How many pain pills does it take to deliver an Amazon package?

Warehouses dot the outer rims of Middle American cities like farmland. Pain, addiction and turnover plague the people working there.

Your first day at a 2020s warehousing job will be a painful one. Doesn’t matter where. Amazon, a battery brand, a car parts retailer - prepare for your feet to hurt, your knees to weep and your legs to ache. And it won’t ever stop.

After 20 years in journalism, I made the abrupt decision that gas prices and my health demanded something closer to home. I took the first job I could find, doing select picking at a local warehouse. It’s one of several warehousing jobs I’ve worked in the last couple years and in between a couple full-time journalist roles at Cincinnati TV stations and covering other topics freelance.

Unlike many of the adults who find themselves in one of these 500,000 square-foot behemoths for the first time, I worked logistics and warehousing during college. I started my web design and reporting career online at night while building massive boxes for laser engravers and whatever wonders the manufacturing economy of Dayton was still producing in the early to mid 2000s.

That led to newspaper jobs, a few promotions at a small daily, working my way through the beloved Mid-Metro daily even as the Great Recession tore it to shreds.

I went back to digital, then had my big break - investigative and enterprise reporting while freelancing for several outlets on issues spanning Russia misinformation during the 2016 election, the opioid crisis and the working class economy. The same economy still careening down on its occupants like an imploding house.

I wasn’t new, but I was also out of shape, but that wasn’t the worst. I could keep up with my Gen Z and millenial co-workers, but the pain was the factor I hadn’t planned. It was one of the few things that crossed generations, and one reason why “Beer:30” was more than a folksy way of saying quitting time.

A few million square-feet of concrete guarantees you will be in pain constantly if you are are walking eight to 12 hours a day. It may go away after the first weekend off, or the second. At some point it doesn’t.

Talking shoe brands was serious business among co-workers. If you want to know who has the best deal on insoles, what’s the most comfortable, and what lasts longest for the money, ask someone who works in a massive warehouse. I knew one person who used his brother’s 3D printer to make his own custom insoles.

“They’re not bad,” he said. “(Much) cheaper than what you’ll get at the store.”

Nike Air Jordans dominate the floor of one local warehouse. I talked to a woman in her 60s while working at a warehouse for shoe brand. She styled the latest Brooks running shoes.

“Don’t ever go cheap,” she said. “If you can, get multiple pairs. They last longer and switching up shoes every day helps your feet.”

This was one of the of the few topics people of all ages could talk about and relate to - pain and shoes.

A 20-something co-worker said he went with a cheaper pair of Nikes he found out a local department wstore.

(“I’ve regretted going cheap every day for two weeks,” a former co-worker told me.”)

New shoes and insoles, stretching, icing your feet, heat - the pain eventually stays. Humans weren’t built to wander concrete leviathans for 20,000 steps a day while doing repetitive work.

There’s certainly worse suffering on the planet, but the constant presence of leg, foot and back pain makes for an unpleasant life. It takes away the joys of young parenthood and makes yard activity or playing catch impossible. Forget walking the dog. It takes your good moods and switches them bad. And if the pain is bad enough, it’s all too easy to find comfort in alcohol or opioids.

After the pandemic ended, I quit one journalism job and went to work as a pick-packer in Springfield while I planned on finishing a book I started on the history of Dayton.

Dayton was ground-zero of the opioid epidemic in the early 2010s. Major news stations and documentary crews came to the city, trying to figure out what was happening to America’s former Silicone Valley.

One of my stories about the opioid crisis was for the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia. It was about a relative who flat-lined after shooting up at home, then was brought back on the table in the hospital after being dead for 20 minutes.

When people find out they’re working with a journalist, they start googling you. A co-worker told me of his issues with his mother, who shot up in front of him and his siblings regularly while he was growing up. I wanted to talk to him for my book. He wasn’t sure, but he tentatively agreed.

I missed the next day, and Mark was found overdosed near my work station. He lived, but was fired. I tried finding him online to check up on him, but the shock and guilt forced me to shelve a book I had spent four years putting together into a proposal and had already conducted dozens of interviews for.

