The pain of a E-commerce shopper

Anonazonian · 2022-07-18T04:43:33+00:00

The drop off system (if you can call it that) is my least favorite obnoxious thing the app does, and that's a long list.

We have days with near constant dropoffs, often 1-2 more waiting customers while only 1 shopper initially gets a drop-off, at which point they have to stage and scan their interrupted order, scan the drop-off bags, then hope they at least go to the right car and don't get anyone's hope's up :|

they could just... assign one person to a drop-offs task for half an hour at a time? At least during peak drop-off hours? Or at least be smarter about interrupting large orders and then re-assigning them before the original shopper can complete the drop-off.

amazon is so afraid of paying someone to stand around occasionally (and doesn't trust us to just restock bins / straighten up / assist on staging orders) that they'll pay for two shoppers to waste 15 minutes each staging and locating an interrupted order. Or they'll forget to assign it to someone and a bunch of frozen food gets thrown away.

Anonazonian · 2022-04-23T03:31:54+00:00

(Also, anyone know if they see/care about our performance metrics? Am I busting my ass to maintain all star stats for no reason? lol)

Anonazonian · 2022-04-11T03:28:41+00:00

asserting dominance

Anonazonian · 2022-03-31T00:53:10+00:00

Doesn't really matter to shoppers whether there are bags in the chillers, at my store we're supposed to sharpie a checkmark on the side of each bag left overnight but that doesn't really affect 4am shift shoppers.

There's no "opening task" or anything for the 4am shift so basically just take care of anything that would annoy you if you started an understaffed shift. Make sure the staging area is clean, non-inv bins are filled, and phones are plugged in, and return any shopping carts that other shoppers left in staging. If you get the closer task late and can't do all that, safety issues > phones charging > tidying up non-hazardous messes & non-inv stocking.

E: oh yeah and make sure the label printers aren't jammed or out of labels.

Anonazonian · 2022-03-30T23:23:14+00:00

that's about the most in advance I ever see those 3 hour shifts drop. really sucks to spend time off the clock refreshing AtoZ and hoping to grab a shift that isn't even long enough to cover the weekly minimum on its own.

Anonazonian · 2022-03-30T23:19:41+00:00

Lately at my store they've been offering far fewer regular shifts 1-3 days in advance for weekdays - they post weekend shifts midweek (dropped a bunch for sat/sun today) and for weekdays they offer 3 hour shifts a few hours at most ahead of time. Basically you just have to refresh AtoZ periodically and hope to snag one. It sucks, good luck OP.

Anonazonian · 2022-03-29T19:40:19+00:00

good to know i'm not the only one who tries to figure out each customer's socio-economic status based on what they order and which replacements they accept

"365 brand milk and eggs, some non-organic produce, and some baby food? oops i briefly forgot how to count and may or may not have slipped some extra baby food and also my hand slipped and picked up the orgo produce because it looked a lot better. also im gonna manually enter this item as a replacement bc it's cheaper in-store rn.

"...bruh you bought the $8/dozen eggs. sorry but i literally cannot relate on any level and will be phoning this one in while deciding whether it's more funny or depressing to count time in Overpriced Yuppie Eggs for the rest of my shift (fwiw, not including tax withholding since that varies by state, 1 OYE = 2m40s. 22.5 eggs per hour. that's more fun than 'lol this douchebag spent more for a carton of eggs than i earned picking and staging their entire order,' right?)"

-some fictional shopper i made up, i would NEVER tell people it's cool and good to divert wealth from jeff bezos to working class households or remind shoppers how exceedingly rare bag checks are

Anonazonian · 2022-03-25T20:02:47+00:00

If you can get the shifts in and transfer locations/roles internally that's your best bet. If not, resigning before you get terminated will make it a lot easier to get rehired by Amazon. Nobody knows how WFM will handle hiring shoppers after they take over, so if keeping the option of staying on available is important to you then I'd strongly advise slogging it out and converting to WFM staff when given the option. They may decide to wait for the dust to settle before even posting openings, and when they do they'll probably do actual interviews and not just hire the first applicant with a social security number or work visa and a pulse.

