The hum of 102 rooftop air conditioners and a chorus of beeping electric carts provide the acoustic backdrop in Amazon.com’s 60 000 sq m distribution facility on Phoenix, Arizona’s west side, writes The New York Times.
But the center’s employees can almost always hear Terry Jones. On a recent summer afternoon, Jones, an “inbound support associate” making US$12/hour, steered a hand-pushed cart through the packed aisles and shouted his location to everyone in earshot: “Cart coming through. Yup! Watch yourself, please!”
Jones explained that he was just making his time at Amazon “joyful and fun” while complying with the company’s rigorous safety rules. But his cries might double as a warning to the retail world: Amazon, the Web’s largest retailer, wants you to step aside.
Fifteen years after Jeffrey Bezos founded the company as an online bookstore, Amazon is set to cross a significant threshold. Sometime later this year, if current trends continue, worldwide sales of media products — the books, movies and music that Amazon started with — will be surpassed for the first time by sales of other merchandise on the site.