The Amazon warehouse in Haslet, near Fort Worth, Texas, becomes the narrator’s first sustained firsthand encounter with the warehouse labor that supports life on the road. Amazon CamperForce brought mobile workers to the facility for temporary employment, but the site was more than a stop on a seasonal work circuit: its scale, rules, crowded worker housing arrangements, and automated systems made visible the pressures behind the cheerful public image of workamping.

Setting and Arrival

The narrator received a start date of November 4 at the warehouse after completing Amazon’s pre-employment screening. The test requirement made the job feel precarious even before arrival; once cleared, the narrator returned to the van and drove to Haslet. Orientation took place on a Wednesday morning, with thirty-one trainees gathered in a classroom. Most were over sixty, and the narrator was the only person under fifty. The contrast between the cohort’s age and the physically demanding work ahead was immediately apparent: the trainer warned that workers might perform roughly a thousand squats in a day.

The facility was described during orientation as the largest in Amazon’s distribution network, with a footprint comparable to more than nineteen football fields. That scale shaped both the work and the organization of the building. Trainees were assigned to Inventory Control Quality Assurance, or ICQA, where the basic task was to scan merchandise and match it to digital inventory records. What sounded like a simple counting job placed workers inside a large, busy system of moving goods, machinery, rules, and time pressure.

Seasonal Hiring and Housing

The warehouse’s demand for temporary labor exceeded the available accommodation nearby. Managers had sought eight hundred Amazon CamperForce workers and received more than nine hundred applicants. Trailer parks within commuting distance did not have room for the full group; managers considered using a local pasture but rejected the idea because it could not provide the necessary services. They eventually assembled a limited number of RV spaces at twelve trailer parks within a forty-mile radius and hired 251 workers, as many as the available places could accommodate.

The shortage of sites had a direct cost in workers’ time. Some new hires faced a commute of up to ninety minutes each way in addition to ten-hour shifts. One worker living in a white Ford van planned to sleep discreetly in the warehouse parking lot twice a week to save both time and fuel. The arrangement shows how the job’s promise of a place to park did not guarantee an easy or stable daily routine: access to a worksite, a vehicle, and a campground still had to be pieced together around the employer’s staffing needs.

The workers arrived with varied histories and physical capacities. Among the people the narrator encountered were a minister in his sixties with ten children, a seventy-seven-year-old former mechanic whose knees had been damaged by years of work, and a couple who had retired from police and postal careers. Their experience undercut any easy assumption that seasonal warehouse labor was performed by a uniform group of young workers. For many in the cohort, working at Haslet meant bringing an existing life, body, and home-on-wheels into a short-term job.

The Warehouse Floor and Its Machines

ICQA’s scanning routine unfolded in a hazardous and highly organized environment. More than twenty-two miles of conveyor belts moved boxes through the interior, producing a noise the narrator compared to a freight train. Belts could jam, and employees were instructed to secure their hair and avoid tying sweatshirts around their waists so clothing would not catch in the rollers. Breakaway lanyards reduced the risk posed by identification badges around workers’ necks. A horn sounded when a jammed belt had been repaired and restarted, turning routine warehouse noise into a signal that machinery was moving again.

The Amazon Kiva robots formed another layer of the operation. The 350-pound orange machines traveled within a dim enclosed area known as the Kiva field, carrying shelving columns to human-operated stations around its perimeter. Workers outside the enclosure were not permitted to enter, even to retrieve merchandise that had fallen inside. Instead, they could use a long-handled retrieval tool from outside the boundary, and using it required special training. The arrangement made the robots’ efficiency dependent on a carefully controlled division of space: machines moved the shelves, while workers scanned and handled the merchandise at designated stations.

The narrator’s own shifts revealed both the repetitive pattern and the odd unpredictability of the system. A robot repeatedly brought a station the same shelf, including one delivery of eighteen boxes of patchouli incense. On another shift, the narrator’s handheld scanner gave instructions that did not match the assigned task, repeatedly indicating forklift work before the problem was resolved. The malfunction delayed the work and sent the narrator to a section for damaged merchandise. These episodes showed that the computerized workflow did not eliminate confusion; workers still had to respond when a machine or instruction system repeated, misdirected, or stalled.

Rules, Injuries, and Workplace Culture

The warehouse’s regulation extended beyond machinery. A tour presented company murals and slogans, marked pedestrian paths, and a display of workers disciplined or dismissed for misconduct. A calendar recorded at least one safety-related incident on each day so far that month. The environment framed order as a continual requirement, from where workers walked to how they responded to the demands of the production system.

The narrator also encountered a serious workplace mishap involving Chuck Stout. A cardboard box fell from a conveyor area and knocked him to the floor. After the in-house medical service assessed him, he was sent back to his receiving job, which involved walking fifteen miles a day. Later, Chuck and Barb Stout described managers giving repeated warnings about union organizers who had been speaking with workers in the parking lot. The account adds labor relations to the warehouse’s portrait: alongside the physical work and operational rules, employees encountered organized messaging about how to respond to efforts at workplace organizing.

A Brief Stay and Its Significance

The narrator spent one week at the warehouse, including a final night shift. By then, some older workers were exasperated by scanners that repeatedly sent them to the same merchandise or issued erratic commands. The narrator considered entering the restricted Kiva field as a way to force an immediate end to the job, but did not do so. Notes, audio recordings, and video gathered during the shifts were being carried out with the narrator, and preserving that reporting material mattered more than staging a dramatic exit. After placing the identification lanyard and its attached equipment in the security basket, the narrator left the building at the end of the shift.

The Haslet assignment belongs to a larger reporting effort shaped by the distance between public portrayals of workamping as cheerful travel and the material demands of earning money while living in a vehicle. The narrator had already spent months interviewing workers and observing encampments, but taking a temporary warehouse job supplied a different kind of access: long shifts, commutes, training, and the physical organization of work could be observed from within. The warehouse thus serves both as an employment site for mobile workers and as a concentrated example of how temporary work, scarce RV spaces, digital systems, and human labor intersect.