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Americans have grown more comfortable ordering everything on the internet, including bulky wares like canoes and refrigerators. Warehouses, as a result, have become gargantuan, doubling in size since 2010, according to CBRE, a real estate services firm.

“We are at the very beginning of a rather large transformation, and the humble warehouse is the leading edge of this,” said Michael Mandel, chief economic strategist at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington. “These fulfillment center jobs are not being created in the tech hubs that were growing before. We’ve broadened the winner’s circle.”

A significant chunk of that growth has occurred outside large metropolitan areas, in counties that had relatively little of the picking-and-packing work until recently.

And while robots have started to intervene in the process, it still takes a lot of bodies to move hundreds of thousands of boxes in and out of these buildings every day. Warehouses serving the largest e-commerce sites typically employ upwards of 2,000 people.

The hubs of this network are far-flung. In Bullitt County, Ky., south of Louisville, warehouse employment surged to 6,000 in 2017 from 1,200 in 2010, according to the Labor Department. In Kenosha, Wis., once a manufacturing hub whose auto plants turned out Nash Ramblers and Plymouth Horizons, warehouse jobs grew to 6,200 from 250 in the same period.

Those places have the advantage of being surrounded by highways and rail lines that lead to some of the nation’s largest cities. They also have an abundance of cheap land and labor, two assets that have become increasingly vital to companies selling online.

The vote-tally process — done by hand — includes several lengthy steps.

Hundreds of ballots have been challenged, the union says, mostly by Amazon. These ballots are then set aside and may play a huge role if the tally of uncontested votes produces a result that's so close that these set-aside votes could sway the outcome.

Afterward, the vote-count moved on to the next step. Inside that first letter was a second sealed envelope containing the anonymous ballot. That second set of envelopes required opening and shuffling.

On Thursday afternoon, the hand-counting of yes and no votes finally started. This tabulation of anonymous ballots is being streamed online for preregistered members of the media and the general public.

The Bessemer workers are deciding whether to form Amazon's first unionized warehouse in America.

A vote to unionize would shake up history for both Amazon and Alabama.

Amazon unleashed a strong push to sway Bessemer workers to vote against unionizing.

The vote is the most consequential labor battle in the U.S. in recent history.

Employees who are selected to make the switch can make $19 per hour, a $2 raise on top of the pay hike Amazon announced earlier this month.

“As we continue to see a significant increase in demand for grocery orders, we are offering temporary opportunities for associates across our fulfillment network to provide additional support,” an Amazon spokesperson said on late Friday, confirming the action.

Amazon has been doubling down on the grocery industry since its $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods in 2017.

Since the outbreak, grocery delivery has become a lifeline for people to get household staples while trying to avoid stepping outside.

So far, coronavirus has spread to at least 17 Amazon warehouses in the U.S., prompting workers and lawmakers to question if enough safety measures have been taken to protect employees on the frontlines.

Grocery stores are competing for workers to fulfill online orders. Walmart, with a fast growing online grocery business, plans to hire 150,000 employees at stores, distribution and fulfillment centers through May.

That’s one reason the worker petition calls for eliminating rate-based write-ups. The petition also demands that the company provide paid sick leave even if workers don’t have a covid-19 diagnosis because testing remains difficult to get. And it seeks to make sure warehouses are shut down if a worker tests positive for covid-19 and not reopened until it’s been thoroughly cleaned.

“I think everyone is seeing through the P.R. at this point and focusing on both their economic and political power,” Sarah Miller, a critic of Amazon, said about the company. Ms. Miller, who runs the American Economic Liberties Project, an antitrust think tank, added, “I think the narrative is cooked now on their status as a monopoly, their status as an abusive employer and their status as one of the biggest spenders on lobbying in Washington, D.C.”

“As it relates to progressive Democrats in general, we’ve been surprised by some of the negative things we’ve seen certain members say in the press and on social media,” he said. “If there’s a progressive company in this country, it’s Amazon. Find me another large company paying two times the minimum wage, providing great health benefits from Day 1, 95 percent education reimbursement, safe working environment, and so on. We really think we are an example of what a U.S. company should be doing for its employees.”

