Amazon has revolutionized how we shop. Now it’s doing the same to how we ship.

Twelve weeks! That’s how long I ended up being laid off from my job as a UPS driver – from the end of February to the middle of May. It’s felt great to be back in ‘browns’ after wearing street clothes for my part-time shifts in the warehouse.

I’ve already written about the various elements of the UPS driver uniform. The company has a 118-year-old brand to protect, so it provides me with everything I need, for every season, from the ankles up, free of charge. When it comes to my feet, however, I’m on my own.

I’ve been purchasing the same pair of hiking boots from my local Dick’s Sporting Goods store since I started driving four-and-a-half years ago. Meanwhile, official UPS-branded socks come in packs of six pairs from a designated online vendor. Since I wear uniform shorts pretty much year-round, I’m required to purchase and wear the official UPS socks.

I placed my latest sock order this past February 2nd. The cost of a six-pack seemed reasonable enough (around $12), but when I saw the added fee for shipping (around $10 for UPS Ground service), I flinched. That’s outrageous! I remember saying aloud. It’s neither big nor heavy – it’s just a bag of socks!

That’s when I heard it. The Prime Effect.

I didn’t realize it then, but the very day I ordered my UPS socks was the 20th anniversary of the debut of Amazon Prime. For the past twenty years Amazon has offered ‘free’ shipping to its Prime members for a paid annual subscription. The initial fee in 2005 was $79; in the two decades since, it’s crept up to $139.

Still, Prime is a great deal for Amazon’s frequent or everyday customers. It’s an even greater deal for the company – in 2024 it took in more than $44 billion in subscription fees alone. That’s a whole lot of money for something Amazon’s customers perceive it to be giving away for free.

And that’s had an insidious effect on all of us.

Prime has trained an entire generation of online shoppers – myself included – to think of shipping as a free service. Nowadays, any fee for shipping already feels too high by comparison.

Even though I work in logistics, I sometimes need to remind myself that shipping is not in fact free. It’s not even cheap! Shipping is expensive because it’s labor-intensive – the supply chain is people, and we span across the entire globe.

Three months of warehouse work made this painfully plain to me.

My current facility, which opened in 2023, was designed and built as an ‘automated’ building. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t filled with human workers. I counted more than three dozen names on the early-morning ‘Preload’ shift schedule.

Preload is all about one thing: taking the packages that arrive via tractor-trailers and overnight flights, and getting them loaded on their respective package cars so they can go out for delivery that day.

A typical Preload in my building started at 5 am and went to about 9, the start time for drivers. During that roughly four-hour window we handled around 12,000 pieces, give or take a few thousand.

And I do mean handle. Lots of human hands touched each piece on its way through our building. It’s a small enough space, and I’ve worked in enough different stations in it, to see this process from beginning to end.

It goes something like this:

Unload. Trailers are backed onto rollup doors along one side of the building. The work of backing full trailers and then moving them after they’re emptied falls to a human called a Shifter.

Other humans – usually one per trailer – work their way from the back to the front of each trailer, hoisting its contents piece by piece onto a conveyor belt that passes under a scanner. After the shipping label is scanned, a machine affixes a sticky label (a ‘SPA’) to each piece indicating the destination belt, the park position, and the shelf position in its assigned package car.

I may be wrong, but I understand this process of automatically scanning packages and affixing SPA labels – and this process alone – is what makes my building an ‘automated’ facility.

Indeed, SPAs are very important to help each package wend its way through the building. But they only modestly mitigate the need for human involvement.

Not every piece being unloaded from the trailers gets treated the same way. Envelopes and packages that aren’t six-sided boxes are too unwieldy for the scanner to get a good read or place a SPA label on them. They’re also too small or delicate to travel safely on the system of belts snaking their way through the building.

Most of these ‘smalls’ have been bundled together for transit, as many as can fit into a large heavy-duty mesh zipper bag. Bags of smalls are unloaded to the Sort Aisle but they get routed to ‘Small Sort’ for further handling. More on that below.

