The author resigned after participating in Amazon CamperForce at Haslet

The author’s week with Amazon CamperForce at the Amazon warehouse in Haslet turned months of reporting on nomadic workers into a brief spell of warehouse labor. The experience brought the author close to the bodily demands, technological frustrations, and tightly organized routines that promotional accounts could obscure. It also ended not with a dramatic confrontation but with an ordinary exit: a lanyard placed in a security basket, a brief pause, and a good-night to the guard.

From reporting to participation

The author had spent about six months interviewing workampers and following coverage of their lives. Much of that coverage presented the work as a cheerful travel adventure, emphasizing cross-country movement and new friendships while skirting the economic pressures behind people’s decisions to live and work on the road. The author recognized that brief visits and early interviews had not supplied enough proximity to understand the lives being described. A more sustained immersion was needed.

That commitment had already taken a material form. To live and report alongside nomads, the author bought and prepared Halen, a self-contained van with a bed, cooking equipment, a toilet, and a solar-powered electrical system. Over the following two years, Halen carried the author on reporting trips totaling more than 15,000 miles. Living in the vehicle changed the conditions of the reporting: the author could sleep, cook, and write on the road rather than commute from a conventional home. The move into warehouse work extended that effort from observing mobile workers to sampling one of the jobs that supported their itinerant lives.

The author had also applied to work the sugar beet harvest after hearing about seasonal jobs but not seeing their worksites firsthand. Acceptance for Amazon CamperForce provided another opportunity to test what such labor entailed. The aim was not to claim that a short stint made the author a workamper, but to bring firsthand experience to stories previously gathered through interviews.

Entry into the warehouse

Orientation began on a Wednesday with a group of thirty-one trainees, most of them older than sixty. The author was the only person under fifty and one of just three without gray hair. The Haslet facility had requested eight hundred CamperForce workers and received more than nine hundred applicants, but nearby trailer parks could not house them all. Managers eventually hired 251 workers, limited by the number of RV spaces they could secure across twelve parks within forty miles. Some workers faced commutes of up to ninety minutes each day in addition to ten-hour shifts.

The cohort trained in Inventory Control Quality Assurance, a department whose task appeared straightforward: scan merchandise and compare it with digital inventory records. The facility, described by the trainer as Amazon’s largest distribution center, covered an area comparable to more than nineteen football fields. More than twenty-two miles of conveyor belts moved boxes through the building, producing a noise loud enough that a horn signaled when a jammed belt had been repaired and was starting again.

The equipment and safety instructions made the warehouse’s risks part of the daily routine. Workers were told to pin up their hair, avoid tying sweatshirts around their waists, and wear breakaway lanyards so clothing or badges would not catch in the conveyor rollers. The instructions reflected a workplace where movement and machinery were closely entangled, even as the job was presented as scanning inventory. The author’s week thus began with both a large-scale technical system and a set of practical precautions for moving through it.

Repetition, robots, and disorientation

Amazon Kiva robots moved shelving columns of merchandise from a restricted, dimly lit area called the Kiva field to workstations around its perimeter. Ordinary workers were not permitted to enter the field, even when merchandise fell there; they could retrieve stray items from outside with a long-pole tool. The arrangement made automation visible as a division of space: robots carried shelves through the enclosed area, while workers stood at stations to handle and scan the goods.

During a shift, the author scanned many kinds of merchandise, from adult products to gun accessories and gift cards. One robot repeatedly brought a shelf containing patchouli incense boxes to the author’s station. After the boxes were scanned and the shelf sent away, it returned several minutes later, and then returned again. The loop turned a routine inventory task into a small demonstration of how little control a worker might have over the sequence of assignments. The author could complete the scan but could not prevent the same work from cycling back.

That repetition was not unique to the author’s station. A white-haired CamperForce worker said the robots kept presenting the same shelf to her; after several rounds, it began going to her husband at a station twenty-five feet away, where he received it repeatedly as well. She said she was close to quitting and expressed a preference for cleaning toilets over continuing with the robotic assignments. Her frustration clarified that the technology did not simply remove repetitive labor. For the workers stationed at its edges, it could organize repetition in ways that felt arbitrary and difficult to escape.

The author’s final shift added a different kind of disorientation. A manager sent the author to Damageland, where broken merchandise was held, but the handheld scanner indicated that the assigned job was forklift driving. The author did not know how to drive a forklift. Rebooting the scanner several times did not immediately resolve the conflict between the manager’s instruction and the device’s command. Eventually the author reached Damageland and spent a few hours recording damaged goods before the shift ended.

Departure and significance

By then, the author had decided it was time to quit, though the exact manner of leaving remained undecided. The temptation to make a conspicuous exit by entering the Kiva field arose against the restrictions workers had been given, but the author chose not to act on it. The purpose of the stay was to gather evidence, and the notes, audio recorder, and small camera carried on the author’s lanyard mattered more than staging a dramatic gesture. The scene captures the tension between direct participation and continued observation: the author had entered the labor process, but remained there to document it.

At the warehouse exit, the author placed the lanyard and its contents in a security basket, slid it down the ramp to the guard, and passed through a metal detector. The author paused, watching the guard and the basket, but she barely examined the equipment. After a good-night, the author left. The quietness of the departure contrasts with the regimented, noisy work inside, but does not undo the experience: the author had spent a week working amid conveyor belts, scanner commands, and repeated robotic deliveries.

The Haslet episode belongs to a broader shift in the author’s method. Earlier reporting had shown how public accounts could frame workamping as sunny travel and camaraderie; living in Halen and taking seasonal jobs brought the work’s conditions closer to view. The brief warehouse stint could not stand for every worker’s experience, but it supplied concrete encounters with the scale of the facility, the constraints on housing and commuting, the hazards surrounding conveyor systems, and the repetitive relationship between workers and automation. Its ending marks a limit as well as an arrival: the author participated long enough to observe the labor from within, then left with the reporting tools still intact.