tesla notes end of september 2020.

Most of the hoopla right now is about battery day but there are other things going on as well.

4% drop in solar roof price.

27% drop in first powerpack, the medium sized ones. so far unable to confirm if the price of the second through n ones has stayed the same.

10%ish drop in price to made in China model 3 expected tomorrow.

China plant is adding a third shift after next week, to supply korea, which benefits fremont. Battery news from China expected soon but I don't have firm news on that yet.

Waiting on production and delivery numbers for Q3, expecting around 140K. 

I have 2 calls for next week, one at 420 in the money, one at 485 way out of the money. Up 500ish overall. no, up $850 right now.

Meanwhile spacex is proceeding with starlink, which will probably IPO eventually. That was on, then off, now on again. 

And crew dragon will take its second batch of astronauts to the space station soon.

Boring company has expanded the types of tunnels it sells, plain, utility, pedestrian, bike, freight etc. 

Gertrude is doing well at neuralink.

Construction is going well at Berlin, Austin, Nevada, Fremont, and China. Unclear if changes in progress at Buffalo.

I should do an entry on some of the battery day topics. This one was because there is too much to remember all at once if I don't write it down. I may have forgotten something, if so I'll come back and edit.

Share price today around $429.

saturday: finished chapter 2 of the white belt book.

memo 0
day 1: i imbed myself in an amazon facility toobserve and critique

memo1 - stop throwing away product

memo 2 - ergonometrics of the produce aisle

memo 4 - a hunble brag. my currilculum vitae,a 6 page resume

memo 5 a leave of absinthe. i take a month off to do a rough draft of this book. and read a few books about amazon

memo 6
mentors, mentees and manatees.
i'm not even sure there's a memo here

memo 7 a glossary - some amazon jargon explained.

memo 8 the 13 1/2 values, roadmap or hype?

memo 9 - iww, prayer circles, recruiting an empire.

memo 10 - vid and covid.

memo 11 - my life as an amazon consumer, reseller, and kindle author

memo 12- angling for promotion, apply for L3jobs

memo 13 proposal for a health care program

Amazon is a logistics company, an everything store, but what drives them is big data. 
So here's a modest proposal. They have a large number of employees. They could have an optional employment physical, with bloodwork and dna testing. This would be expensive, but also extremely valuable. It would improve employee safety. It would provide a valuable benefit to employees. For example, some employees have undiagnosed hepatitis C or HIV, life threatening diseases that can be managed with medication. 

Some had a genetic predisposition to certain cancers, suggesting followup screening for cancer. In the middle of a covid epidemic, this kind of attention to employee health only makes sense.

But meanwhile, they would be using their employees as guinea pigs, acquiring a treasure trove of big data.

There are two levels of implementation. Blue badges are permanent employees. White badges are temporary employees, with very high turnover. Some quit the first day, half quit the first month.
So the expense of doing a medical workup for these short term employees adds a large expense, but also gives a much larger datebase  of medical records.

Amazon tracks every minute of its employees' days, measuring productivity and absenteeism. This would be a unique opportunity to look for correlations with bloodwork and dna. It would be valuable to Amazon to be able to have some predictive guesses about how long a new employee is likely to stay employed, or if they are more or less likely to be productive. 
This is a brave new world approach which would draw criticism,
but the advantages to both employees and the company make it worth doing.

This is valuable in terms of personnel management, and would help amazon run its facilities more efficiently. But it they actually find correlations with a measurable rate of return, this could result in a new product line, as they export the techniques to other companies.

4:01 8/29/20   

wrote 1 page today. 





















memo 14 investing - my 401k, tesla, amzn, etc.

memo 15 what is gemba? six sigma explained in 6 pages.

= = =

8/27/20.
my goal in this entry is just to add a few lines to this bare bones outline, not finished product but bits and pieces of rough draft, to try to get writing again. 

july 5th 2020

My Gemba Walk at Amazon

My name is Arbitrary Aardvark. or if you prefer, The Arbitrary Aardvark. There are already several very good books about Amazon. For instance, The Everything Store.  This isn't one of those. This is a personal story of how I took a job at an Amazon warehouse for a few months, so I could write this book, and because I needed the money. I wanted to earn some of the secrets from the inside, because from the outside, it's clear that Amazon is part of a wave of new smart industry that is changing our world. I should write a chapter on Austrian Economics. When I started at Amazon, I didn't even know what a gemba walk was. I'm not fluent in japanese, and I've never attended a business school. I've been a teamster, a lawyer, a journalist, and an aardvark. I want to bring you with me inside the big amazon building to show you a bit of how and why we do what we do there. This is not a carefully constructed textbook. It's a story, my story, so expect some digressions and rambling asides.

