It is probably reasonable to assume that tax avoidance is not 'constitutionally' a part of the Santa business model as Brad Stone, the author of a new book on Amazon, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, tells me it is in Amazon's case. If Santa had a track record in paying his temporary elves the minimum wage while pushing them to the limits of the EU working time directive, and sacking them if they take three sick breaks in any three-month period, this would be an apt comparison. Right now, in Swansea, four shifts will be working at least a 50-hour week, hand-picking and packing each item, or, as the Daily Mail put it in an article a few weeks ago, being 'Amazon's elves' in the '21st-century Santa's grotto'. It expects to continue the growth that has made it one of the most powerful multinationals on the planet. And it expects to double the number of warehouses in Britain in the next three years. In the past two weeks, it has taken on an extra 15,000 agency staff in Britain. Christmas is its Vietnam – a test of its corporate mettle and the kind of challenge that would make even the most experienced distribution supply manager break down and weep. Amazon took 3.5m orders on a single day last year.

And this is just one of eight warehouses across the country. Tomorrow, 2 December – the busiest online shopping day of the year – that figure will be closer to 450,000. On my second day, the manager tells us that we alone have picked and packed 155,000 items in the past 24 hours. I work mostly in the outsize 'non-conveyable' section, the home of diabetic dog food, and bio-organic vegetarian dog food, and obese dog food of 52in TVs, and six-packs of water shipped in from Fiji, and oversized sex toys – the 18in double dong (regular-sized sex toys are shelved in the sortables section).

To spend 10½ hours a day picking items off the shelves is to contemplate the darkest recesses of our consumerist desires, the wilder reaches of stuff, the things that money can buy: a One Direction charm bracelet, a dog onesie, a cat scratching post designed to look like a DJ's record deck, a banana slicer, a fake twig. And if you can't possibly imagine it, well, Amazon sells it too. There is space, it turns out, for an awful lot of crap.īut then there are more than 100m items on its UK website: if you can possibly imagine it, Amazon sells it. It is a quarter of a mile from end to end. The warehouse is 800,000 square feet, or, in what is Amazon's standard unit of measurement, the size of 11 football pitches (its Dunfermline warehouse, the UK's largest, is 14 football pitches). The second is a massive pink plastic dildo. The first item I see in Amazon's Swansea warehouse is a package of dog nappies.

Amazon moment shift schedule