Coffeyville, Kansas, was an early proving ground for Amazon’s CamperForce program, which recruited people living in recreational vehicles to meet the warehouse’s seasonal staffing needs. Its significance in the book lies not only in the program’s beginnings but in the contrast between the promise of mobility and the demanding labor that brought workers there.

The CamperForce Experiment

Amazon’s warehouses had struggled for years to find enough workers for the Christmas rush, trying different hiring approaches and even busing employees from several hours away. In 2008, as the housing crash was unfolding, the temp agency Express Employment Professionals brought a group of RV-dwelling workers to Amazon’s Coffeyville warehouse for the pre-Christmas surge. Amazon was pleased with the results: it gave the effort the CamperForce name and logo, expanded the program to warehouses in Fernley and Campbellsville, and eventually hired workers directly rather than through temp agencies.

The program’s later reach extended beyond its initial sites. Amazon managers assembled small teams of experienced CamperForce workers, called away teams, to train staff at newly opened facilities. Coffeyville therefore appears as an early test of a labor model that could be carried to other warehouses when seasonal demand required it.

Big Chief RV Park and Warehouse Work

Big Chief RV Park in Coffeyville was one of the encampments where the book’s reporter met CamperForce workers. Kenny Harper, who was there with Angela Harper, left the job soon after starting. In a later email, he explained that his left rotator could not withstand the work. His departure gives a specific human measure of the physical demands behind Amazon’s seasonal staffing solution.

The workers’ trailers were more than a place to sleep: they were the homes that made this labor force mobile. The book describes workampers more broadly as appearing where and when employers need them, bringing their own housing and forming temporary communities around seasonal jobs. Such arrangements offered employers flexible staffing, while the short duration and physical strain of the work could leave workers with little energy for social life after a shift.

A View of the Workers Behind the Program

Coffeyville also entered a national story about people whose finances and housing had become precarious. The book describes CamperForce workers who had lost savings, retirement funds, homes, or businesses, as well as younger workers facing unemployment and student debt. Their circumstances varied, but many saw life on the road as a way out of an uncertain future. The book’s account places the Coffeyville workforce within this wider pattern without suggesting that every worker there shared the same history.

The seasonal job could be presented as an upbeat opportunity for travel and new friendships. A National Public Radio segment featuring a CamperForce worker at Big Chief RV Park emphasized those pleasures and was punctuated by laughter. The book sets that cheerful public image against stories of financial loss and bodily wear, including Kenny Harper’s decision to leave. Coffeyville thus serves as both a recruitment site and a vantage point on the gap between the appealing language of work on the road and the conditions that workers encountered.