No matter what you think about Amazon, you just can’t deny that the company is an unparalleled innovator in the field of corporate villainy. When it isn’t working hard to crush unionization movements, sending news stations pre-written scripts to read, trying to handle PR disasters about workers pissing in bottles, or dispatching employee Twitter drones to robotically write messages about how much they love their jobs, The House That Bezos Built is creating incredible new products meant to neatly house its employees’ on-site stress-induced mental breakdowns.
Say hello to the Amazon Zenbooth.
A video of this closet of horrors showed up yesterday on the Amazon News Twitter account before being removed and subsequently reuploaded by a YouTube user. In it, we see “Amazon Employee & AmaZen Creator” Leila Brown extol the virtues of an on-site booth referred to as a “Mindful Practice Room,” “ZenBooth,” or an “AmaZen station.”
“With AmaZen, I wanted to create a space that’s quiet, that people could go and focus on their mental and emotional well-being,” Brown explains over footage of an employee entering what looks like a porta potty decorated with pamphlets, a computer, some sad little plants, and a tiny fan. She continues, calling the overgrown iron maiden a place to “recharge the internal battery” by checking out “a library of mental health and mindful practices.”
As Vice reports, the ScreamKeeper was designed as part of the company’s “WorkingWell” program, which is meant to help keep the annoyingly needy company flesh-stock in good enough health to continue their work by providing them with Amazon-provided nutritional advice, “physical and mental activities, wellness exercises,” and more.
Hopefully, this initiative accomplishes what Amazon intends, and its workers are able to strive endlessly onward, mind and bodies perfectly optimized for the eternal list of tasks laid out before them. If nothing else, a semi-private booth seems like a better place for overworked employees to relieve themselves than the alternatives.
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