When you cover an addiction crisis that killed over a dozen of your former classmates, wiped out families and sent kids into the oblivion of the foster care system, the pain gets to you - even if you’re on the sidelines as a writer or spectator. At some point I wondered if writing and asking questions was doing more harm than good.

OxyContin may not be freefalling like it did when Purdue Pharma was lying to the world and murdering much of the American working class, but fentanyl in pill form is out there. Those former OxyContin and heroin addicts have to go somewhere, and if the only choices are pain and addiction - the question can answer itself if you get too down, too hurt or too dark. Tranq dope - combining fentanyl with a powerful animal tranquilizer - is being found more readily. During the early days of Fentanyl, before the mega-powered analogues came dribbling in from China and other parts of the world, mixing the painkiller with marijuana and cocaine was a common practice.

Cincinnati is full of tranq-dopers. If there was ever a city whose leaders huddled behind pearly gates while the riff raff suffered, it’s Cincinnati. Portions of the city look straight from a Grand Theft Auto game or the Walking Dead. People high on fentanyl, meandering around mindlessly. Walking into cars in line at a Wendy’s drive-thru or staring at the sky while standing in the street.

The drug dealers originally used Fentanyl to fatten dwindling supplies of heroin. Heroin isn’t nearly as powerful of Fentanyl, but Fentanyl was more available. This led to hot spots where someone combining the two drugs would leave a batch with more Fentanyl or another. You could trace ambulance or coroner reports and see a row or apartments, a block of houses or a group of neighbors had got the bad batch.

Some prefer older fashioned ways of dealing with pain. While the world was running wild for the opioid epidemic in the mid to late 2010s, alcoholism was becoming more abundant. I had two friends fired within weeks of each other at one job for being drunk at work. Both of whom were in middle age, both of whom were hard workers in constant pain.

The public has agreed we are in a mental health crisis and an addiction crisis, but the pain crisis is one we’ve ignored. Acknowledging it means saying no to the thousands of jobs a retailer or a major brand warehouse can bring to that empty space on that exit a few miles outside of the city. It means making unions more powerful, companies paying for shoes and making these places safer. The money can be good, but these jobs aren’t built to last. They are designed to cycle through employees.

I asked a veteran employee one time where the nurses station was in one building. “What, you think there’s a nurses’s station? You think this is the 90s?” If you were lucky you could find a cabinet full of bandaids, a few knock-off ibuprofen and a few wraps.

The opioid crisis didn’t start with the quick delivery boom, neither did alcoholism. But these jobs aren’t designed to last, and employees aren’t physically capable of doing them for years on end. Human beings weren’t meant to meander on concrete all day or lift 50-to-75 pounds of goods in awkward positions for 12-hour shifts.

Even if they could, the employees wouldn’t be around long anyway. Point systems, penalizing employees for absences are beyond arbitrary. The shoe company I worked at gave you one tardy and one absence your first 90 days - all unpaid - and if you missed more than that, you got fired. Some people clocked in during the morning, thinking they made it on time, only to get fooled by a malfunctioning clock and to be told six hours later they hadn’t clocked or were late.

I talked to one supervisor, she was religious and hard-working herself and thought the point system completely missed the point of keeping a company functional. “I have a lot of bozos who have been around forever but don’t do a thing, but they’re on time every day. They also don’t have kids, live nearby, live with their parents and have no work ethic and no ambition to do more than that. Meanwhile, the people who want to get ahead, to work hard, to try to turn the job into an opportunity and have kids, they’re pointing out if the flu or a cold bug hits their house.”

If you have kids, forget about it, unless they’re super healthy you are unlikely to make it through the probationary period, which the standard is one day off and one late arrival before you’re canned. Allowed absences and tardies increase afterward, but one medical emergency or health issue can doom you before you start.

One hard-working co-worker was taken to the ICU with what he thought was appendicitis. It took two trips to the doctor before he was diagnosed with a hernia, but by then he was out of points, out of options and out of a job. At least he’s not addicted to anything.