Isegoria

Joel Johnson describes the secret lives of Amazon’s elves — “workcampers” who park their RVs near Amazon’s fulfillment center in Coffeyville, Kansas:

“From what the agency people had told us, Amazon had a bad experience busing in people from Tulsa,” says Chris. “There was a lot of theft and a lot of people who weren’t really serious about the job.”

Workers from Tulsa were adding a 4-hour round-trip commute to an already grueling 10-to-12 hour shift, Cherie is quick to add. “They’d get there exhausted.”

Enter the workcampers, people making a go at living in their RVs full time — many of whom might be otherwise overqualified. “I think Amazon was skeptical at first,” says Cherie. “But after the first trial year they were very, very impressed. Workcampers came in enthusiastic about working, since most are professionals. We’ve owned businesses or been managers.” White collar workers, trying their hand at the gypsy life. Even better, the workcampers were able to stay locally.
[...]
“Every shift starts with what they call a ‘Stand Up.’ You gather in one area with your usual department — ours was called ‘Sortable Singles,’ which sounds like it should be the name of a dating site — and they’d count off how many people they needed in each department. Run through a few announcements. Give you a few safety tips. And then they lead you through five minutes of group stretches.”

Cherie was mainly a packer, putting items in the box and scanning them. Chris, on the other hand, was a “water spider.” He explains, “A water spider is responsible for keeping all the packers supplied, so ideally they’d never need to stand up and leave their station to get any other supplies like all the different sizes of boxes, plus making sure their tape machines and paper-spitter machines are operating.”

“I never quite exactly figured out why they call it a water spider. My guess is back in the history of assembly line jobs, the water spider would be the person who would bring people on the line water to drink. Nobody seemed to know!”
[...]
Inside the warehouses, machines and man alike were controlled by Amazon’s computerized assembly line.

In one part of the factory, Chris watched two giant elliptical carousels, each one the size of a football field, carry wooden trays around at 15mph. “All the items are coming in the totes on one side of this giant machine. There are people who take each individual item, scan them and put them on the trays as they go by. The trays get to a chute where their order is being assembled, tilt, and the product flies down into that space. When all the items for a particular order are assembled in one place an orange light comes on and somebody comes by.” Above, another carousel brought an endless procession of empty boxes to be filled with the orders.

It wasn’t exactly what Cherie had envisioned. “When we told people were going to do this, someone said ‘Whenever I click the order button on Amazon, I always imagine a chorus of happy, singing Oompa-Loompas riding around on Segways and shipping my stuff.’ Well… no. It’s not exactly like that.”

“The computer has to prioritize how it’s going to send out all the pickers in this giant facility. So someone could order a book and a sweater and an iPod, and those could be in completely different corners of the whole facility. But somehow they all arrive within about 30 minutes of each other.” It’s efficiency even Willy Wonka could love.

Will Big Business save the Earth? Maybe it will, says Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel, Collapse), who until recently assumed corporations were environmentally destructive, greedy, evil and driven by short-term profits:

The embrace of environmental concerns by chief executives has accelerated recently for several reasons. Lower consumption of environmental resources saves money in the short run. Maintaining sustainable resource levels and not polluting saves money in the long run. And a clean image — one attained by, say, avoiding oil spills and other environmental disasters — reduces criticism from employees, consumers and government.

Let’s start with Wal-Mart:

Obviously, a business can save money by finding ways to spend less while maintaining sales. This is what Wal-Mart did with fuel costs, which the company reduced by $26 million per year simply by changing the way it managed its enormous truck fleet. Instead of running a truck’s engine all night to heat or cool the cab during mandatory 10-hour rest stops, the company installed small auxiliary power units to do the job. In addition to lowering fuel costs, the move eliminated the carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to taking 18,300 passenger vehicles off the road.

Wal-Mart is also working to double the fuel efficiency of its truck fleet by 2015, thereby saving more than $200 million a year at the pump. Among the efficient prototypes now being tested are trucks that burn biofuels generated from waste grease at Wal-Mart’s delis. Similarly, as the country’s biggest private user of electricity, Wal-Mart is saving money by decreasing store energy use.

Another Wal-Mart example involves lowering costs associated with packaging materials. Wal-Mart now sells only concentrated liquid laundry detergents in North America, which has reduced the size of packaging by up to 50 percent. Wal-Mart stores also have machines called bailers that recycle plastics that once would have been discarded. Wal-Mart’s eventual goal is to end up with no packaging waste.

One last Wal-Mart example shows how a company can save money in the long run by buying from sustainably managed sources. Because most wild fisheries are managed unsustainably, prices for Chilean sea bass and Atlantic tuna have been soaring. To my pleasant astonishment, in 2006 Wal-Mart decided to switch, within five years, all its purchases of wild-caught seafood to fisheries certified as sustainable.