Here's a bit of the backstory of how I happened to wind up working at an amazon warehouse in avon indiana from april to july of 2020.

In March of 2020 my usual set of medical research studies dried up, and I was looking about for something else to do with my time until things reopened. Meanwhile amazon was declared an essential service, and many rich or desperate people stopped going to the grocery store and started getting their food and junk from amazon. 

Five years ago, before the accident, I'd been planning to go to work for Amazon. I knew that once I turned 55 I'd no longer be qualified for 90% of the medical studies that were how I'd been making a living. One of my roommates at the No Limits housing coop where I'd been living had worked at Amazon and had only good things to say. Dylan was a friend of his, who we knew from the Burning Man local festivals, and also put in a good word, as did Mark, one of the drag queens at the thursday night amateur show at a local bar I was a regular at. I've worked in warehouses before, those have some of my best paying jobs. Amazon doesn't have warehouses, they have fulfullment centers, FC's. They look a lot like warehouses to me. 

I'm a bum. I've had an interesting life, and have probably failed at more things than most people try. I might write a prequel, about my 12 years doing medical studies, or my adventures as an arbitrary aardvark, so if you'd like to be on the mailing list for future book announcements drop me a line [or use this form.] if you hat ethis book and feel you've been ripped of, send me some feedback. I'm writing this with the expectation that my readership will be very small. I once wrote an article that probably only two people ever read, but they were the right two people.

But then in 2015 I got rear ended in Lincoln Nebraska, and spent most of the next few years in bed, hurting and a bit depressed as my money ran out. Last year I tried to go back to work, washing dishes at a fancy pseudo-french bistro, but the pain was too much and I had to quit. I started doing paid medical experiments again. I was back in lincoln nebraska this january doing one and picked up a side hustle, washing dishes full time at a korean restaurant for enough to cover rent and gas while I banked all the study money.  I decided I was well enough I could try a warehouse job again, although I wasn't sure how it would go. 

One of the things I'm arguing in the federal lawsuit about the accident is that I had lost income from not being able to work at amazon, so actually getting hired and working there would make my case a little stronger. 

So the job was some much needed money, a bit of physical therapy,  more per hour than I usually get, and would be a talking point in my lawsuit. So I put on my to do list to apply to amazon.
It's a big list, and I procrastinate  and get distracted, and there was no certainty I would follow through. Another reason I wanted the job was to study Jeff Bezos and Amazon from the inside.
I'm 60, born in 1960. I've been around computers and computer networks most of my life. I'm a bum, but I've watched others, like my brother, become millionaires in the computer industry, and the richest of all was Jeff Bezos. Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg. How do I get a tiny little piece of that? I would have to become the student before I could become the master. 

Reason number 6 that I wanted to go to work for Amazon was to make some money to invest in Tesla. Back around 2000 I had an X.com bank acount, that Elon Musk paid me $10 to open. That's another of my side hustles, opening bank accounts and credit cards for the sign up bonuses. I'm committed to the idea of multiple income streams, not being dependent on a boss who could fire me and make me live in fear. I'll take a job for awhile now and then, but I'm not like my father, 30 years at DuPont, retire early at 62, die of cancer. So I've known of Musk since then, and watched him build SpaceX then Tesla while Bezos was building his online bookstore. 
But I got really interested around 2016, with the idea that if I could get a referral code, and get some famous bloggers podcasters and youtube stars to use that referral code, I might be able to make some money. Never happened. But I started following Musk obsessively, and when the stock price dropped from 325 to 200 I decided it was time to get in. I was going to buy 5 shares and wait for the price to go back up to at least 250. Never got around to it.
I finally reopened my charles schwab account in march and bought 1 share at 431, to test if I had my account set up right. I planned to buy 10 shares this year, and scheme to see if I could somehow buy 100 shares next year. Never got around to it. But I was in the market to go make around $4310 I didnt need to live on so I could buy the ten shares. I got $100 from schwab for opening the account, and $200 from Key Bank for direct depositing my Amazon paychecks into their bank. By the time I had the money in the bank, TSLA had risen to above $600, and it was far too risky to try to buy in at that high number, so I didn't; I still have just the one share, and about $115 of amazon. Today in August of 2020 TSLA is at $2250, another new all time high. If I'd put in the $6000 I made at amazon it would have more than doubled. Two weeks ago I went to my bank, got a certified check for $3000, and walked across the hall to Schwab to put more funds in my account so I could buy two more shares, but the office was closed due to covid so it never happned. The next day the stock split 5-1 and the price per share has gone up $1000.    Anyway, where was I? March, unemployed in indianapolis, ready to go to work for amazon. 

