I love using Fulfillment by Amazon, I really do, but it can also have its bad days. I (and others) may lament over how a particular fulfillment center in Tennessee takes forever to receive inventory, or how the newest fulfillment center in Baltimore experienced a lot of missing and lost products in its early days.
Looking at the other side of things, Amazon doesn’t like the internal theft any more than we do. Well, heck, they like it even less, since they have to eat the product cost to those of us sellers that catch the shrinkage. Bloomberg posted an article yesterday, about Amazon’s efforts to discourage internal theft.
For example, the Bloomberg article states:
Amazon has put up flatscreen TVs that display examples of alleged on-the-job theft, say 11 of the company’s current and former warehouse workers and antitheft staff. The alleged offenders aren’t identified by name. Each is represented by a black silhouette stamped with the word “terminated” and accompanied by details such as when they stole, what they stole, how much it was worth, and how they got caught—changing an outbound package’s address, for example, or stuffing merchandise in their socks. Some of the silhouettes are marked “arrested.”
Bloomberg references security experts who say that:
Amazon’s anecdotal warnings are a natural extension of older corporate loss-prevention tactics, such as frisking employees as they leave a store.
Oh, and by the way, we understand that much like my local fedex center, Fulfillment Center workers need to go through “airport style” metal detectors.
Wrapping Up
The fact that Amazon is doing something is not nearly as surprising as the approach that they are taking. I mean, at the end of the day, Amazon is a business, and they need to mitigate risks. That means they need figure out ways to reduce internal theft, just as much as they need to figure out ways to ensure products make it to where they need to be, when they need to be, as illustrated by talks of Amazon getting into the air cargo business.
H/T: Gizmodo