Diamond found himself mightily impressed with Chevron:

Not even in any national park have I seen such rigorous environmental protection as I encountered in five visits to new Chevron-managed oil fields in Papua New Guinea. (Chevron has since sold its stake in these properties to a New Guinea-based oil company.) When I asked how a publicly traded company could justify to its shareholders its expenditures on the environment, Chevron employees and executives gave me at least five reasons.

First, oil spills can be horribly expensive: it is far cheaper to prevent them than to clean them up. Second, clean practices reduce the risk that New Guinean landowners become angry, sue for damages and close the fields. (The company has been sued for problems in Ecuador that Chevron inherited when it merged with Texaco in 2001.) Next, environmental standards are becoming stricter around the world, so building clean facilities now minimizes having to do expensive retrofitting later.

Also, clean operations in one country give a company an advantage in bidding on leases in other countries. Finally, environmental practices of which employees are proud improve morale, help with recruitment and increase the length of time employees are likely to remain at the company.

Years ago, when I was driving around Pennsylvania — and didn’t know the area — I found myself behind a truck emblazoned with the logo for something called Yuengling, which it trumpeted as America’s Oldest Brewery.

Frankly, the brand name looked Chinese to me — even if the Eagle logo didn’t — and I thought I should have heard of America’s oldest brewery. Nobody in the state seemed to know the story, so here it is:

• The German brewer David G. Jüngling immigrated to the United States in 1823 from Aldingen in the Kingdom of Württemberg. He anglicized his surname from Jüngling to Yuengling and began the “Eagle Brewery” on Center Street in Pottsville in 1829.
• Yuengling’s trademarked phrase “America’s Oldest Brewery” refers to the U.S. only, as the Canadian brand Molson, founded in 1786, is the oldest in North America.

It’s pronounced Ying-ling (/?j??l??/), by the way, and it’s now popular all along the east coast.

Donald Pittenger has noticed a connection between themed casinos and entropy:

Currently active themes in the heart of the Strip include Venice, the Italian lake country, King Arthur’s court, ancient Egypt, New York City, Caribbean pirate islands, China, a desert oasis and Paris. Well on the way to phase-out are Aladdin’s Middle East and Hollywood. (The MGM Grand dropped some of its Hollywood-themed decor. On the other hand, the Aladdin has been pretty much transformed into its new, Planet Hollywood guise.)

Did I just mention “phase-out?” What I’ve been noticing are signs that that theme-purity is starting to diminish in the strongly-themed casinos — places where even the shops originally tried to conform to the overall scheme. The majority of themed casinos wear their themes lightly, embodying them in the general decor, but not extending to most of the shops and restaurants.

A case in point is the Paris. It has a Parisian-style shopping street where all (or nearly all) shops and restaurants were — Parisian. Yesterday I noticed that one shop site had been taken over by (if memory serves) a Shooz shoe store. And there was a new restaurant that, at a glance, didn’t seem particularly French.

The Luxor casino began an image remake a few years ago. Its architecture (a hollow pyramid) is impossible to change, but the ground floor details are changing from ancient Egypt to Los Angles show-biz.

The Luxor’s change was by top management decision. The Paris’ seeming shift is probably fed by the need to rent retail space, a need that will likely be enhanced by the current hard economic times.

Or, as the title of this post suggests, it’s possible that entropy itself kicks in where highly structured, low-entropic conditions exist.

Scott Adams (Dilbert) wonders if one if the prime drivers for entrepreneurship is bad management:

I have to think that bad management pushes a lot of capable people out of their day jobs, and those people go on to become entrepreneurs.

Imagine a world where managers always recognized and rewarded their most capable people. It would be hard for a rational employee to leave a great job for a ten percent chance of creating something even greater. But leaving a boss who is Satan’s learning-challenged little brother is relatively easy. And if the general economy isn’t serving up wonderful job opportunities at other companies (thanks in part to bad management) then you can see why people gravitate toward starting their own companies.

You can thank The Dilbert Principle for some of this entrepreneurial zest. The Dilbert Principle observes that in the modern economy, the least capable people are promoted to management because companies need their smartest people to do the useful work. It’s hard to design software, but relatively easy to run staff meetings. This creates a situation where you have more geniuses reporting to morons than at any time in history. In that sort of environment you’d expect the geniuses to be looking for a way out, even if Plan B has a low chance of success.

I’ve never seen a statistic on the number of companies that were started while an employee “borrowed” resources, from his day job, mostly in the form of time and Internet access, but I’ll bet it’s a big number.

Big companies with bad managers are the ideal breeding ground for entrepreneurs. Employees are exposed to a wide variety of business disciplines, and can avail themselves of excellent company-paid training and outside education. When you add broad skill development to the inevitability of eventually getting a moron for a boss, thanks to frequent internal reorganizations, it’s no wonder that big companies spray entrepreneurs into the environment like the fountains at Bellagio.