My plan was, I'd cooperate with Amazon, so we could both make money. I'd start out just being a grunt, working for wages. Meanwhile, I'd educate myself about some of the other ways to make money at amazon. I was going to get a scanner and a smartphone, and be able to go to thrift stores, scan for books I could sell to amazon for a few bucks more than I'd pay for them. I have not yet implemented that aspect. Later I would write one or more books for kindle. 

Many people these days are selling products via amazon. Conceivably I could find a product, not yet marketed, get it listed on amazon, get it produced cheap locally, and start raking in the bucks. I'm far from doing that, and there's downsides to even trying, but something like that could be in my future. For example, after law school, and after I got fired from the produce warehouse where I made the money to buy my first house in Indiana, I worked for a year as the headwaiter to Chef Jigme Norbu at the Snow Lion. We had a house dressing there, and a hot sauce. I don't have the recipes, but those are the kind of product I'm looking for. Jigme's father was a professor of Tibetan language and culture in Bloomington Indiana, and his mother was a respected lama and restaurant owner, but the best known member of the faimily is Jigme's uncle, the Dalai Lama. The restaurants were a way for Jigme to make an honest living while promoting Tibetan culture. He died, accidentally run over while on a peace march for Tibet. 
So if I were to come up with a brand of yak butter tea or a can of tsel dey, it would help keep jigme's memory alive and do something for the struggle for autonomy and human rights in tibet, and Amazon could bring these products to any door in the country. If you are reading this and would like to work with me to bring this pipe dream of an idea to reality, drop me a lion. I have a lot of ideas, very little follow through, so I went to Amazon as a lowly worker bee, not as the boss. 

Elon Musk had a plan to become a giant elecric car company in three stages. First, he'd make a few electric cars to show that it could be done, and to raise the money to make more and better cars. He'd use the money from that second round to build an affordable mass market vehicle. Those were the roadster, model S, and Model 3, respectively. 

My plan was to do something similar, at a much smaller scale.

I'd go to work for wages at a amazon warehouse, to build a little startup capital. I'd use that opportunity to try to learn more about how amazon worked from the inside, so that I coud find the right next step, perhaps applying for a management level job, or selling a product or service via amazon. I'd use my love of book sales to scout for books I could sell to amazon. While it's become the everything store, they still sell, and buy, a lot of books.  

And I'd write a book, or shorter piece, about my experience, and offer it for sale via kindle. Now, maybe that would never happen, because all my life I've been plagued with writer's block.

But if I could write one book for kindle, it might teach me enough about the platform that it would be feasible to write, or edit, a book a year, and over time I might develop some residual income or even a following. I have one online friend, Tynan of Tynan.com, who writes books about his adventures, that help fund his further adventures, so he has more books to write. 

Another piece of that pie would be to become an amazon affiliate. I've been a blogger for ten years, during which i've made $35 from adsense revenue. One of the bloggers I link to, the Instapundit, helps generate revenue from his popular right wing lawblog by frequently linking his blog to his Amazon affiliate links, so if he mentions a book, he can link to where that book is for sale on Amazon,and get a 5% commission, although I hear that's been reduced to 3%. So far i havent gotten around to it, but perhaps by the time this gets published in kindle, it will have links to an Amazon affiliate page, and specific links for specific books or products. 

Another business model I've been looking into is the professional youtuber. One of my occasional roommates and study companions, BJ, is trying to get a foothold in that line of work. He did a study, bought a ticket to Colombia, put up a youtube video from his trip that has attracted 2 million hits. He hasn't been able to replicate that, but some of his other videos get thousands of hits. I follow some podcasters and tesla bloggers, like Ben Sullins, Steven Mark Ryan, Rob Mauer of Tesla Daily, Everyday Astronaut. The business model they mostly follow looks a bit like this:  income from youtube hits. income from sponsors or affilliate links. patreon, where people join the channel with a monthly fee and get extra perks, and merch. merch is typically tshirts.

Right now I don't have sponsors or affiliate links. I see no reason to do a patreon. Unless I were providing something extra of value, it would seem like begging. This could change if I were to start putting out good content; I'm not currently. my few youtube videos are about voting rights issues and were not aimed at a broader audience, but were just about preserving evidence. 

But the point is to build an income model with multiple streams.
I'm not going to get rich by working at amazon. I've already made $6000, a nice start, but it's probably too physically demanding a job for me to hold very long. I will apply for the lowest level mamagement job,and if I don't get that, I'll try being a warehouse grunt again this fall for peak season, but I doubt that I'll be working at amazon in 5 years, unless somehow this book gets me noticed in a good way.   




