Introducing the "AmaZen" booth, a box designed for convenient, on-site worker breakdowns
Aux Features Economy of the United States
No matter what you think about Amazon, you just can’t deny that the company is an unparalleled innovator in the field of corporate villainy. When it isn’t working hard to crush unionization movements, sending news stations pre-written scripts to read, trying to handle PR disasters about workers pissing in bottles, or dispatching employee Twitter drones to robotically write messages about how much they love their jobs, The House That Bezos Built is creating incredible new products meant to neatly house its employees’ on-site stress-induced mental breakdowns.
Say hello to the Amazon Zenbooth.
A video of this closet of horrors showed up yesterday on the Amazon News Twitter account before being removed and subsequently reuploaded by a YouTube user. In it, we see “Amazon Employee & AmaZen Creator” Leila Brown extol the virtues of an on-site booth referred to as a “Mindful Practice Room,” “ZenBooth,” or an “AmaZen station.”
“With AmaZen, I wanted to create a space that’s quiet, that people could go and focus on their mental and emotional well-being,” Brown explains over footage of an employee entering what looks like a porta potty decorated with pamphlets, a computer, some sad little plants, and a tiny fan. She continues, calling the overgrown iron maiden a place to “recharge the internal battery” by checking out “a library of mental health and mindful practices.”
As Vice reports, the ScreamKeeper was designed as part of the company’s “WorkingWell” program, which is meant to help keep the annoyingly needy company flesh-stock in good enough health to continue their work by providing them with Amazon-provided nutritional advice, “physical and mental activities, wellness exercises,” and more.
Hopefully, this initiative accomplishes what Amazon intends, and its workers are able to strive endlessly onward, mind and bodies perfectly optimized for the eternal list of tasks laid out before them. If nothing else, a semi-private booth seems like a better place for overworked employees to relieve themselves than the alternatives.
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54 Comments
I suppose that’s cheaper than fostering an environment where such areas are unnecessary.
The workers say “we need time to use the bathroom”and amazon replies “how about a telephone booth in the middle of the floor where you can cry and read articles about your workplace induced depression, they’re just like the nap pods Google has, without the napping or comfort, also you’re behind on your daily quota.”They really have to try to be this out of touch.
Given what we know, I cannot imagine a scenario where you are not penalized for taking precious seconds away from stocking.
And if that booth doesn’t work:
This needed to be here.
I’m pretty sure that the original tweet was removed because over 50% of the replies referenced this.
I predict they’ll eventually remove the AmaZen booth because it was too much work having to clean up the blood spatters inside it.
This structure would actually sense:
It’s all shits and giggles until somebody decides to blow a load in there.And the person cleaning it up better make more than minimum wage.
I’m sure that decision has already been made. Now it’s just matter of timing.
Hello fellow worker, you seem “Stressed”. Perhaps you need ten minutes in the PAIN BOX
This reminds me of the ads I keep getting on Youtube about how great Amazon is to work for. The woman in the ad is like “I even needed three surgeries that Amazon medical insurance covered” and all I can think is “I bet all three were work related injuries”
I hate shit like that for many reasons, but I especially hate when corporations pretend that basic principles of employment are luxuries. Not having to pay out of pocket for surgery is literally the point of the health insurance (which the employee is paying for). Amazon might as well brag that they pay their employees money by the hour rather than haggling labor for food, or that they don’t require their employees to live in corporate housing developments. Now that I think about it, what are the odds that Bezos is researching space travel because he wants a grave nobody can piss on?
Amazon on YouTube is so fucking weird. My fiance went down a rabbit hole of Amazon workers’ rights violations and she showed me the comment section of a seemingly innocuous video of someone recording their day in a fulfillment warehouse. The section was carpet bombed by people thanking her for the “informative” video, saying that they started at Amazon in a few days/just started and were excited. Sometimes they asked a question pulled from a FAQ.The weirdest was a woman going “Can I work 60 hour weeks? I have a baby on the way!” I’m not saying a pregnant woman can’t do anything, but they PROBABLY SHOULDN’T BE WORKING 60 HOURS IN A WAREHOUSE.
The woman in the ad is like “I even needed three surgeries that Amazon medical insurance covered” and all I can think is “I bet all three were work related injuries”It would be pretty open-minded of them to cover suicide attempts.
The boothings will continue until morale improves.
So has anyone had sex in it yet?
With all the piss that’s likely in there?
Hey man don’t shame
I believe that would be referred to as “Ama-zoom-zooming”
“I’ll let you know. I get livestreams from all of them.”-Jeff Bezos, probably
So now we’re supposed to be outraged at Amazon for advocating mindfulness practice? Got it.
Nah, we’re outraged at Amazon for being dicks.
“Advocating mindfulness”=mandatory breathing exercises in a wellness closet in lieu of collective bargaining rights, bathroom breaks, healthcare, and adequate wages.
“Mindfulness” is worthless New Age nonsense. Amazon workers need higher wages and union representation, not mysticism.
Not really. Generally paying broader attention to the world around you and actually spending some time thinking about what the fuck you’re doing are useful practices.
The great mathematician Alfred North Whitehead had this to say about that fallacy over a hundred years ago: “It is a profoundly erroneous truism that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”.
“The great mathematician”“over a hundred years ago”I think I’ve spotted some flaws in your argument.
