Kinja reply list

I also worked as a "picker" in a warehouse for a certain Pacific Northwest based sportswear company, and that sounds similar to my experience. Except we had deceptively low quotas. My first week, I hit 105% at a pretty rapid pace, assuming I was a doing a pretty good job (I had just gotten out of the Army, and was waiting for the fall semester to start, to go to college on the G.I. Bill, so I was in pretty good shape).

Nope. The long-term guys were hitting 175% or so, mainly because they were cranked up on meth, didn't take breaks, pissed in bottles and left them everywhere, and didn't eat. So all of the new hires were at the bottom of the productively list (after assuming we were doing a great job for being new), and the least productive would get cut after two weeks.

We pushed ourselves to about 125% per day the second week, and still got the "you're not trying hard enough" lecture, despite being soaked in sweat and aching after every shift. Me and another hire (a former infantry Marine) high-fived each other when we were told not to come back on Monday (at about 140% productivity), and walked out past a fresh crop of clueless suckers who had just gotten hired that day, and were expecting to start next week.

For the life of me, I can not figure out why on Earth you'd deliberately set up new employees for failure, and create a system designed to have constant turnover.