Likewise, other packages are too large, too heavy, or otherwise not suitable for travel on the belt system. These ‘Irregulars’ (‘Irregs,’ pronounced ‘E-regs’), usually weighing anywhere from 70 to 150 pounds, are placed onto an ‘Irreg Train’ and driven by a human directly to one of the destination belts. Some Irregs can be wrangled by a single human, but many – most? – require a second pair of human hands.

Total humans on Unload: 5 or 6, including a Shifter.
Total humans on Irreg Train: 2.

Sort Aisle. The belts leading from each of the Unload doors all feed into a single belt where multiple humans read the newly-affixed SPA sticker on each package and move it to the corresponding destination belt across the aisle.

Three color-coded destination belts run parallel opposite the sort belt: Red, slightly below foot-level; Yellow, waist level; and Green at shoulder level. Plenty of packages that aren’t quite Irregs, but are still large and heavy, require team lifting onto that shoulder-level belt.

Sort Aisle workers move bags filled with smalls down to the Blue belt, directly underneath the sort belt, bound for ‘Small Sort.’ (More on this soon, I promise!) Problematic packages also get sent to Blue for troubleshooting by the Exceptions Clerk.

Alas, the machines spitting out SPA stickers aren’t 100% effective. More than a few packages come to the Sort Aisle without a SPA, or somehow with multiple (conflicting) SPA labels. Workers in the Sort Aisle carry portable equipment (‘i-SPA’) with which they can scan the package and apply a (correct) SPA to send it on its (correct) way.

Total humans on Sort Aisle: 4 or 5.

Small Sort. Blue belt takes the mesh bags (and problematic packages) to an area where one human unzips each bag and dumps its contents into a chute, and a second human makes sure that the chute doesn’t get jammed. This chute sends the smalls down a belt where they’re scanned and SPAs are (hopefully) affixed to each piece. A third human awaits them on the other side, placing each of the newly labeled smalls into tubs according to their belt color. When tubs are sufficiently full, that human sends them on a belt that loops back around to the Sort Aisle where they’re routed to their destination belts.

Meanwhile, a fourth human takes the empty mesh bags and readies them for re-use. (During the evening shift, outgoing smalls are bundled together and placed in mesh bags for loading on trailers; some smalls even arrive from large retailers already pre-bundled, in bags furnished by their UPS driver.)

As with the larger size packages on Unload, the SPA labeling machine in Small Sort doesn’t always work effectively, so smalls also get SPAs using an i-SPA before they’re sorted.

Total humans on Small Sort: 4 or 5.

Load Lines. Each of the destination belts (Red, Yellow, Green) has at least a couple-dozen package cars to be loaded according to a daily ‘load sheet.’

At the ‘top’ of each belt, where packages arrive by chute, one or two humans have the job of Splitter: moving the packages to one side of the belt or other (in the case of a two-sided belt), or just getting them organized, with the SPA label facing up so they’re easily read by individual loaders as they go ‘down’ to the ‘bottom’ of the belt.

Human loaders are assigned anywhere from two to five cars to load, depending on the cumulative total piece count. Each loader ends up responsible for loading 300 to 500 (or more) pieces during the shift. They read the SPA label which directs them to load the package on a particular shelf space in the cargo area of the assigned car.

Irregs usually arrive toward the end of the shift and are loaded in the rear and/or on the floor, space permitting.

Total humans on Load Lines: about 24 (across all three belts), including Splitters.

Special Cases. There are two humans assigned to special cases. One is our Exceptions Clerk. I still don’t know what all this person does, but they stay busy each preload shift handling situations that require a bit more mental effort and maybe even some detective work online.

The other specialist, the Responder, responds to ‘leakers.’ In most cases, pieces whose packaging is starting to fail are repacked and taped up by whoever is closest. But if the contents are damaged or the integrity of the contents are somehow compromised, it’s treated as a leaker and the Responder does what he or she can to remedy the situation in their own work area.

Total humans on Special Cases: 2.

