Shining blue and bright above a subterranean labyrinth of hollow shafts, a warehouse sits upon the abandoned remains of a coal mine that once defined this working-class English town. It is as bright as the mines are dark, as vast as the shafts are claustrophobic, as clean as they are filthy. This warehouse represents a future of shopping that does to brick-and-mortar retail what it has already done to the coal mine that used to thrive in its place: Bury it without filling the hole it left behind.

This warehouse is the focus of one particular vision of retail’s future captured by Ben Roberts in Amazon Unpacked, a haunting series of photographs exposing the inner workings of Amazon’s massive fulfillment center in the English Midlands.

Roberts was originally sent to Amazon’s fulfillment warehouse to contribute to a Financial Times article about the online retail giant’s impact upon the town of Rugeley, which fell on hard economic times after the closure of the area’s main employer, a coal mine, back in 1990. In 2011, Amazon announced its intent to set up a fulfillment center in the once vibrant town. It would be a packaging and delivery nexus through which Amazon’s centralized computer brain orchestrated the shipment of millions of packages every year, all throughout the U.K. More important? It would hire a significant number of locals, some of whom had been out of work for 20 years.

Rugeley was hopeful that Amazon’s move into the city limits would result in brighter prospects for the area after two decades of economic gloom. As Roberts’s photographs show, however, Amazon’s future may be bright…but it’s also soulless.

“Vast but one-dimensional. That’s what the Rugeley center is like,” Roberts tells Co.Design. “It’s shockingly quiet there.”

Workers at Rugeley spend their days wandering the massive warehouse, either squirreling away incoming products, pulling orders down from shelves, or packing them up for shipment. In each of these activities, the workers’ motions are not driven by the engine of human judgment or expertise but rather by the massive engine of Amazon’s exquisitely complex fulfillment mechanism: a computer that both tracks and commands every worker’s movements throughout the day.

An Amazon fulfillment associate might have to walk as far as 15 miles in a single shift, endlessly looping back and forth between shelves in a warehouse the size of nine soccer fields. They do this in complete silence, except for the sound of their feet. The atmosphere is so quiet that workers can be fired for even talking to one another. And all the while, cardboard cutouts of happy Amazon workers look on, cartoon speech bubbles frozen above their heads: “This is the best job I ever had!”