- Amazon is reportedly asking some workers to volunteer to help with orders on Prime Day. Office workers in New York are being asked to work two-hour shifts to help pick and pack orders for Amazon Fresh. This comes as Amazon adds more robots to its fulfillment centers.
Prime Day is an all-hands-on-deck day (or, this year, four days) event. And to follow through on its promises, the retail giant is reportedly asking some corporate workers to “volunteer” their time to assist with customer deliveries.
The Guardian reports Amazon sent a Slack message to workers in New York office on Monday looking for “volunteers to help us out with Prime Day to deliver to customers on our biggest days yet.”
The call asked for workers to put in two-hour shifts between 10:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood, where Amazon operates an Amazon Fresh warehouse. Volunteers were asked to pick items, prepare delivery orders, and work to “boost morale with distribution of snacks.”
Those volunteers will still be able to take calls and meetings in conference rooms during their volunteer shift, the Guardian notes.
The call for volunteers comes as Amazon closes in on having more robots than humans at its fulfillment facilities. At the end of last month, Amazon said it had deployed nearly 1 million robots in workplaces, helping select and pack items for shipment. Some 75% of all global deliveries are now assisted in some way by robots, the company said.
Amazon Fresh, though, is a bit of an outlier. The grocery delivery division has struggled to make a profit in recent years and has seen hundreds of workers laid off since 2022.
Amazon did not immediately reply to Fortune’s request for comment about the Guardian story, but a spokesperson told the paper “This support is entirely optional, and it allows corporate employees to get closer to customers while enabling our store teams to focus on the work that’s most impactful.”
