Last weekend I was just goofin' around on the interwebs when I got the notion that I should check out what Amazon has to offer in the way of jobs. Fully aware, due to ample news coverage last week, that all US employees at Amazon were soon to have a $15/hour minimum wage, I wanted to see if they had anything of interest to me. Of course my first check was towards customer service since I have ample experience in that field but there wasn't a call center anywhere in Florida that I could see. Know where there was one though? Huntington, West Virginia. Where I almost bought that little house but adhered to Ric's advice that it might be a bad idea to move without having a job, especially considering the high unemployment there. But then I found out later, after I kaboshed the house purchase, that there were at least two large call centers in that town...and now I find an Amazon one too. Ugh.
Well, I did find out that they did have a distribution center in Orlando though and after watching videos about what the job might entail, I decided to apply. The process was all online and super quick and easy. Answered some very basic background questions, didn't need to submit a resume or indicate any experience since none was needed. Picked part-time hours I thought I could live with at the start and was assigned a New Hire Event appointment for Monday. Sweet.
Went to the event at a facility which was different from the warehouse I'd been assigned. Never knew they had one warehouse in Orlando let alone two. But I found out the place I was hooked up with, due to the short shifts I picked, was the shipping site. Where all the trucks come and go. So the job would be unloading or loading trucks. In the weather. Lots of physical work, lifting, bending, walking, reaching and since it's at a truck bay, sweating in the Florida weather. Even at night, until the height of winter, but if I'm doing heavy work, I'd still be sweating.
The gigantic building where the hiring event was though, is the fulfillment center. It's also a warehouse with loads of truck bays but the jobs here were for pickers. Now in some facilities that means walking huge distances around the massive stacks of storage, getting items to fill an order, bringing that to the packing stations and rinsing and repeating. Well, this place is brand-spankin' new, having just been built this summer, and the "picking" is done by robots. The human "pickers" just pluck the items from the stacks of bins the robots retrieve, pack the items in the boxes and throw the box on a conveyor belt. Yes, standing all shift and likely pressured to pick and box shit quickly, but for $15 an hour, easy peasy. Simple monotonous repetitive shit. Like call center work, except no bitchy customers to deal with.
So, I get through the event, with a room full of about 50 others, (and there was another group right behind us) do the oral drug test (whew! no pee!) and everything looks like it's a go. Well, last night I get an email telling me they want to go forward and I'm basically hired right, but now they tell me the hours I picked aren't available, I need to work mornings (more heat), and the start date is this Sunday not November 3rd like it was originally. Well, it turns out that settled it, that I'd withdraw and try to get a job at the fulfillment center instead but it looks like the site is locking me out of choosing hours for that job.
The HR guy at the hiring event did say that if the job we were signed up for wasn't what we wanted, we could opt out of it before they did the ID photo and drug test during that appointment and since I didn't pull out then, I'm probably out of luck since he said that once we start our positions we couldn't change our schedules for at least a year. Yet, I've gotten two reminders so far saying I need to pick the schedule I want for the fulfillment center job. The dude at the event said they load in new schedules daily and it's first come first serve so either I'm checking too late or I am locked out since I completed the Hire Event tasks.
Looks like yet another job that sounds great at first but when looking into it further is more than I am willing to accept. I guess I have the "luxury" of being picky right now but likely once the holidays are over, I may find the pickin's to be slim and my options to be even slimmer.