In my first round, I lasted 10 weeks, long enough to gather the intel for this [story, book] I do not think that I'm done working at Amazon, but it makes sense right now to take a bit of time off to start writing, because I can't both work and write. When you work at Amazon, you spend the rest of the time sleeping or trying to sleep or wasting time on reddit; it would take a far more disciplined writer than I am to write this while still working there. 

It was a not a living hell; I've had worse jobs. But the best part of my day was the drive to work at 2 am, on deserted highways in the covid wasteland, listening to the local college station play classical music. 

The "music" at work was a whole different ball game, so I bought ear protectors, like you'd wear on a  firing range, and when they wouldn't let me wear those i wore ear plugs.

I put in my application online in late March. I was given a start date of April 9th, and some conflicting emails about exactly when and where to go, but was generally told I'd need to watch some online training videos and attend a hiring event to get my badge, get drug tested, be assigned a shift, and so forth.

On the one hand, they were taking everybody who could drag themself over the threshhold. I did not give them a resume, did not tell them I was an honor student, 4.0 undergrad, National Merit Scholar, with a doctorate, masters degree, forklift certification, and several years of warehouse work. I did tell them I was a living american, and willing to work 40 hours a week for $17 an hour, with likely mandatory overtime during peak periods. That was all it took. 

Not much, but there was a bit of screening there - you had to be able to use a laptop, look up where to apply, fill out a quick application, respond to several emails. Not 100% of the prospective employment pool gets that far. Of my 3 roommates at my current shack, I was the only one willing and able to jump that first hurdle. 

A next filter is the drug test. You have to be willing to take one. Again, that would filter out my three roommates. There never was a drug test. I could pass one, and was expecting one when I converted from temporary to permanent employee, from a white badge to a blue badge, but even after I put in the form to move up, I never heard back, not yes, not no, just never heard back, and soon I put in for a leave of absense that got denied because white badges don't get LOAs, so I quit, but on good terms so I should be able to start again whenever I want, maybe. I left in July but right now we are still talking about April.

The next filter was the hiring hall. This was at a hotel on the west side, and I ran into an unexpected obstacle. By then I has been given a conditional notice that I'd been hired, but it was contingent on a few things, like showing up to the hiring hall event, watching the preemployment videos, and so forth.  

Oh did I mention yet the part about that my start date got changed from april 9th to april 23rd? I also got messages saying my start date was april 20, but other messages saying to ignore those messages. At least during covid, their HR and hiring processes was not the model of efficiency you might expect from the world's expert at logistics. I never got any explanation for why they delayed my hiring 2 weeks at a time when they claimed to be desperate for new blood. I'm not a paycheck to paycheck guy, but it ended up being kind of a long process for a job that many people quit the first day. I have enough tenacity that I was willing to wait; I'd been waiting for years already.

So we're filling out my paperwork and she asks for my social security card and I say I can't find it but offer other documentation with my number. No dice, fired before I even started. She says go to the social security office, get a new card, make a new hiring hall appointment, get a new start date. I happen to know the office is closed due to covid.

I finagle the wifi password from the front desk clerk and jump online. I find the social security office page, jump through some flaming hoops, find the page to request a new card. I get a promise that I am being emailed a reciept for a temporary new card, and the receipt is valid to begin employment with. I check my email, no email. I wait a bit, check it again, there it is. I finagle the desk clerk into unlocking the room with the printers, boot up the printer, get online on their machine, print off my reciept for a new card, and stroll back into the hiring hall about 40 minutes after I'd been sent away. I get asigned the 3 am shift m-f and am told to expect an email with the info to watch the preemployment training videos.
I complement her on her glamazon shirt but she mis-hears or doesn't pick up the cue that I'm part of the tribe. At any big enough organization, there's a network of queer employees who look out for each other, just are there are many other such networks, all calmly competing for their share of control of the hierarchy. 

So it's taken a month to get this far, but I have a start date now, and they've taken my picture for the badge. Shoulda worn a tie.

1 am, i think i'll call it a night. have to get up in the morning to help my mom renew her passport and replace her mailbox key. ended up writing till dawn, didnt sleep.

Now to some people this is a simple bit of routine paperwork. To others, it would have been an insuperable obstacle. I'm a lawyer. I'm used to solving problems, especially problems that involve government agencies, red tape, and reasons why you can possibly do the thing you want to do because it doesn't follow the rules. 