Mr. Sanders said he appreciated Amazon’s help on the minimum wage. “On the other hand,” he said, “to my mind, I find it hard to understand why Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon and the wealthiest guy in the world, worth about $182 billion, is spending millions of dollars fighting a union organizing effort in Alabama, where his workers are trying to organize for better wages and better working conditions.”

Under Mr. Carney’s leadership, Amazon has taken steps to satisfy its liberal critics. In 2018, Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, attacked the company over its wages. Not long after that, the company announced that it would raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour and push federal policymakers to do the same.

The union organizers in Bessemer have increasingly attracted support from the White House and top lawmakers in Congress. Labor leaders spent weeks pushing Mr. Biden’s staff to have him weigh in on the election at the warehouse.

“We’ve got to protect every worker’s right to form and join a union, and to bargain collectively for better pay, quality health care, a safer workplace and a secure retirement,” said Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington

Amazon has made efforts to reach out to the new administration. Dave Clark, who runs the company’s consumer business, sent a letter to the White House in January offering to help with the distribution of the coronavirus vaccine and met virtually with Jeff Zients, the White House’s coronavirus coordinator, to discuss the vaccine rollout.

It recalled the message Amazon had waiting for a delegation of progressive lawmakers who met with union representatives in Alabama this month.At the warehouse, workers held up a large banner with text in bold letters: “CONGRESS: PLEASE MATCH AMAZON’S $15/HOUR MINIMUM WAGE!”

is words demonstrated a willingness to use his bully pulpit on behalf of communities that have often fallen outside the Democratic Party’s governing focus: working-class voters in Republican states, many of whom are Black. The message also elevated the national debate about the future of labor and unions, a cross-ideological issue on which Mr. Biden can uniquely find common cause with the progressive wing of his party even as many Democrats continue to shy away.

The task will be tougher in Alabama: The state is much more firmly Republican than its Southern neighbor, having ousted the incumbent Senator Doug Jones, a Democrat, by a healthy margin in 2020. The state has also not experienced the rapid demographic change that has made Georgia’s political transformation possible, and does not have its considerable numbers of college-educated suburban moderates.

Mr. Shakir said he had privately lobbied Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, to persuade Mr. Biden to speak out. And in a sign of the potential kinship between Mr. Klain and the left on labor, Mr. Shakir said he believed the president would have chosen Mr. Sanders as labor secretary if the Senate had not been split 50-50, making confirmations more difficult.

Although labor leaders, local union activists and national progressive politicians uniformly support an Amazon union in Alabama, that feeling does not reflect the mood inside the warehouse itself. With less than a month to go in the union vote, the 5,800-worker warehouse is split among supporters of the union, strong dissenters and an apathetic center that is growing sick of the national attention.

Last week, in a media round table of anti-union warehouse workers hosted by Amazon, some said that Mr. Biden’s message had been unnecessary, and that they did not feel intimidated by the company. A spokeswoman for Amazon declined to directly comment on the president’s remarks.

Last year, when Amazon opened the warehouse to the praises of local elected officials, the company hailed its arrival as a sign of economic revival in a predominantly Black area. With the coronavirus pandemic raging, Amazon offered thousands of jobs at a minimum wage of at least $15 an hour, more than double the state’s minimum. Some hailed it as a godsend.

The legacy of union sensibilities in Alabama maybe don’t follow along partisan lines,” she said. “So regardless of the outcome, one of the things that we really did see over the course of the last three to four years was Democrats and progressive Democrats coming out of the woodwork. Waking up and realizing they weren’t the only person on the block in the retail workplace who has a progressive mind-set.”

Ponce is one of several cities in the island’s southern region hit by the recent 6.4 magnitude earthquake that killed one person and caused more than an estimated $200 million in damage. More than 7,000 people remain in shelters since the quake.

