Jeff moved quickly up and down the aisles alongside men and women half his size, earning the nickname "Tornado.” “If I gave him a directive, he took care of it,” said Tim Taylor, a supervisor at the warehouse. The handheld scanners allowed managers to track precisely how long it takes workers to fulfill an order, and those who failed to "make rate" could lose their jobs. Since workers at the Chester facility were typically expected to pull 100 items or more per hour, a picker could expect to walk more than 12 miles over the course of a shift. He was built like an offensive lineman-6-foot-3 and 300 pounds, with a flowing, dirty-blonde beard, wire-rimmed glasses and a head shaved almost completely bald. "I'm telling you," he later told Di-Key, laughing as he showed her the listing online, "this thing was as big as my fist."īeing a picker was a demanding job for a man of Jeff’s size. Another time, he filled an order for a mysterious item that turned out to be a butt plug kit. Once, he stumbled on a small soccer set and made a note to buy it for Jeffrey when spring arrived. He got a kick out of this peculiar window into the desires of the American consumer. Once he pulled the item, his scanner would give him his next assignment, and off he'd go, wherever the gun took him next. Since the Chester facility covers 1.1 million square feet, the equivalent of roughly 18 football fields, the right shelf might be just around the corner, or it might be 100 yards away. A handheld scanner gun told him what he needed to pull and the exact aisle and shelf where he would find it. Family photos courtesy of Di-Key Lockhart.Īt the warehouse, Jeff was a picker, fetching orders to be shipped to Amazon customers. Jeff and Di-Key with their children, Jervontay, Jeffrey and Kelton (left to right).
But he was still there, two months after he'd started, wearing his white badge. By January, peak season had come and gone, and hundreds of Jeff’s fellow temps had been let go. It was the first job he’d been able to find in months, ever since he’d been laid off from his last steady gig at a building supply store. He’d started working at the warehouse in November 2012, not long after it opened. But it also enlists hundreds, possibly thousands, of temporary workers to fill orders during the holiday shopping frenzy, known in Amazon parlance as “peak.” Since full-timers and temps perform the same duties, the only way to tell them apart is their badges. The warehouse only provided positions for a fraction of the local jobless: It currently has around 3,000 full-time workers. When the warehouse opened its doors in 2012, there were about 37,000 unemployed people living within a 30-minute drive in nearby Richmond, more than a quarter of residents were living in poverty. Then Jeff climbed into his Chevy Suburban, cranked the bass on the stereo system he’d customized himself, and headed for the Amazon fulfillment center in nearby Chester, Virginia, just south of Richmond. He told Jeffrey, the most rambunctious, not to give his mom a hard time Kelton, the oldest, handed his father his iPod for the ride. “You better have your hair done by then,” he teased her.Īs he headed out the door, Jeff, who was 29, said goodbye to the boys. Jeff had been putting in long hours lately, and so the couple planned a breakfast date at Shoney’s for when his shift ended around dawn. His wife, Di-Key, was in the bathroom fixing her hair in micro-braids and preparing for another evening alone with her three sons. He slipped a T-shirt over his burly frame and hung his white work badge over his broad chest. 18, 2013, as the sun went down, Jeff Lockhart Jr.
The Life and Death of an Amazon Warehouse Temp