So now I was ready to start.




a book told in a series of 6 page memos

memo 0
day 1: i imbed myself in an amazon facility toobserve and critique

so i got hired. day 1, they take 5 of us to a room and we get a lecture and a video and  a handout, and they explain some basics.
one of the 5 gets pulled aisde and we never see him again.

one of the 5 is an older woman, hillbilly type, long red hair, and she lasted the first month, who most of us old folks don't do.  we never really talked, but we were comrades. 
some people quit the first day, some last a week, at least half quit the first month. maybe a few get fired, who knows, it's just new people all the time. so there's like one group that's been there awhile and does the work, and another group that is new and largely gets in the way, and some in between like me who kinda have the hang of it but don't fully fit in either. 

like every warehouse job, there are two main tasks, so the workforce tends to be divided into two groups, pickers and stowers.

i'm going to be discussing this in very general terms, not giving away any amazon trade secrets. 

the area i worked in was groceries. the rest of the building was shoes, and we had no interaction with the shoe people. we had one small corner in the back of the big shoe warehouse. the grocery corner had 5 main areas: 1. ambient, meaning room temperature, which is stuff like canned goods. 2: bigs, which are larger items that don't go in a bag, but get their own label, 3: produce, 4 chilled, which is dairy and eggs and meats and such, 5 frozen. For produce and chilled you wore latex gloves. For frozen you wore a snowsuit- like outfit, and heavier gloves. Aside from these main 5 areas there was an office, a break room, a dock where stuff came in and went out, a space where the carts were kept, a set of shelves where completed bags waited to go out to the delivery drivers. two bathrooms. by far the largest area was ambient. rows of shelves, with a corridor in the middle of the room of shelves. each row of shelves  was one way, so you worked a snake-like pattern, starting at the first set of shelves (drinks) and all the way back to the last set of shelves, (breads and chips). 

the stower's job was to take stuff that came in via the docks and put it onto the shelves. i was a picker; i very rarely stowed and never really got good at it. the picker has two main tools, the cart, and the scanner. the cart is a rubbermaid type cart with 4 wheels, a lower shelf we mostly ignored, and an upper shelf with 10 bags on it, two rows of 5. so the scanner would have you start a new order, and you'd set up your cart with ten bags, and you'd start at one end (drinks) and you'd pick items to put in the bags. the scanner would tell you what the item was and what shelf it was on.  you' scan the shelf, beep, scan the item, beep, scan the bag, beep. every bag, shelf and item had a bar code, like you see at the supermarket. the scanner read the bar codes and if it was the right thing it would give an approving beep and you'd go on to the next item. it took about half an hour to fill the ten bags with the items the scanner wanted.
so the task is very simplistic compared to other warehouses i've worked in. the job had been broken down into simple steps designed to be foolproof. we were hardworking humans, but clearly we are only there temporarily until they get better robots. maybe 3-5 years before most of the humans won't be needed. 
have you ever worked at mcdonalds? mcdonalds, for all its horrors, is a great job for low skilled teenagers to learn their first job, because the complex steps of running a restaurant have been simplified as much as possible, broken down into simple steps that can be easily learned, so a new employee quickly gets up to speed on every process. amazon has taken that to extremes. if you can push a cart, take items off a shelf, make a scanner go beep, you can work at amazon. the first month, you learn to do it right. from then on, you get pushed to do it a little faster. but only the bottom 5% gets fired fo rbeing too slow, and during covid they were happy you showed up and didn't screw up, so there was less pressure to go fast, as long as you werent in the way.

so the first day the newbies, after their lecture, are taken to the floor, gemba, where the  work happens. they are shown how to sign into a scanner, how to select next order, ambient, and they begin pushing their cart around the shelves. when the cart is full it gets handed off to the slam station, which slaps a label on each bag and puts in on the proper shelf so the loading dock guys can give it to the right driver at the right time. ambient orders have a long shelf life so they just have to be ready on time. produce and frozen orders need to be more just-in-time; you don't want a container of ice cream sitting out getting too warm.  after a couple of days to get the hang of ambient, the newbies, those that didn't quit after a day, are shown the similar process of the bigs, produce, chilled and frozen section. for bigs, same cart, but no bags, you just label each item, scan the bin, scan the item, scan the label, beep beep beep, on to the next location. produce is similar, but it's just two long aisles.
one warm, with stuff like bananas onions potatoes and tomatoes, one cold, with organic produce on one side and mostly regular produce on the other side. 4 shelves per row, A lowest, B waist level, C chest level, and D hopelessly out of reach at about 6 feet.
So for items on D you are either stretching and jumping to try to grab these high items, or you are getting the ladder and climbing up to be able to reach them.   Meanwhile in theory you are socially distancing, keeping 6 feet from everybody else trying to get their produce at the same time. 10 bags of produce takes about 1/2 hour, unless you are new, when it takes an hour, or when a newbie is in your way, that is to say usually. in this section i'm just introducing the reader to the general layout; in a later section i'll be more vocal about how this is a less than optimum set up. produce is stuff like apples, berries, chard, but not in alphabetical order, or any other discernable order. the organic stuff is mostly on one side of the aisle and the regular on the other , but not always. there were a few weeks where i did mostly produce and could knock out my ten bags in a half hour if no one was in my way, but i did this using some shortcuts i worked out, that were not how they wanted it done, so i later moved back to ambient.