How so? The past hundred years has only strengthened the argument. We are communicating via two computers across the Internet. Even if you have a technical background, I’m pretty sure you aren’t thinking about every byte of information you are entering into your computer flowing through each microchip in your machine and how it is routed through the Net to get to my computer.
“I’m pretty sure you aren’t thinking about every byte of information you are entering into your computer flowing through each microchip in your machine and how it is routed through the Net to get to my computer.”Putting aside that this is an extremely weird way to reframe my point, this is indeed something I think about often. You should see my home network setup.
Hell, let’s forget about the technological mediation that’s occurring, and pretend we’re face to face. The both of us think not in words, but this weird amalgam of feelings and images and (for lack of a better word) video.And despite our commonalities, of which I’m sure there’s many, your “brain pictures” are going to be wildly different than mine. Your mental model of everything will always be different than mine, even if only slightly. Because your parents were Episcopalian instead of Catholic. Because you watched He-Man but not She-Ra. Because you lived in wintry climes instead of sunny ones.So you and I are talking, which means you have to convert what are essentially unique conceptualizations into a much more reductive language (it also being coloured by your priors).And then I have to do the reverse, with all my wildly different preconceptions added into the mix. It’s like a shorter game of “Chines Telephone”, but fraught with just as much danger.TL;DR. Try some mindfulness. Even if you don’t get anything out of it, it’s not like there’s a downside.
Now I’m just genuinely curious how small this would have to be before you would decline to claim that people are upset that Amazon is advocating for mindfulness as opposed to the way that they’re choosing to do so. Fridge box with an ipad and a few daisies? Dishwasher box with a pad of paper and some moss? Am I getting warmer?
I think we are supposed to be outraged, but this website has so many ads for Amazon that it’s a real bag of mixed messaging from the The AV Club.
*Algorithm notes increase to emotion status=joy if [human workers] carry “pillow, small”, enabling [human workers] to update their “sound, scream” to status=muffled, as it both calms [human workers] and disturbs nearby [human workers] 3-6% less than [human workers] with “sound, scream” on the default status=unmuffled. End Communication.*
I’m 99% sure that’s what Bezos sounds like in a board meeting.
Sure, but he’s got an infectious laugh, so he’s fine!
Can I take my pee bottle into it?
“I really have to pee—can I take a bathroom break?”
“No, but after your mandatory 2 minutes with our Wellness Kiosk, feel free to use the bottle of your choice while practicing your breathing exercises.”
I dunno how many people watched The Drew Carey Show back in the day, but I remember they’d make constant jokes that Winfred-Louder was such a horrible, abusive company that they were constantly trying new tricks with their cubicles and office layout to keep them as mindless, miserable worker drones.
Thing is that was a sitcom. THEY WERE JOKING. I feel like Amazon looks at stuff like that and interprets it as a dare.
My company has similar quiet rooms / spaces where people can go hang out or even take a nap. Not sure I see the big deal here, compared to some of the other issues Amazon has.
The “other issues Amazon has” is what makes it a big deal. They exert constant, intense pressure to meet nigh-impossible performance metrics, to the point of inflicting work-related injuries and refusing to allow time to visit a toilet, but now they want a pat on the back for giving lip-service to ‘wellness’. The big deal is not the action, but the hypocrisy inherent in the action.
Ok
eh, I prefer a method of “finding zen” involving buying a super-yacht that has its own smaller yacht
So many people are going to masturbate in that booth.
So an Amazon employee feels overwhelmed by working conditions and the supervisor decides it’s time for said employee to take a break in the ZenBooth? This could be looked at two ways.The first is the way Amazon wants us to look at it; providing a few moments of relative peace and quiet for the employee to relax and get a new perspective. After spending an unspecified time in the booth perusing meditation literature on a computer screen, the employee wafts back to the production line a new person.The second is what it likely going to be in practice; providing a new psychological tool for supervisors to shame employees into a more productive mindset. What are coworkers going to think of an employee who spends time in the booth instead of pulling their weight on the floor? Seriously, someone is going to have to take up the slack while all this introspection is going on.“Your productivity numbers were down this morning. Instead of taking your full half-hour lunch, you should spend 20 minutes of it in the ZenBooth. That should give you the peace of mind to hit your numbers this evening.”
The whole idea seems more like solitary confinement in a prison than an employment perk. If Amazon really wanted to promote its employees’ mental health through mindfulness, a better way would be to offer free classes on the clock after their shifts. Who wouldn’t take advantage of a free class on the company’s dime?
I….do not hate this? I mean, I know Amazon sucks and it’s not nearly as good for workers as a good wage or being treated like a human but having a cool down place to go at work isn’t a bad thing to have. Probably better than drinking heavily, breaking things, or shooting everyone with a semi-automatic rifle
Probably better than drinking heavily, breaking things, or shooting everyone with a semi-automatic rifleYou clearly aren’t very well acquainted with the U.S.
Nooo! Not that! Not the Boo Box!
Tension Aggravating, Ridiculously Dystopian Idiocy Shack. It’s smaller on the inside!
She says the booth is quiet inside, but I’m presuming it’s soundproof the other way, too. So you can’t hear the bellows of despair from the outside.
Ah yes, nothing says relaxing like a DIY glass coffin.
How about f@cking living wages for your employees, Bezos you trillion dollar turd.Wait… Does this booth come with free shipping?