Only 54 more days until Christmas!!!

Week five, with mandatory overtime is done!  The cardboard drawers full of costumes have already switched over to ‘ugly’ Christmas sweaters and ‘naughty’ Christmas sweaters.  What makes a ‘naughty’ sweater?  The carrot used for Mr. Snowman’s nose is in a different  spot, and Mrs. Snowman is ‘very happy’!  And those reindeer are playing some interesting games!!

We have also noticed some new LED sweaters, with red/blue/green  LED lights knitted into the sweater.  I love shaking the drawers to get them to ‘light up’ as I go down the aisles.  (it helps pass the time!)  It must be getting cold in some areas, because we have picked a lot of thermal underwear, gloves and winter coats this week.  Amazon sells a lot of Columbia, North Face and Carhart apparel.

By the end of the week, work had slowed down a bit, and they offered voluntary time off for an afternoon.  The regular full-time employees were excited about this, and rushed to take advantage of taking some unpaid time-off.  Since orders were slow, they moved some of us around, and I was moved to the Packing department, to do vendor returns for an afternoon.  If merchandise does not sell after a certain amount of time, Amazon sends it back to the manufacturer, or liquidates it.  I really did not like doing this, as you stand in one spot all afternoon.  I like to be moving.

ALL HANDS ON DECK

We attended the monthly ‘all hands on deck’ meeting last week, where the senior management went over their expectations for peak season.  Since it coincided with the employee Halloween costume contest, the senior management was all dressed as Star Wars characters.  It was the first time I have attended a meeting run by Darth Vadar, Princess Leia and a Storm Trooper!

The meeting was very informative, and they stated this years Peak should be better than last years.  They said last year, staffing was 50% full-time Amazon employees, and 50% temporary agency staff.  This year, they are projecting 84% Amazon employees, and only 16% temporary employees.  That should alleviate a lot of the craziness that we saw last December when we came up to this facility.

They also announced we will again be switching to 11 hour days, starting on Black Friday.  Our start time will be 6:30am – 6:00pm (currently 7:30am to 6).  Camperforce is not required to do the 11 hour days.  But it is an easy way to get an extra 5 hours of overtime a week, so we will do the longer days.

And since they are not anticipating staffing problems this year, they do not anticipate needing to go to 59 1/2 hour weeks, like they did last year.  We are happy to hear that, as we like having 2 full days off.  55 hours is enough for us!

Quote for the day:  “All I want for Christmas is a really ugly sweater, said no one ever.” – unknown