Disposable People, Ladders, and Zapp Brannigan

The older I’ve gotten, the more and more you realize that many managers often use the Zapp Brannigan strategy to solve problems. I worked at a large online retailer, which is actually largely just warehouse work, and it treated people horribly. Wages were low, hours were long, and if you had benefits you had to jump through hoops to use most of them. And if you used them, especially things like paid time off, managers would get mad at you for not being at work.

On the off chance you didn’t now, Zapp Brannigan is a character from Futurama, and is celebrated as a military hero for winning a battle. His strategy is outlined in the beginning of the following video:

If you don’t, or can’t watch the video: “You see, killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down“.

This is obviously a terrible strategy. It’s unnecessary and a waste of human life. And that’s how this place was run. Keep throwing enough people at it and it’ll eventually work. If they get burned out, that’s not a problem, the next wave of people will come.

A manager would come up with some new method to try and be more efficient, and then send more and more people to support a terrible idea. For instance, the warehouse is set up for high volume receiving. There’s a dock where trucks come in, where dock workers will off load the truck onto a conveyor line, that leads to people to pull packages off and off load the product out of the packages. There was a working system in place for dock workers to scan labels on packages into the system, then send them on the line to people to receive, and scan the individual item. So naturally, they wanted to implement a new stickering system to scan. So that meant they had to apply a sticker with a code, and then log it in, scan the matching things on the box, then make sure the scanning worked as it was a little dicey, then send it down to line. This obviously slows things down, so inevitably, it became really inefficient, and people down the line on receiving were running out of work because the line couldn’t be filled. So more people were thrown at the problem which doesn’t really solve the issue. All it did, was force the dock workers to work harder at a already back breaking job, while the manager looked confused, then patted himself on the back or yelled at employees if the numbers weren’t met.

And, if I’m being honest, this strategy is encouraged, at least at this place. As long as you got results, it didn’t matter how you got them. It was frightening considering the size and clout of this place. People were disposable, and the turnover I imagined was somewhere around 90% every six months in the warehouse. It’s so bad that new hires were brought in basically every week, as people left so often. And that speaks volumes to the conditions of the place, because everyone knows it costs more to retrain people than retain them. It’s doubly sad that the managers were also not paid particularly well, and were treating people like this. Maybe it’s that they’ve become jaded, or maybe this is all they’ve got, and this is what they know about climbing the ladder. That you kiss up to the people you want, and grind down the people below you so you can reach the next rung.

It’s a sad state of affairs, and the company gets a pass because generally people don’t know the poor working conditions as they don’t have a retail front like Walmart where people can see the issues. Much like Walmart, it’s killing out other retailers with this management strategy, but it’s billing lauded as the future. And I’m guessing this style of management isn’t unique to this online retailer, so the future for these people and the structure of online retail management is likely to become even more brutal.

It’s like someone told me, the more a place focuses on customer satisfaction, the more crappy they treat their employees. Some companies will sell it to you as “competitive”, but there’s a difference between undercutting others and encouraging whistle-blowing other employees on the smallest things.

I wish I had a good way to close this out, but I don’t. I am lucky I have options, but many don’t, and are stuck in these kind of jobs.

Actually wait, I do have a somewhat good way to close this out.

Don’t sink to that level. Don’t play the shit on other people and dispose of them game.

Be better.

Be a better person, and try to make things better for others if you are able, or in the position to be able to. Don’t step on others, pull them on up, and push them forward to their goals.

While it’s ok to be angry and frustrated, always know you can be better than those people who are pushing you down.