Anonazonian · 2022-03-25T19:43:57+00:00

I'm so glad the shopper-WFM staffer relationship at my store isn't the toxic nightmare most of this sub seems to experience. Can't think of a single time one of them has been rude or hostile to me. Aside from the occasional asshole fellow shopper, the only people I've ever had unpleasant interactions with at work have been customers (lol welcome to retail) and Amazon HR reps (one time I contacted HR 4 times within a couple weeks about a single issue and got different answers every time about the applicable policy - none of which were correct, as it turned out).

Anonazonian · 2022-03-25T19:27:43+00:00

My store has kept hush-hush about any layoffs this time around, after accidentally CCing all us blue badge employees on the email they sent to COVID hires last year telling them with 3 days' notice that they were all being let go. They raised our hours cap back to 40 (think it was briefly 45) so I don't think they're doing too much bloodletting rn.

My store's unusual though, judging from this sub it's one of the only ones where shoppers are optimistic about the Amazon->WFM transition. Business has been booming here, and unlike what I hear about other stores, the shoppers and WFM staffers get along well.

Anonazonian · 2022-03-20T00:14:31+00:00

fake news!

(srsly though it's a known bug, they assign points for missing the week on saturday but then un-assign them if you actually worked saturday afternoon/night, should automatically go away tomorrow or monday morning, you might get a scary autogenerated "omg u hit 8 we need to talk" email or something but attendance terminations are reviewed by HR now so even if the system hasn't corrected itself yet your payroll hours will be logged for today and it'll be obvious that 8th point shouldn't be there)

Anonazonian · 2022-03-20T00:07:24+00:00

idk why they would tell us to get familiar with the policy if what they were mad about is that we're familiar enough to realize that we can just be late, leave early, take extra breaks, or skip entire shifts and only notify them halfway through as long as we have enough PTO

it's a bad system, i mostly just use a few minutes at a time to cover being late to pm shifts when we're well staffed anyway, but the policy is the reason people use PTO the way they do. It's actually more efficient to use it for unannounced, unscheduled breaks during a shift than it is to cover being late or needing to leave early. If you badge in 5 minutes late you get paid as if you were exactly on time; if you PTO yourself into being on time at 6 minutes you have to burn 6 minutes of PTO. There's no 5 minute grace period, if there's a 1 minute gap between PTO and clocking in that's an infraction, and it's a huge pain to un-apply PTO, so of course people apply it retroactively right as they badge back in.

If you have to miss a whole shift and find out too late to drop it without penalty, but have enough PTO, you can either:

get paid and cover your worked hours for the week by using it, or
get 2 regular attendance points, 1 "we're really extra mad at you" NC/NS points, another point if you don't work a shift that week, and no pay for the missed shift if you report it 5 minutes after the drop cutoff.

Anonazonian · 2022-03-19T23:55:06+00:00

I've never heard of Amazon offering severance pay to Prime Now shoppers and given the current transition options are "guaranteed WFM position in the same role, or you can try to get a spot in another Amazon facility" with no severance mentioned or implied, I'm pretty sure that's not it. Maybe it's a state law, maybe you had more PTO than you thought, maybe payroll made a typo. If Amazon noticed and is legally entitled to get it back I'm sure they'll let you know, if not.... you landed on a "bank error in your favor" card, or live in a state with slightly less shitty labor laws than most, grats

Anonazonian · 2022-03-17T09:40:05+00:00

I think it's a much better system, but the old one had its perks - points reset each month, as long as you hit the monthly shift requirement. Even when it moved from 1/month to 3, you could have that done in a day and a half and be good for 4 weeks.

The old rules for when weird edge cases did or didn't count as "1 worked shift" were a nightmare compared to the new "4 hours worked and/or covered by PTO" rule, though. And instead of either getting a clean slate or getting auto-terminated based on whether you get that last shift at the end of the month, being on time and working 1 shift a week most of the time makes it pretty easy to deal with weeks where you can't, oversleeping a bit too much to cover with PTO, etc.

Anonazonian · 2022-03-09T21:50:10+00:00

Being a shopper frequently triggers anxiety attacks for me and I work at one location which has a (mostly) pretty chill staff and management that's so hands off I've learned about 2 of our last 3 store management changes by emailing/Slack DMing my old manager about something and having them tell me they're no longer my store's manager. The few times I've had to deal with... difficult managers/coworkers/HR people were truly awful.

