| Hey y'all, it's Austin. Today is Cyber Monday, the annual online retail promotion that gives shoppers an excuse to skip the hassle of camping all night outside a Walmart or Costco store to get huge deals on holiday gifts. It seems every Black Friday brings nightmare reels of post-Thanksgiving mall-goers trampling each other for the last discounted television and impossible-to-find kids' toy. Yet this year, the most horrific consequences of such consumption seem to be driven instead by web customers staying home. The past week has surfaced a rash of tragic reports from inside e-commerce product warehouses, highlighting the oft-unseen costs of consumerism. Reveal, part of the Center for Investigative Reporting, published a disturbing story on the back-breaking labor and intense monitoring that goes into Amazon.com Inc. laborers' work scanning and packaging more than 300 items per hour. Gizmodo obtained leaked documents that show "staggering" injury rates at one of the company's fulfillment centers in Staten Island. And NBC News reported that sales volume at Amazon has taken priority over delivery driver safety. It's as if we've outsourced the pain of in-store shopping to these low-paid workers, with the ease and simplicity of online buying masking the physical harm our clicks can cause. In response to the rash of reports, an Amazon spokeswoman said that the company's fulfillment centers are safe and that it has an aggressive policy of reporting accidents. "While many companies under-record safety incidents in order to keep their rates low, Amazon does the opposite," she wrote in an emailed statement. Yet the burden on warehouses appears only to be escalating. This year, Cyber Monday is expected to supplant Black Friday as the choice shopping holiday for the majority of U.S. consumers. FedEx announced it anticipates moving a record-breaking 33 million packages on Monday. One problem is that the operational logistics are mostly invisible to customers. E-commerce giants such as Amazon have made their web and mobile experiences so seamless that we have no sense of the sweat and toil required to fulfill shipping times. Is the shopping convenience worth it? Many warehouse workers don't think so. In recent days, there have been strikes and protests against Amazon from those seeking better workplace conditions. At an Amazon distribution center in Lyon, France, the scene looked more like a war zone than a retail hub. In an emailed statement about the protests, an Amazon spokeswoman said it has strong policies in place to protect and compensate its staff, and innovative processes to handle the rush. There are signs that over time, the proliferation of retail channels, online and offline, has spread the holiday shopping season out somewhat. But it still remains strikingly concentrated in a few short windows tied to steep sales offerings. In the five days following last year's Thanksgiving, for example, Amazon customers ordered more than 180 million items. And last year's Cyber Monday became Amazon's biggest single day of shopping in its history. The irony is that few of these customers need these items delivered at lightening speeds, given that Christmas and Hanukkah are still weeks away. Yet Amazon has historically used Cyber Monday to showcase the might of its supply chain, touting free same-day shipping and one-hour pickup turnarounds for its Prime subscribers. This all puts unnecessary pressure on the very warehouse workers Amazon has promised to keep safe, all for the sake of providing a benefit to its members they might not even want. I, for one, used to judge others for stampeding into big-box stores on Black Friday. Now, I'm increasingly judging myself for overstuffing an Amazon cart from the comfort of my own apartment. —Austin Carr | 
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