The tactics that Amazon used in Chester are surfacing elsewhere. The retail workers union said Amazon was trying to surveil employees in Bessemer and even changed a traffic signal to prevent organizers from approaching warehouse workers as they left the site. Last month, the New York attorney general said in a lawsuit that Amazon had retaliated against employees who tried to protest its pandemic safety measures as inadequate.

The machinists union filed a complaint with the labor board in July 2015 alleging unfair labor practices by Amazon, including surveilling, threatening and “informing employees that it would be futile to vote for union representation.” Mr. Hough spent eight hours that summer giving his testimony. While labor activists and unions generally consider the board to be heavily tilted in favor of employers, union officials said a formal protest would at least show Chester technicians that someone was fighting for th

The pandemic helped change that, bringing safety issues at Amazon to the forefront. In a Feb. 16 suit against Amazon, the New York attorney general, Letitia James, said the company continued last year to track and discipline employees based on their productivity rates. That meant workers had limited time to protect themselves from the virus. The suit said Amazon retaliated against those who complained, sending a “chilling message” to all its workers. Amazon has denied the allegations.

It said Amazon forces employees to work at “dizzying speeds, even if doing so prevents them from socially distancing, washing their hands, and sanitizing their work spaces.”

Unions, elected officials and some employees have faulted Amazon’s treatment of workers, including the firing of some critical of warehouse conditions.

Chief Executive Jeff Bezos said last week that Amazon has not fired people for such criticism.

Amazon is spending more than $800 million on coronavirus safety in this year’s first half, including cleaning, temperature checks and face masks.

Amazon ended 2019 with 798,000 full- and part-time employees.

The case is Palmer et al v Amazon.com Inc., U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York, No. 20-02468.

Before the rise of Google, internet companies stuffed their data centers with increasingly powerful and expensive computer servers, as they struggled to reach more and more people. Each server delivered the website to a relatively small group of people. And if the server died, those people were out of luck.

Dr. Barroso realized that the best way to distribute a wildly popular website like Google was to break it into tiny pieces and spread them evenly across an array of servers. Rather than each server delivering the site to a small group of people, the entire data center delivered the site to its entire audience.

“In other words, we must treat the data center itself as one massive warehouse-scale computer.”

Widespread outages became a rarity, especially as Dr. Barroso and his team expanded these ideas across multiple data centers. Eventually, Google’s entire global network of data centers behaved as a single machine.

By the mid-1990s, he was working as a researcher in a San Francisco Bay Area lab operated by the Digital Equipment Corporation, one of the computer giants of the day.

There, he helped create multi-core computer chips — microprocessors made of many chips working in tandem. A more efficient way of running computer software, such chips are now a vital part of almost any new computer.

At first, Dr. Barroso worked on software. But as Dr. Hölzle realized that Google would also need to build its own hardware, he tapped Dr. Barroso to lead the effort. Over the next decade, as it pursued his warehouse-size computer, Google built its own servers, data storage equipment and networking hardware.

For years, this work was among Google’s most closely guarded secrets. The company saw it as a competitive advantage. But by the 2010s, companies like Amazon and Facebook were following the example set by Dr. Barroso and his team. Soon, the world’s leading computer makers were building and selling the same kind of low-cost hardware, allowing any internet company to build an online empire the way Google had.

In Seattle, New York, and the United Kingdom, the firm has set up automated “lockers” in drug stores and convenience stores. If you order something from Amazon and you work near one of these lockers, the company will offer to drop off your item there. On your way home from work, you can just stop by Rite Aid, punch in a security code, and get your stuff.

I’m a frequent Amazon shopper, and over the last few months I’ve noticed a significant improvement in its shipping times. As a subscriber to Amazon’s Prime subscription service, I’m used to getting two-day shipping on most items for free. But on about a third of my purchases, my package arrives after just one day for no extra charge. Sometimes the service is so speedy it seems almost magical. One Friday afternoon last month, I ordered three smoke alarms, and I debated paying extra for shipping so that I could install them over the weekend. The $9 per item that Amazon charges for Saturday delivery seemed too steep, though, so I went with standard two-day service. The next morning, the delivery guy arrived with my smoke detectors. I’d gotten next-day Saturday service for free

I suspect that, over the next few years, next-day service will become its default shipping method on most of its items. Meanwhile it will offer same-day service as a cheap upgrade. For $5 extra, you can have that laptop waiting for you when you get home from work. Wouldn’t you take that deal?

