Black Friday through the eyes of an Amazon worker 

Black Friday is no longer a single day, it has stretched into a season. 

In the UK, Amazon’s own ‘Black Friday Week’ runs from 20th November to 1st December in 2025. 

In 2024 Black Friday drove $74 billion in online sales across the globe. For Amazon, a trillion-dollar company, it was the company’s biggest UK Black Friday to date. 

However, as one former employee and local union vice president pointed out to the publication Left Voice “The workers are the ones who make billionaires, billionaires.” 

For shoppers, the event is framed as discounted convenience, with deals delivered quickly and returns processed instantly. But inside Amazon’s fulfilment centres, the vast, windowless warehouses that power this ritual, the week feels very different.

To understand what Black Friday looks like from the inside, we spoke to an Amazon worker currently employed in a fulfilment centre. They asked to remain anonymous, but wanted people to know what the season really demands of those who keep it moving.

Inside a typical Amazon work shift

A typical shift, they explain, starts with clocking in and finding out where you’ll be assigned; a process that feels matter-of-fact until the briefing begins. Each team is run through “company speak” about targets, daily expectations and safety tips. Then the pace accelerates as workers head to their stations.

“Workstations are always standing only,” they say. “You can ask for one [a seat], but it’s usually difficult to do so.” Breaks amount to two thirty-minute windows — one paid, one unpaid.

During Black Friday, that routine sharpens into something more intense. The worker describes “huge volumes of returns” that arrive almost immediately after the sales window closes, creating a near-constant flow of items that must be processed at speed so they can be resold. “It’s unreal how much work before and after we have to handle,” they say. “It feels never-ending.”

By the end of a shift, the toll is physical. “You feel completely exhausted, with your whole body heavy and aching all over,” they tell us. Stepping out into the winter darkness, “the cold night hits you like a tonne of bricks. Your feet feel utterly raw.”

Targets and tracking

Amazon’s public line is that UK warehouse workers do not have productivity targets. Despite this, nearly 70% of US Amazon employees reported having to take unpaid time off due to exhaustion suffered on the job. The worker we spoke to echos this pain. 

“(Amazon) states we don't have targets, but you better believe there are targets,” they say. “It’s drilled into you what you and the team are expected to do and about your ‘unproductive’ time.”

Some of this monitoring is automated. Idle-time detection, for example, means leadership can detect if a worker is not processing items at the expected rate. “There is a lot of tracking within the fulfilment network,” the worker explains. Alongside the surveillance, there is the ever present pressure of being observed, “You feel physically as though there is always this hidden ghost of a team leader constantly watching and scrutinising you.”

The infrastructure reinforces the feeling. CCTV is everywhere; some parts of the building have no exterior windows at all. “Sometimes you don’t even get to see the outside at all… It can be depressing at times,” they add. It aligns with what external investigations have found: gruelling shifts, high expectations, and a work rhythm shaped by profit rather than human pace.

In 2024, Amazon worker, Sultana Hossain, discussed the surveillance technology Amazon develops to surveil their workers, and how Amazon uses their technology to help governments, militaries, and police departments around the world to oppress people in working class communities. Hossain states: “in some way or another Amazon affects you.”

You can read more on our site about how Amazon powers the surveillance state, supplying cloud services to ICE’s militarised deportation regime and enabling the Israeli military’s illegal occupation of Palestine.

The strain of Black Friday

Time off is extremely difficult during peak periods. “Most fulfilment associates struggle to get holidays,” the anonymised worker we spoke to says, even when they need time with their families. With Christmas so close to Black Friday, the pressure intensifies. “Many rely heavily on overtime to pay for gifts for their families,” they explain. Securing that overtime can feel like “a dog-eat-dog world”.

The combination of long hours, physical strain and surveillance means Black Friday isn’t just busy, it reshapes entire weeks and months around it.

The contrast between worker’s experiences and Amazon’s public messaging about sustainability and kindness feels stark. “It’s all well and good seeing all these glitzy and glamorous straplines,” they say, but inside the warehouse, consumption looks very different. “A little bit of kindness should be given when the majority of the work is not done by robots it’s done by humans”.