
Are dark kitchens the satanic mills of our era? - DanBC
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/09/dark-kitchens-satanic-mills-deliveroo
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rsync
A portion of the article speaks of an Amazon fulfillment center:

“The top floor on which I worked was a gloomy place, with the only natural
light coming in through small rectangular windows located far above on the
high ceiling,” he writes. “Most of the light was provided by grey steel lamps
the shape of rugby balls and about the same size. These were dotted about the
ceilings on every floor and cast a peculiar yellow glow about the place.
During the course of the night … many of the motion-sensitive lights would
malfunction, meaning a dozen or so workers would be left scuttling around in
the dark on the top floor of a warehouse at three o’clock in the morning. Who,
when they purchase an iPhone charger or an Adele album with a click on
Amazon’s website, imagines anything like this?”

 _Who wouldn 't_ imagine something like this ?

What else could it possibly look like ? Regional shipment centers predate
Amazon (and the web) and one would have to be comically out of touch with
reality to not understand what a time sensitive shipping facility would look
like ...

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Sharlin
You'd be surprised. I don't think the large majority of the population thinks
about the logistics involved _at all_ , except insofar as it directly concerns
them (ie. the last link in the chain, or when there's a problem in fulfilling
the order). Retail is an abstraction that conjures products into consumers'
hands as if by magic. This permits them to stay conveniently ignorant of the
ugly parts of the supply chain, whether it's torturing and killing animals on
factory farms, inhumane working conditions at a sweatshop in a faraway
country, or the labor-laws-dodging gig economy of couriers and fulfillment
center workers.

~~~
dionidium
> _This permits them to stay conveniently ignorant of the ugly parts of the
> supply chain_

Yes, but it also leaves them completely ignorant of the extent to which modern
capitalism is an unprecedented miracle of human cooperation and effort, which
results in a lot of very silly rhetoric about the evils of corporations that
wouldn't survive the slightest contact with the realities of running a
business.

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koliber
Business has always been about putting on a pretty front at the retail side
that faces the customer, while squeezing the back end for efficiency.

In traditional restaurants, there is an often repeated quote: if you like a
restaurant, don't look in the kitchen.

A retail store will often have pretty displays while the conditions in the
warehouse are more, hmmm, pragmatic.

Nowadays, we find that the retail interaction consists of a web app or mobile
app for purchasing, and a delivery man for receiving of an order.

Customers will be ignorant of the backend. Rarely are people really aware what
is necessary to enable them to buy the things they buy.

There is nothing surprising that there is a discrepancy between the customer-
facing side and the behind-the-scenes operation. What is important is to treat
employees as people, regardless of whether they work in a stock room 10 feet
behind the display, or 1000 miles away in a order fulfillment center.

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olivermarks
I'd say Amazon warehouses and delivery services are the 'satanic mills'.
Deliveroo kitchens are the western world sweatshops...

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joshstrange
What I'm still not clear on is in these "Dark Kitchens" are the chef's
provided by the restaurants or Deliveroo? As in does McDonalds (for lack of a
better example) send a chef to one of these kitchens or is a chef trained on
McDonalds practices work there?

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oska
John Harris is one of the few journalists at _The Guardian_ I have respect
for. His series "Anywhere but Westminster" is very good. He also did a smaller
"Anywhere but Washington" series.

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drivingmenuts
From the article: "This is no way to run an economy, let alone a society. "

It's a great way to run an economy, if you're the owner and not an employee.

It's a horrible way to run a society, regardless.

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collyw
Got to love the disruptive new business models.

