The Star prefers Amazon’s robots to Amazon’s Kansas workers
The Kansas City Star‘s homepage — your one-stop source for recipes, celebrity froth and reports of grisly crimes committed in other states — marks Cyber Monday with a wire story this morning about Amazon’s coming armada of order-picking robots. Missing from the Star‘s website is any mention of Amazon’s impending closure of a Kansas distribution warehouse, one of the company’s oldest.
The Star‘s sister paper in Wichita reported Saturday about the latest developments in the retail juggernaut’s plan to pull out of Coffeyville by February. That struggling community spent $3.5 million a decade ago to keep Amazon in Montgomery County. Now, leaders are mulling whether to stiff Amazon for the last $60,000 in its incentive package. It sounds like a “Whatever, jerks” gesture, but it’s more about every dollar counting at a lousy time for the area:
But most in this southeast Kansas town of nearly 10,000 agreed that the pending closure of the giant Amazon warehouse – with its 634 employees and several hundred temp workers – will blow a hole in the local economy. The question of whether the local economy will sink as a result is still being debated.
The Star doesn’t want you to worry about Amazon, though. As its AP story notes, Jeff Bezos’ empire has its holiday shit together:
Amazon.com Inc., which faces its single biggest day of online shopping on Monday, has invested heavily this year in upgrading and expanding its distribution network, adding new technology, opening more shipping centers and hiring 80,000 seasonal workers to meet the coming onslaught of holiday orders.
How many of those workers are going to suffer ill health on the job? How many will even get to keep their already-temporary jobs through the season? Lest anyone forget this classic Mother Jones piece about the life of the warehouse picker, here it is again. Treat it like a holiday tale to be savored year in and year out. And hey, maybe next year Kansans won’t have to pay sales tax on Amazon orders anymore, without a physical Amazon presence in the state. Practically a rebate waiting to happen.