frozen i mostly avoided, because if you were in the frozen locker for more than about 15 minutes pain set in, as your hands became too cold to operate the scanner. on a good day i'd do one frozen order, to be doing my part, and otherwise tried to avoid it.   

next to frozen, chilled is what i tried to avoid. the aisles were narrow and long, so you either were stuck behind somebody, or somebody was stuck behind you. the products were often corpses, mulilated, disgusting, and coud not be handled directly so you were  kind of juggling plastic bags, trying not to handle the product, while going fast enough, and sometimes needing the ladder, and sometimes not being able to find the item because it was behind something else or wouldn't scan or needed the ladder, or if it were eggs you had to put it into a cardboard sleeve so it wouldn't break in the bags.   

one of the great things about amazon is that they have a large stock, with many many items to choose from, in a way that wouldn't be practical or cost effective in a market, unless you were jungle jim's or somebody like that. jungle jims is a 6 acre supermarket in cincinnati that is like a food museum.

when i worked at the produce warehouse when i first moved to inianapolis, the genius of the place was that there was a place for everything and everything in its place, so after you'd worked there a month or so you knew where everything was, so when you looked at your order and saw what you needed, you also knew where to go get it. amazon is the opposite. stowers stow anywhere there is room. sometimes there are some general guidelines likes eggs go in this area, produce in the produce aisle, etc. only the computer knows where everything is. most of the time the algorithms work pretty well. sometimes they don't. if the item isn't where the computer says it is, look on the nearby shelves, it may be somewhere close. 

earlier i described how the process is scan the shelf, scan the item, scan the bag, go on to the next one.  that's a great system and keeps the error rate low because each item is being checked. but when it doesn't work it doesn't work, so every single item is a potential bottleneck, bringing the whole process to a screeching halt. imagine you are the new employee being pushed to work faster faster, but the scanner is telling you to get item A off shelf B, but you can't find it. At this point employees may get creative.  Find item A on some other shelf. If all else fails mark it missing, but that sends and alert to the inventory team, who may get annoyed if it wasn't actually missing. Sometimes the answer is to wait a few minutes until someone gets out of your way, because in theory you can't be within 6 feet of another employee. this rule gets broken 20 times a day or more. the officially approved method is to go get a supervisor. that might take 6 minutes, and you were already behind on rate. if you go 6 minutes without scanning your next item, that sends an alert to a different supervisor who may come around to find out why you are slacking off. if you ever forget to punch out for break or lunch this will come up. 6 minutes is enough time to go to the bathroom and back, which is allowed. so most of the time you are smoothly walking your route, filling your bags, politely waiting when you need to to allow someone else to get their item.
but sometimes you are looking for an item that isn't ther    e, or is well hidden, or someone's in your way, or the ladder you need is 50 feet away and in use. there is no button the scanner to indicate "let's come back to this one later." Covid has brought changes to the way the warehouse works, but the algorythyms [sp] were not written with covid in mind. The coders who write the algorthyms rarely come out to the floor, and there's not much of an expectation that the guy pushing the cart is going to be able to have a meaningful discussion with the coders about the glitches in the algorythm. The two group of people rarely interact; at least in my 10 weeks as a cartpusher i never met a coder. In a union shop, there's at least a way for problms like that to filter up through the shop steward. When I was a teamster in the 1990s my local had a history of corruption going back to hoffa days, and I can understand why Amazon has a strong preference for being a non-union shop. But there's a lack of communication between the white badges on the floor, and the suits at corporate in seattle. now, they don't actually wear suits, it's very business-casual and dog-friendly.  That's one of the reasons I'm writing this. This book is for the grunt who's thinking about maybe going to work for amazon, and also for the L7 who doesn't spend a lot of time anymore pushing the cart.
I don't expect that current amazon empoyees will read this. We are too tired to read, nd not all of us are functionally literate. Perhps I should do this as an audiobook as well. I am specifically writing it for the kindle. I have no agent or publisher. The kindle is a platform for self-publishing, so that I may sell 5 copies or 5000. 
It's possible that this little  book will bring me a promotion. It's also very likely it'll get me banned from ever working at amazon again. It's been my experience that large institutions are not always comfortable with close scrutiny.
I mentioned above that I used to be a teamster. That will raise some hackles. I was the world's lowest paid teamster, and I quit in 1990 to follow my girlfriend to law school. We are no longer a couple, and neither of us practices law, but it seemed like a good career move at the time; we were a dishwasher and hotel maid respectively in our early years together. Being a lawyer raises a different set of red flags that may lead amazon to not want me out on the shop floor. My intentions are good. I like the company, with reservations. I liked working there, although it's a relief not to be enduring the aches and pains. I'm an old man, and a cripple, and going up and down those ladders all day was taking a lot out of me. I am a shareholder, all $115 of it. I took the matching 2% for the 401k in Amazon stock, which is up 50% this year.
In some chapters of this work I'm critical, but it's intended to be constructive. 

