Fulfillment center is an ironic name for a place where people have all hope and desire beaten out of them by hard labor and poor conditions.
YES, LITERALLY. WE LIVE IN A MEDIOCRE YA NOVEL AND I'M NOT EVEN A SECONDARY CHARACTER
You're not even a character. You're a throwaway description of actions in the background written to develop atmosphere and worldbuilding. They call rename it the despair center, and even then it wouldn't capture the horrors of life there.
Y'all just gave me a great idea for a YA novel.
This time, the villains are people who are so thoroughly convinced they're the main characters and that's why they treat everyone like garbage because they see their life as a video game. Like Scott Pilgrim but never getting called out for the bad shit he does, and as such never really has to stop being a manchild.
Honestly it probably caught on because it protects the company from its own bean counters. A warehouse sounds like a capital expense where your goods just sit there doing nothing; a cost to be cut. A fulfillment center is a place that fulfills orders; the final step in the process of actually making money.
Did fulfillment at a major retailer chain. The only nice thing was the boss didn’t care if you didn’t help the customers, because the fulfillment metrics were (apparently) so incredibly important. The holidays were brutal though. Definitely helped to radicalize me, honestly lmao
the term was in use for technical equipment provisioning, configuration and delivery as far back as 2003 in my direct experience, but i'm sure they had been using it since probably the 1980s. i worked with a guy whose job at a commercial client-focused telecom company was "fulfillment" in that he made sure some highly specific telecom equipment arrived at a customer's premises inside a certain window and was either configured ahead of time and ready to connect, hand delivered and configured/installed by a tech, or arrived not-yet configured but with a tech arriving to do the configuration and install on site. and this was often coordinated with the customer's in house network integrator / tech guy to deal with their end.
it was a catch all term (logistical fulfillment of service equipment at customer's premises) for a monitored and tightly managed shipping system involving a technical process at some point in the chain. when the circuit was up and everything was working, the order was "fulfilled" and then part of the general customer base. and until that happened the first time, the buck stopped with him as he "owned" any issues during that initial process since he could track all the equipment with shippers from manufacturers and intervene to make sure it has someone from our end to link up with it and set it up to spec at some point.
doesn't surprise me at all that this bled over into a rebranding of warehouses shipping lead contaminated dog toys and travel umbrellas by bazingoids.
shoutout to the "Walmart is a better model for a planned society than Stalinism" anti-degrowth DSA neoliberals!
Fulfillment House is the working title of the erotic reverse harem novel I'm writing.
Will I ever at least meet the Mary Sue in chief?