In addition to these several dozens of workers, each of these stations in the process from the Unload to the Load Lines has its own Supervisor. Collectively these Supervisors report to the Preload Manager. Meanwhile, one or more Dispatchers is busy through the early morning hours building each delivery route. So that adds another half-dozen or more humans, bringing the total workforce to somewhere near 50 for just the Preload shift in just one (‘automated’) building!

I don’t know whether Amazon’s fulfillment centers are any less labor-intensive than my UPS warehouse. What I do know is that when I first started driving in 2020, Amazon handed off most of its packages to be delivered by another company, and now it delivers most of them itself.

In 2023 Amazon surpassed both UPS and FedEx to become the country’s second-largest delivery company by volume. It’s expected to overtake the U.S Postal Service by 2028.

I have so much to write about Amazon, but the important takeaway here is that Prime has intentionally disconnected (and obscured) the actual (considerable) cost of shipping stuff – cost which includes multiple factors but especially lots of human labor.

This alone puts Amazon’s main logistics competitors at a disadvantage. Even with its large high-volume customers, I have to believe that my employer is charging per-piece fees based on package dimensions, weight, and distance shipped, instead of a flat annual fee.

There are other disadvantages besides. For one, UPS doesn’t offer a bundle of ‘free’ services with an annual subscription. We don’t give our customers access to content like books, music, videos, or video games, and then capture revenue on that content from advertisers the way Amazon does.

Also, UPS can’t use its shipping service as a ‘loss-leader’ to lure and then lock customers into all the many other parts of its business, because we don’t really have other parts of our business the way Amazon does. As one journalist wrote:

When you subscribe to Prime, you’re paying to pledge your fealty to a single company’s ecosystem – something that consumers once wanted to avoid. You’re paying to have your every purchase cataloged – also something consumers aren’t wild about, at least in theory – so that Amazon can use that information to sell you, and people like you, more goods. You’re paying to become part of a system that is purpose-built to keep you paying, forever, and to keep Amazon growing, forever.

Ellen Cushing, ‘Cancel Amazon Prime,’ Atlantic Monthly, June 22, 2021

Lastly, UPS doesn’t pay its unionized workers less than what’s agreed to in its five-year contract with the Teamsters. This is in stark contrast to Amazon’s paying tens of millions of dollars to outside consultants to thwart, block, and disregard its workers’ efforts to unionize across the country and at every stage in the process.

With all these structural disadvantages, there aren’t a lot of ways companies like UPS can remain competitive against the Amazon juggernaut. Even FedEx, which holds the line on its labor costs through outsourcing much of its workforce, is forecasting tough times ahead.

One of the few ways is to reduce headcount. This is why UPS is in the process of streamlining its shipping network, closing dozens of facilities and laying off thousands of employees. In its multi-year Network of the Future initiative, the company hopes to become ‘better, not bigger.’ Just last week it announced a voluntary severance program for its U.S.-based drivers.

Meanwhile, even as it continues pursuing an aggressive growth strategy, including betting big on artificial intelligence, Amazon anticipates its own (A.I.-related) workforce reductions.

All this to say: I can’t rule out the possibility of another layoff. But I won’t be protesting shipping charges for UPS deliveries anymore.

Nor will I be participating in Prime Day this week. Now more than ever, I see Amazon for the threat that it is.

At its origin, Amazon was a threat to booksellers. Then, as it diversified, it became a threat to other retailers of all kinds. Now I see Amazon as a threat to delivery companies as well. Author Danny Caine goes into all the whys and wherefores, and he puts it best when he writes:

Even if it’s cheaper and faster, Amazon’s vision for a replacement shipping network circumvents good jobs and union labor to create something less safe and almost entirely unregulated.

Danny Caine, How to Resist Amazon and Why: The Fight for Local Economics, Data Privacy, Fair Labor, Independent Bookstores, and a People-Powered Future!

I personally don’t want to live in a world where more people in blue vests than brown uniforms are delivering packages. But we may be headed there soon – if we aren’t there already.