How an Amazon warehouse is getting ready for Prime Day – Quartz

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If you ordered something smaller than a toaster at Amazon, in the northeastern United States, it is highly likely that it comes from LGA9, a 900,000 distribution center. square feet located in Edison, New Jersey.

From the outside, LGA9 – named, like most Amazon warehouses, after a nearby airport – is deeply inimitable. It is one of the many unmarked low-rise warehouses on New Jersey's highways. But thanks to its numerous loading docks, millions of items are handled every year, from detergents to sports bras, Amazon echoes of Little Live's Scruff-A-Luvs toys, Bounty vitamins from Nature to bells ringtones. The plant employs 2,000 people full-time and can carry hundreds of thousands of packages each day.

This efficiency will be highlighted next week at Prime Day, a two-day Amazon bacchanal shop since 2015. This year, Prime Day falls on July 15 and 16, when Amazon and its vendors will be throwing thousands of products at random. 40% off Under Armor clothing, 30% off mattresses, 20% off Bowflex machines and pre-orders from Lady Gaga's exclusive new cosmetics line. To add pressure, Amazon has recently committed to offering members of its Prime program – a $ 119 a year club, which allows for faster shipping, access to movies and TV shows, discounts at Whole Foods and much more – a one day shipping on many products the company sells. This is a very big demand, but also a major challenge: Amazon has already turned the e-commerce and logistics sector upside down by setting a two-day shipping standard for Premium members.

With a real World Cup retail in less than a week, you can expect an impression of apprehension that will reign at LGA9. But general manager Alex Urankar said Prime Day was another day for them. "We are staying close to the peak of the year on this site," Urankar told me during my visit to LGA9 this week.

Thank God for all the robots.

Automation is the key to Amazon's success

Most of the average time spent on the product in LGA9 has passed into the hands of one robot or another. Open since 2017, the building is an excellent example of the highly automated structure created by Amazon to route merchants' products to the front doors as quickly as possible.

In older Amazon facilities, products are stocked on countless rows of shelves that employees must browse in order to pick items to pack them. In LGA9 and many of its newest facilities, shelves are for employees.

Just one of the shelves fields at the LGA9 installation.

Amazon uses a combination of old technologies, such as barcodes, and other advanced innovations, such as computer vision, to keep track of its inventory. As a result, the company knows exactly where each product in LGA9 is located. It also includes different processes for single-item orders and orders with multiple products hosted in the same facility.

The LGA9 is equipped with three vast fields of shelves (the photo above represents only one) where, with rare exceptions, no human being is allowed. Under the shelves, a tribe of squats, orange robots, descendants of robots built by Amazon, buyers of Kiva Systems, rush, picking up the shelves on their backs and moving them to a deeper storage or bringing them to the right nobody.

In dozens of stations, human staff receive robot field towers and plastic bins to sort the products, from a super-powerful version of the belt conveyor system that you will find in the baggage sorting room. 'an airport. A computer placed in front of the human partner tells them which section of the tower to extract a product and into which bin.

A typical picking station of the LGA9 facility, run by his associate Eric Schoner.

The products are placed in the LGA9 towers in the same manner as they are removed. A worker stands in a workstation, filled with boxes of products made by manufacturers and places them in towers. Scanners located at each station control the location in which each product is placed following the hands of the partner and identifying each location of the tower. This is reminiscent of the computer vision used in Amazon's Go stores, but conversely: computers are watching people put their products on shelves rather than removing them.

Workers sort products randomly into shelving towers.

Once a product has been moved from one tower to another in an assigned bin, the barcode of that bin is scanned and sent onto the automated conveyor belts to another employee, who packages each produced for shipping.

The belt conveyor system, which knows how to send each bin to the right packing machine.

Packers, like Mariana Rivadeneira (below), receive the bins at their desks and the computer system tells them which size box and which band to use for each order. Once a box is packaged and glued, the packer sends the empty tray in one direction on the conveyor belt system and the package in another.

"I like to be proud of my work," says Rivadeneira, who talks about packaging, which she describes as simple and fun. "I never have to guess myself."

At this point in the process, no one who came into contact with the product knew to whom he was destined or where he was going. The system has followed everything, but it is only when the product is packaged and placed on another conveyor that the packaging is labeled.