Order something in the morning and get it later in the day, without doing anything else. Why would you ever shop anywhere else?

What is creeping into the culture is simple dehumanization, a failure to imagine the lives others lead.

For years, observers have wondered if Amazon’s shopping business — you know, its main business — could ever really work. Investors gave Mr. Bezos enormous leeway to spend billions building out a distribution-center infrastructure, but it remained a semi-open question if the scale and pace of investments would ever pay off. Could this company ever make a whole lot of money selling so much for so little?

Amazon’s retail operations had reached a “critical scale” or an “inflection point.” They meant that Amazon’s enormous investments in infrastructure and logistics have begun to pay off. The company keeps capturing a larger slice of American and even international purchases. It keeps attracting more users to its Prime fast-shipping subscription program, and, albeit slowly, it is beginning to scratch out higher profits from shoppers.

Now that Amazon has hit this point, it’s difficult to see how any other retailer could catch up anytime soon. I recently asked a couple of Silicon Valley venture capitalists who have previously made huge investments in e-commerce whether they were keen to spend any more in the sector. They weren’t, citing Amazon.

“The truth is they’re building a really insurmountable infrastructure that I don’t see how others can really deal with,”

Amazon also faces a wider set of competitive threats internationally. Although it has reported increasingly brisk sales in India, the company has had a difficult time breaking into the lucrative Chinese market, where Alibaba dominates the shopping scene

Walmart, which on Tuesday published earnings that came in slightly above analysts’ expectations, is also spending billions to slow Amazon’s roll. But Walmart said that in its latest quarter, e-commerce sales had grown only 10 percent from a year ago. Amazon’s retail sales rose 20 percent during the same period.

What has been key to this rise, and missing from many of his competitors’ efforts, is patience. In a very old-fashioned manner, one that is far out of step with a corporate world in which milestones are measured every three months, Amazon has been willing to build its empire methodically and at great cost over almost two decades, despite skepticism from many sectors of the business world.

Amazon has built more than 100 warehouses from which to package and ship goods, and it hasn’t really slowed its pace in establishing more. Because the warehouses speed up Amazon’s shipping, encouraging more shopping, the costs of these centers is becoming an ever-smaller fraction of Amazon’s operations.

Amazon’s investments in Prime, the $99-a-year service that offers free two-day shipping, are also paying off. Last year Mr. Bezos told me that people were increasingly signing up for Prime for the company’s media offerings

Mr. Schachter, of Macquarie Securities, estimates that there will be at least 40 million Prime subscribers by the end of this year, and perhaps as many as 60 million, up from an estimated 30 million at the beginning of 2015

he predicted that by 2020, 50 percent of American households will have joined Prime, “and that’s very conservative,” he said.

its operating margin on the North American retail business was 3.5 percent, while Amazon Web Services’s margin was 25 percent.

“retail gross profit dollars per customer” — a fancy way of measuring how much Amazon makes from each shopper — has accelerated in each of the last four quarters, in part because of Prime. Amazon keeps winning “a larger share of customers’ wallets,” the firm said, eventually “leading to a period of sustained, rising profitability.”

“The thing about retail is, the consumer has near-perfect information,” said Paul Vogel, an analyst at Barclays. “So what’s the differentiator at this point? It’s selection. It’s service. It’s convenience. It’s how easy it is to use their interface. And Amazon’s got all this stuff already. How do you compete with that? I don’t know, man. It’s really hard.

A model-driven business is something beyond a data-driven business. A data-driven business collects and analyzes data to help humans make better business decisions. A model-driven business creates a system built around continuously improving models that define the business. In a data-driven business, the data helps the business; in a model-driven business, the models are the business.

