado’s I-25 freeway, cleaning supplies like disinfectant and hand sanitizer were scarce well into May; employees were directed to scrounge for substitutes from what they called “damage land”—an area for discarded items that were unfit to ship.

  As many employees took advantage of Amazon’s offer of unlimited unpaid time off, workers at the SDF9 fulfillment center in Shepherdsville, Kentucky, said the building felt emptier than usual during the early weeks of the pandemic. But when that temporary perk expired on May 1, even though the growth in cases in the U.S. wasn’t slowing down, the building became more crowded as adherence to social-distancing policies, such as the floor markings that directed movement through the facility, decreased. “It’s been kind of scary,” said one SDF9 worker. “Associates aren’t following the guidelines that have been put in place.”

  No one did more to highlight these concerns than an assistant manager named Chris Smalls from the Staten Island fulfillment center, JFK8. Employees at JFK8 had already demonstrated a penchant for speaking out and organizing, in conjunction with the same unions that had opposed Amazon’s HQ2 campus in Long Island City. In early March, workers at JFK8 returned from a training trip to Seattle, an early virus hotspot, and began to show symptoms of infection, Smalls claimed. Seemingly indifferent, the facility’s managers sponsored an indoor event for staff on March 12, complete with a DJ and raffle, to encourage them to sign up for various Amazon affinity groups.

  Social-distancing measures went into effect soon after, but workers were initially told to keep only three feet apart, per the guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control at the time. Smalls also felt that other requirements, like congregating in groups no larger than ten, were impossible to comply with given the nature of the warehouse’s team-based work. A five-year veteran of JFK8, he started taking time off and lobbying his superiors to temporarily close the fulfillment center for a thorough cleaning.

  On March 24, Smalls returned to work and attended a regular standing meeting. Senior managers informed the group of JFK8’s first confirmed Covid-19 case, an employee who hadn’t been in the building for more than two weeks. Smalls argued that the warehouse needed to be shut down and sanitized, and all workers sent home with pay. His superiors resisted. Smalls disagreed and brazenly “told as many people as possible as I was making my exit towards the door,” he said.

  In the days that followed, Chris Smalls filed complaints with the city, the state, and the CDC. Though he conceded that he had been in contact with an infected colleague, he returned to the warehouse and staged breakroom sit-ins. On Saturday, March 28, a supervisor told Smalls he was being placed on paid “quarantine leave” and to stay at home. Nevertheless, the following Monday, he organized a demonstration outside the warehouse—timed to a lunch break—and tipped off the press. Protesters, some clustered together with their masks tucked under their chins, held up signs that read, “Jeff Bezos, can you hear us?” and “Alexa, send us home!” Amazon workers and reporters live-streamed the protest.

  “I was trying to scare people,” said Smalls. “More and more people were realizing that this is a scary situation, that we don’t know what we’re dealing with.” A few hours later, he was fired—ostensibly for violating the stay-at-home order, but in his view, for trying “to stand up for something that’s right.”

 
Compounding the unfolding public relations problem for Amazon, a few days later Vice News published a leaked memo from an S-team meeting, where senior executives discussed how to handle Smalls, who is Black, and whose objections to Amazon’s safety precautions were receiving plenty of media attention. “He’s not smart, or articulate, and to the extent the press wants to focus on us versus him, we will be in a much stronger PR position than simply explaining for the umpteenth time how we’re trying to protect workers,” said David Zapolsky, Amazon’s language-conscious general counsel, according to the meeting notes. “Make him the most interesting part of the story, and if possible, make him the face of the entire union/organizing movement.”

  Zapolsky, who said he didn’t know Smalls’s race at the time, later went to considerable lengths to apologize publicly for the remark, including sending out an email to his staff expressing support for the Black Lives Matter movement that gained momentum from the murder of George Floyd that May. “I should never have let my emotions get to me,” he told me. “I shouldn’t have used that characterization for any Amazon employee. It was incredibly regrettable.”

  But the company’s opposition to anything that even whiffed of union organizing was now cast starkly into the open, in cynical and arguably prejudicial terms. In the months ahead, additional news reports would expose a pair of Amazon job listings for intelligence analysts to identify “labor organizing threats” within the fulfillment centers, as well as the existence of heat maps at Whole Foods Markets that scored each store on variables like employee turnover, racial diversity, and safety violations to gauge potential pro-union sentiment.

  Central to the dissension in the FCs was how Amazon alerted staff to infections in their facilities. In the early days of the pandemic, the company’s internal communications department was overwhelmed and struggled to develop a protocol for informing associates of infections. Debate within the comms team centered around what degree of certainty about an infection—a suspected case, or one confirmed by a test result—should trigger a mass alert to employees. It wasn’t a trivial question, since documentation might take a couple days to obtain, delaying the start of quarantine leave for the individual and notification to his or her coworkers. But sharing suspected cases might raise undue alarm and trigger panic.