Packages are scanned to determine where to ship them.

The virtual system that tracks the package through the warehouse scans the barcode of the box and matches it to the current order; In a few seconds, the packaging goes under another machine that prints the shipping label and affixes it on the package.

The parcel is then sent on another conveyor belt specially designed to be packed in a truck.

Packages must be shipped on special two-way conveyor belts.

The conveyor belts, together with the installation tracking system, send the package to the right place of shipment. Once at the destination, the package is pushed out of the band, left or right, onto a small conveyor that extends to the back of a delivery truck.

The conveyor belts extend into the delivery trucks.

The workers are able to slide the conveyor belt backwards, allowing them to pack the trucks from the front forwards and avoid carrying heavy boxes too far.

The sad reality of shipping parcels

Prime Day is going to feel de rigueur at LGA9 because it is: An installation accustomed to meeting peak demand has no choice but to become a well-oiled machine. But despite all its frenetic activity, LGA9 is not really teeming with life. There is a lot of noise and movement, but most of it comes from robots.

Urankar tries to break the lonely character of the work. Employees meet with managers twice during each shift to discuss production goals for the day. Urankar says that these recordings often boil down to discussions about recent vacations, weekend plans and other things that allow the team to feel more connected on a personal level.

Urankar also organizes breakout sessions with employees during their birthday to solicit their comments on life in the warehouse. He recently implemented one of the suggestions, adding screens at the main entrance that celebrate employees' accomplishments at work and away. (During my visit, one of the screens congratulated a worker for obtaining a trucking permit.) LGA9 also has disguise days – "The Flannel Monday" is coming soon – and Urankar has recently organized a weekend carnival for associates and their families.

But LGA9 is a relatively new facility. Not all Amazon warehouses are automated, and employees at multiple distribution centers have complained of grueling quotas, limited toilet breaks, mandatory holiday shifts and the need for pain medication (provided free by LGA9) to combat physical reality. offset. Amazon also sends anti-union messages to its leaders. In addition, there was not one, but two cases of accidental carriage in warehouses.

And although Amazon pays well for its workers compared to many warehouses – the base compensation of an Amazon processing center is now $ 15 at the hour, $ 5 more than the minimum wage New Jersey's current – this is a relatively new development. The rise in wages came as a result of pressure from Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who presented a "Stop BEZOS Bill" in September after years of reports of dangerous and exhausting warehouse conditions. d & # 39; Amazon.

On July 15, the first day of Prime Day, employees of a Minnesota execution center intend to launch a six-hour strike to protest the impact on workers of a ship's shipping mandate. Amazon's day. Employees will ask the company to cut productivity quotas that they believe lead to unsafe work conditions, according to Bloomberg.

Warehouse of tomorrow

LGA9 seems to represent Amazon's vision for all of its 110 order processing centers and its 40 parcel sorting facilities around the world. The building produces more than a fifth of its own energy through solar panels installed on the roof. Inside Amazon, most of the difficult tasks faced by human warehouse workers have been automated. Already, it is seeking more efficiency, including increased automation of product selection; Other companies are also studying the automation of parcel sorting and truck packing. With autonomous trucks and drone deliveries on the horizon, robots are gradually integrated with all aspects of the logistics of an Amazon purchase.

Even Amazon recognizes the impact of all that automation could have on its human workers. On July 11, the company announced that it would commit to retraining (or "upgrading") its 100,000 associates for future positions, anticipating the need for fewer staff to manage its warehouses. The company is earmarking $ 700 million by 2025 for this initiative.

For the moment, the human elements of work in the warehouses remain very real. Most of Amazon's associates are up for the majority of their shifts and injuries remain common (a board near the entrance to LGA9 said that there had been close to 150 injuries this year up to now). While this is aimed at making obsolete warehouse workers, Amazon is also trying to improve the living conditions of its employees. The company offers (relatively) high salaries, generous health insurance and paid time off – all of which have allowed applications for warehouse jobs to double over the last year. Amazon even offers to pay 95% of tuition fees for the continuous training of its employees. The company says that 500 of its employees have returned to school to learn how to maintain themselves and work with robots.

In the near future, robot maintenance may be the only work still available for a human in Amazon's warehouses.

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