    












memo1 - stop throwing away product

memo 2 - ergonometrics of the produce aisle

memo 4 - a hunble brag. my currilculum vitae,a 6 page resume

memo 5 a leave of absinthe. i take a month off to do a rough draft of this book. and read a few books about amazon

memo 6
mentors, mentees and manatees.
i'm not even sure there's a memo here

memo 7 a glossary - some amazon jargon explained.

memo 8 the 13 1/2 values, roadmap or hype?

memo 9 - iww, prayer circles, recruiting an empire.

memo 10 - vid and covid.

8/27/20 update 10:33
just a rough draft

Dear Ms Whitehead (Keri?),

  I wrote to you twice this spring on the topic of produce waste at the warehouse [fulfillment center] you run and I worked at. At the moment I am not working there, although I hope to return at some point. I will shortly be applying for a T3 position at [new castle de location] PHL1. But I have not given up on the mission of doing something about the problem of $1000 a day of good product being thrown away. You never replied to my messages, and with my lack of social skills I wasn't sure what to do next, and it became a back burner item. But "persistence beats resistance", and I have no plans to give up. This is a topic where I have chosen to "disagree and commit". Frugality is one of the 13 and half key values at amazon.
I am new to Amazon, and don't know yet if these are empty buzzwords or actual methods by which we do business, but I am going to be proceeding as though it matters that we are wasting over $1000 a day in product that can easily be fixed. In the three books I have read about Jeff Bezos, I got the sense that he has an attention to detail and a concern for doing things efficiently; what we are currently doing does not meet that standard.
Would you be willing to take a meeting with [the staff of the food bank I wrote to you about?] I think she can make the case better than I can.  Is there someone else I should be discussing this with?

Email is best, gtbear@gmail.com. My rbbiste@amazon.com account is not currently working.
Phone is 303 529-1529 or 317 760 0223 if you prefer to have a conversation, although I can be hard to reach by phone. 

Sincerely, Robbin Stewart.





July 28. I've been here nearly a month. we are halfway through the study. and i've written nothing.
So on my to do list for today I put that I would write at least a paragraph, just to get started. So this is that.



memo1 - stop throwing away product

For a company that claims to value frugality, the UFF (ultra fast fresh, or something like that) isthrowing away over $1000 retail of perfectly good product every day,which shouldbe going to a food pantry, or otherwise kept out of the waste stream. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Here it's about reduction.
I am not saying this stuff should be sent to Amazon's customers. Quality control is important. But framing things as either deliver it to customers or throw it away, is a false dicotomy.

Food waste is bad business. It negatively affects the bottom line. More importantly it's sinful, evil, stupid. It's just plain wrong. Amazon is a company obsesses about loss prevention, defined as stealing by employees. There was a famous incident last year in our warehouse where an employee took a pair of shoes. He was detected and fired. I don't know if they got the shoes back.  At least three employees per shift work loss prevention, their eagle eyes watching the front door. Meanwhile thousands of dollars daily goes out the back door, into the compactor. That is the loss that they are not preventing. It's a blind spot.

I was paid $120 a day to push a cart around. I pretty quickly realized that I could be of more value to the company if I could do something to stop the waste. At first I went through channels.I discussed it with my ambassador, learned how to email my supervisor, who passed it on to the warehouse manager.
I never hard back. A week or so later I folowed up with another email to the warehouse manager, attaching an article about the food bank that I had had found that was offeringto come weekly to pick up the non-marketable but still good product. I never heard back. Since then I have been procrastinating, planning to write this memo.

I am not fluent in the format of the Amazon memo. Apparently it's something like this:
p 1.Mock Press release.
p 2. Thesis. Abstract.
p 3-5  Body. A narrative essay, that tells a story, perhaps using the STAR format: situation, task, action, result. 
p. 6 footnotes and bibliography.

