The Future of Robot Labor Is Unfolding in Shipping Warehouses

As I walked into one of the warehouses run by the aptly named Quiet Logistics in a suburban town outside Boston, I instinctively lowered my voice to a whisper. The room's massive ceilings reverberated my voice and there was surprisingly no noisy work to drown it out. In front of me, a subset of the building's roughly 200 employees earning between 12-18 an hour carefully packaged trendy clothes, shoes, and jewelry into brand-specific boxes, all without a sound. "We were shocked at how calm our warehouses felt," Bruce Welty, the founder and chairman of Quiet, which handles the packaging and shipping of items purchased online, told me in a phone interview before my visit. Many of the products come from a growing class of ecommerce startups that favor the direct to consumer model over brick and mortar stores.