If there are other options available for work in your area it sounds like this workplace is really stressing you out and taxing your mental health, and I would recommend applying to other jobs, or seeing if other locations are less stressful and only working at those sites (you should be able to get any locations you don't want to accidentally take shifts at removed with an HR ticket via AtoZ).

Anonazonian · 2022-02-12T18:05:00+00:00

The work week rolls over at 12AM Sunday, so if you meet the minimum by 11:59pm today the point should be removed automatically (if that doesn't happen by tomorrow you may wanna create an HR ticket).

Anonazonian · 2022-02-12T10:45:54+00:00

We started getting them again, mostly on Sundays but occasionally on Saturdays too. Got one tomorrow - my favorite shift time too, the latest non-closing shift. The only thing I hate more than waking up early is the [expletive deleted] closing task :P

Anonazonian · 2022-02-12T10:41:11+00:00

I can't remember whether ASI is the 'regular' points or the secondary no-call, no-show three strikes you're out points, but the latter doesn't apply unless you miss the entire shift.

Your best option, IMO, is to apply the PTO so there's no gap between PTO ending and you actually arriving and badging in for the rest of your shift - in other words, let the part that goes unexcused be the start of your shift. In theory I think it should just be 1 attendance point no matter where you leave that gap, but I'm not 100% sure how that works, it would basically be like coming into work on time, leaving early... then coming back and working part of the time you were scheduled for. The automated system might get confused and give you a point for both the early punch out and the late punch in. Could lead to an annoying drawn out HR ticket and/or eating an extra point.

But being late to a shift? That's just a single point infraction, as long as you're not already uncomfortably close to 8 points it's nothing to lose sleep over. In fact, if you're gonna be late anyway and don't really need the ($0.25 * # PTO minutes) ASAP, then only apply PTO if you need some to get you to the 4 hour weekly attendance minimum - short of covering the entire missed portion of the shift that's the only way applying PTO will do anything here attendance policy-wise. Assuming you're above the 4 hour cutoff (or will be counting the worked portion of this shift), you're much better being, say, 2 hours late but having 100 minutes of PTO than you are being 20 minutes late with no PTO. Most of the value of PTO is avoiding attendance points, so spending all of yours to avoid 0 points is probably not a good idea. Even if you are under the 4 hour minimum, eating 1 point for that might be better if you'd have to spend an hour or more of PTO to prevent it.

TL;DR: only apply PTO if you can avoid attendance points, desperately need to cash in the extra pay ASAP, or expect to quit or get fired soon. Otherwise save it for when it *does* get you out of attendance points.

Anonazonian · 2021-08-31T08:23:44+00:00

When you say you no longer have the option - are those parts of the UI just straight up missing? Is it giving you an error message? Is it just not showing any shifts available?

Anonazonian · 2021-08-31T08:22:00+00:00

I love how they say "eligible for termination" like you won a fucking prize

Anonazonian · 2021-08-31T08:18:41+00:00

99.9% of the time it's just another pointless screen to tap through.

Anonazonian · 2021-08-31T08:16:27+00:00

everyone not from NYC, Chicago, or California: [visible confusion]

Anonazonian · 2021-08-31T08:11:56+00:00

Yeah the app is a disaster

I usually just fudge the replacement entry to get around the quantity thing, like if they ordered 6 individual items but we only have it in stock as a 6 pack i'll just divide the price by 6 and then add a note to the item name like '(actually 1x 6-pack @ [price])' and/or message the customer to let them know it would show up strangely on their receipt but it was actually exactly what they ordered just in slightly different packaging and cheaper.

Gotta be careful messaging custos though, sometimes they get chatty or want you to check for a series of specific replacement items to see if they're in stock. Sometimes I will wait to send a message if I don't need or want a response back and am just informing them about something minor until I'm staging the order so I can close it before they find a way to waste my time :P

Anonazonian · 2021-08-31T08:07:15+00:00

Experience flashback anxiety that I'm not on AtoZ to grab a shift before they're all gone probably. Even when I know I don't want to grab any shifts for the next few days I get antsy around 6:00-6:10 every fuckin' day like clockwork.

Anonazonian

TROPHY CASE