So that's off to a pretty good start. I can expand later.


memo 2 - ergonometrics of the produce aisle

memo 4 - a hunble brag. my currilculum vitae,a 6 page resume

memo 5 a leave of absinthe. i take a month off to do a rough draft of this book. and read a few books about amazon

memo 6
mentors, mentees and manatees.
i'm not even sure there's a memo here

memo 7 a glossary - some amazon jargon explained.

memo 8 the 13 1/2 values, roadmap or hype?

memo 9 - iww, prayer circles, recruiting an empire.

memo 10 - vid and covid.

memo 11 - my life as an amazon consumer, reseller, and kindle author

memo 12- angling for promotion, apply for L3jobs

memo 13 proposal for a health care program

memo 14 investing - my 401k, tesla, amzn, etc.

memo 15 what is gemba? six sigma explained in 6 pages.

transcribing from notes on plane.

july 5th 2020

My Gemba Walk at Amazon

a book told in a series of 6 page memos

memo 0
day 1: i imbed myself in an amazon facility toobserve and critique

memo1 - stop throwing away product

memo 2 - ergonometrics of the produce aisle

memo 4 - a hunble brag. my currilculum vitae,a 6 page resume

memo 5 a leave of absinthe. i take a month off to do a rough draft of this book. and read a few books about amazon

memo 6
mentors, mentees and manatees.
i'm not even sure there's a memo here

memo 7 a glossary - some amazon jargon explained.

memo 8 the 13 1/2 values, roadmap or hype?

memo 9 - iww, prayer circles, recruiting an empire.

memo 10 - vid and covid.

memo 11 - my life as an amazon consumer, reseller, and kindle author

memo 12- angling for promotion, apply for L3jobs

memo 13 proposal for a health care program

memo 14 investing - my 401k, tesla, amzn, etc.

memo 15 what is gemba? six sigma explained in 6 pages.

= = =

memo 0
day 1: i imbed myself in an amazon facility to observe and critique

this part is one page per memo, just to get an outline,first expand from tobale of contents.
star stories, situation, task, [a-thing] result
narrative - a memo tells a story.

day 1.  I embed myself at an amazon warehouse FC for 10 weeks to learn about the company from the inside, so i can observe and report, criticize and praise.
who how when where and why.

the narrative part:
during covid, my usual gigs shut down, so in late march of 2020 i was thinking about coming out of semi-retirement and actually getting a job. earlier in march, i had reopened my schwab brokerage account, bought a share of tesla, and was looking for a way to make some money to buy more shares, because there seemed to be an unusual attractive investment opportunity. my lifestyle is such that i dont need a job, because i own my house and car, get my food for free, spend almost no money,  and just have a [broken thought]

5 years after my accident, i was recovering well, and though that for the first time i might be well enough to hold down a warehouse job. i lay in bed in pain for the first couple years, but i'd been making progress over the past year.
i had a federal lawsuit going, in which i argued that i had lost income, because i had planned to go work at amazon. this looked pretty speculative to the insurance company, so actually getting a job at amazon would make this more persuasive to a jury.

my plan, as far as it involved amazon, had three stages:
one: work for wages in the warehouse, learn about the company, develop some expertise. invest the wages in tesla or a similar opportunity, maybe buy another house or some cars.
two: learn how to sell used books to amazon.
less likely, find a product or product to sell via amazon; at least i would learn a bit about this option.
three: write a book or other publication for kindle. bruce sterling told me one time, in a bookstore in austin, that there's more money in nonfiction than fiction. there have already been good books written about amazon, but there might be room for one more. if not a book, maybe an article that could be pitched to a magazine.
i know a guy online who supports himself writing one book a year about his adventures, while going around having adventures. adding in some writing income to my current multiple streams suits my long term goals.but in the short term, i was looking for a paycheck, and amazon was offering $17/hr during april. so i put in an applicatioin.

as far as amazon knows, i was just some guy who showed up on time for his shifts and pushed the cart around as the computer told me. they didn't know that i have a doctorate and a masters, that i have a background in working in warehouses, that i've been a teamster, that i've held appointed public offices in the same 4 states where i've been arrested. or for that matter, that i have an internet persona as an aardvark.







memo1 - stop throwing away product

memo 2 - ergonometrics of the produce aisle

memo 4 - a hunble brag. my currilculum vitae,a 6 page resume

memo 5 a leave of absinthe. i take a month off to do a rough draft of this book. and read a few books about amazon

memo 6
mentors, mentees and manatees.
i'm not even sure there's a memo here

memo 7 a glossary - some amazon jargon explained.

memo 8 the 13 1/2 values, roadmap or hype?

memo 9 - iww, prayer circles, recruiting an empire.

memo 10 - vid and covid.

memo 11 - my life as an amazon consumer, reseller, and kindle author

memo 12- angling for promotion, apply for L3jobs

memo 13 proposal for a health care program

memo 14 investing - my 401k, tesla, amzn, etc.

memo 15 what is gemba? six sigma explained in 6 pages.