There is an element of this article that is for the productivity heart in you that wonders how true all these stories of absurdly pressured working conditions are.

But mostly it’s for the tinkerer in you who wonders how Amazon works. Wired Magazine goes inside:

The first thing I saw when I walked into Amazon’s Phoenix warehouse was a man riding on a giant tricycle. Behind him, yellow plastic tubs the size of office recycling bins whizzed by on a conveyor belt. On the wall above, six massive words called out to the 1,500 workers who pass through metal detectors each day as they enter this million-square-foot cavern of consumerism: “work hard. have fun. make history.”

Tricycle aside, the “fun” quotient was hard to spot. But I couldn’t help but register a certain historical significance to the operation humming inside this enormous building erected in the industrial flats of Phoenix. The Amazon warehouse–known in company jargon as a “fulfillment center,” or FC–is a uniquely 21st-century creation, a vast, networked, intelligent engine for sating consumer desire. The FC is the anchor of Amazon’s physical operations, the brick and mortar behind the virtual button you tap on your phone to summon a watch or a shirt or a garden hose or Cards Against Humanity or just about anything else to your doorstep.

A Rare Peek Inside Amazon’s Massive Wish-Fulfilling Machine – Marcus Wohlsen, Wired (16 June 2014)

Via The Loop