Andy Jassey to the American worker: “Kick rocks”

Have you seen the news? We’re screwed. More specifically, Amazon workers are screwed as Andy Jassey announced the company can now run a warehouse without people. Naturally, Wall Street reacted like it was good news.

(Source: Giphy) 

In short, the company’s new robotics system, Blue Jay, can pick, sort, and stow packages without a scent of back pain… and all on its own. In tests at a South Carolina site, Blue Jay handled roughly three-quarters of inventory without human help. Amazon framed it as “helping employees focus on higher-value tasks,” which really just means they need fewer of us now. But alas, in official terms, Blue Jay “works alongside” humans. Unofficially, it’s replacing them. The press release was basically a “it’s not you… it’s me” initiative to its workers. Amazon insists the bots will make work “safer” and “more efficient,” while also introducing Project Eluna, an AI system that manages warehouse ops end-to-end.

(Source: CNBC) 

Now if you’re keeping score here, that means the robot does the lifting, the AI directs traffic, and the humans supervise the software that supervises the robots. Sounds legit. The scary part though, is that while Amazon is selling the illusion of “humans are still needed”, internal estimates suggest automation could save 30¢ per package and cut the need for 160,000 hires by 2027. Morgan Stanley thinks the total efficiency gain could be worth $4 billion. Translation: Every second shaved off a package route, every worker not hired, every injury that doesn’t need workers’ comp is margin expansion in real time.

With that said, sure, Amazon keeps saying automation “creates new roles.” Maybe. But they’re the kind of roles where you monitor dashboards instead of moving boxes, and there’s not going to be 600,000 of them. The idea that warehouse workers will all become robotics analysts is like saying your Uber driver will pivot to autonomous-vehicle engineering. That’s just not reality. 

(Source: Giphy) 

Meaning, Blue Jay is officially the moment Amazon stopped pretending it still needed people for logistics. Labor is no longer the bottleneck. It’s the inefficiency. And once you understand that, the PR about “upskilling” lands about as sincere as “can we still be friends” after a dumping LOL. Now obviously we’ll see what else comes of this… but the writing is on the wall. And that wall isn’t pretty. Until next time, friends… 

At the time of publishing, Stocks.News holds positions in Amazon as mentioned in the article.