Exposed: How Amazon destroys millions of new items it can’t sell

dailymail.com ^ | 5/12/2019 | J Bucks

[rktman]

Amazon destroys millions of brand-new items including televisions, books and nappies it cannot sell, an investigation has revealed.

Lorry-loads of goods, many still in their packaging, are dumped in sprawling landfill sites or incinerated. The shocking waste was revealed by undercover investigators who secretly filmed in one of the multi-billion-pound company’s enormous warehouses.

Reporters posing as Amazon workers discovered an area called the ‘destruction zone’ where they covertly filmed staff loading pristine toys, unused kitchen equipment and flat-screen TVs into skips to be transported to dumps.

[norwaypinesavage]

"he has an army of Operations Research PhDs optimizing that."

You're probably right, though I always thought he was smarter than that.

[texas booster]

I work at an Amazon center. We currently have over 10 pallets full of items damaged in shipping.

Note that these are packages that get busted up moving over our conveyors, sort slides and onto / off trucks.

To be clear, this is just internal damage, not product returns.

When you think about it, at $129 per year, how many packages can Amazon afford to ship? Based on comments on this thread it looks like one shipping is pretty much it.

Add in issues such as product theft, both inside the amazon kingdom and outside the kingdom, and $129 * number of Prime members = a lot of money. But it isn't unlimited.

[jimmygrace]

I’m surprised because I thought Amazon was just a pass through connecting manufacturers with buyers. I did not know they had to worry about storing inventory.