Netflix beat Blockbuster with software; it is winning against the cable companies and content providers with its models. Its recommendation model is famous and estimated to be worth more than $1 billion a year in revenue, driving 80% of content consumption

Amazon used software to separate itself from physical competitors like Borders and Toys “R” Us, but its models helped it pull away from other e-commerce companies like Overstock.com . By 2013 an estimated 35% of revenue came from Amazon’s product recommendations. Those models have never stopped improving

Third, incumbents will be more potent competitors in this battle relative to their role in the battles of the software era. They have a meaningful advantage this time around, because they often have troves of data and startups usually don’

Looking to produce more-resilient crops, Monsanto’s models predict optimal places for farmers to plant based on historical yields, weather data, tractors equipped with GPS and other sensors, and field data collected from satellite imagery, which estimates where rainfall will pool and subtle variations in soil chemistry.

Lilt, a San Francisco-based startup, is building software that aims to make that translator five times as productive by inserting a model in the middle of the process. Instead of working from only the original text, translators using Lilt’s software are presented with a set of suggestions from the model, and they refine those as needed. The model is always learning from the changes the translator makes, simultaneously making all the other translators more productive in future projects.

First, businesses will increasingly be valued based on the completeness, not just the quantity, of data they create

Second, the goal is a flywheel, or virtuous circle. Tencent, Amazon and Netflix all demonstrate this characteristic: Models improve products, products get used more, this new data improves the product even more

inVia Robotics builds robots that can autonomously navigate a warehouse and pull totes from shelves to deliver them to a stationary human picker. The approach is model-driven; inVia uses models that consider item popularity and probability of association (putting sunglasses near sunscreen, for example) to adjust warehouse layout automatically and minimize the miles robots must travel. Every order provides feedback to a universe of prior predictions and improves productivity across the system.

Fourth, just as companies have built deep organizational capabilities to manage technology, people, and capital, the same will now happen for models

Fifth, companies will face new ethical and compliance challenges.

“If Amazon decides to take millions of jobs and essentially cut their labor costs in half, that only comes out of workers’ pockets,” added Korgan. “That creates a major economic problem in an industry that for the last 50 years has done a good job of supporting millions of middle-class jobs.”

“This sort of model is problematic for the entire industry,” said Randy Korgan, the director of the Teamster’s Amazon Project. “They’re willing to loan these small subcontractors money, get them access to their vans and help them advertise for employees to offload all the responsibility that would normally fall on Amazon.”

Amazon has been publicly opposed to unionization and organizing among their employees, most recently through an anti-union campaign launched ahead of a union election vote at a warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, which has included anti-union captive audience meetings and sending mass texts and ads to workers encouraging them to vote against the union.

Drivers for Amazon contractors have complained of the surveillance and pressure they receive through cameras and a tracking app, Mentor.

remain

Drivers for Amazon delivery service providers also face fear of retaliation for trying to organize in their workplaces.

Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have gone back and forth every week about who is the wealthiest person in the world and I can’t even pay my rentDerrick Flournoy

“Sixteen dollars an hour isn’t enough for the amount of work that we have to do. We’re a representation of the wealthiest company in the world and we’re barely making enough money to live,”

An Amazon spokesperson claimed drivers have built-in time through their routes for breaks and provide a list of nearby restrooms in the delivery app. They did not comment on the unfair labor practice charge or on organizing efforts by drivers.

“I know the president weighed in,” said J.C. Thompson, a process assistant at the warehouse. “And I can’t imagine the pressure our leadership is feeling because there’s a few people — a minority — who are disgruntled.”

Last year, when Amazon opened the warehouse to the praises of local elected officials, the company hailed its arrival as a sign of economic revival in a predominantly Black area. With the coronavirus pandemic raging, Amazon offered thousands of jobs at a minimum wage of at least $15 an hour, more than double the state’s minimum. Some hailed it as a godsend.

While liberal activists in Alabama see an opportunity to reshape the state’s politics, and national progressives seize on a shared priority with Mr. Biden’s administration, Mr. Richardson just wants to be able to take a long bathroom break without the fear of having his pay docked.