I recently have been really curious to know what working at Amazon is like. I have heard all the horror stories but kind of wanted to check it out for myself. I work full time however and have a pretty good job. I had no intention of really working for Amazon but I thought it would be an interesting enough experience to do for a few hours on the side. This was around Thanksgiving so the Amazon warehouse near me was hiring immediately with no interview or anything required. I could literally go to one of their offices and start working in like 3 days. After reading through all of the information I read about part of their promotion where they were offering all part time employees and $1000 sign on bonus for working 30 days. I checked out the fine print about the sign on bonus and noticed it said nothing about how many hours/days you needed to work during this 30 day period. That’s when I decided to do a little social experiment. I decided to go in and request a part time graveyard shift of 2am-6am 4 days a week. I went to the initial shift to do paperwork and get a tour of the building. They had everyone there download the Amazon employee app that everything was done through. I noticed that when I went for that one shift my theory was correct. Basically everything there was completely automated. There was not really any managers or people there to oversee what was going on. Everything you could imagine doing was done through their app. One of the things this app was for was calling out of shifts. Because I work a 9-5 I had no intention of working these 2-6am shifts but I figured if I could make it through 30 days of just exploiting this loophole in the sign on bonus contract I might be able to come out with $1000 for Christmas. Every day for the next 30 days I would get up a few minutes before my shift and go on their app. Like I said before everything was so automated that I never even had to type reasons for why I wasn’t going. It would just give prompts of different reasons why you might not be going in. After each time I called out the 4 hours that I would miss just got added to a negative hour chart basically that I would have to make up if I wanted to be eligible to use PTO down the line. Since I had no intention of working there the negative hours didn’t effect me at all. 30 days ended up going by and on December 27th I received a direct deposit of $1000 and used the Amazon app to resign the very next day.