I thought it was very cool that Amazon allows people to tour certain FBA warehouses and see the inner workings of a fulfillment center.
They only offer tours at select locations throughout the country, according to the Amazon Fulfillment Center tours website, it looks like it's still only 8 locations.
Fortunately for me, I live about an hour and a half away from the Virginia location. Unfortunately for me, the wait list to get in was about 6 months long... so there was some waiting involved.
Amazon didn't allow me to use my phone once I walked through the security point at the door, so I'm unable to provide pictures from my experience, other than the one I took outside.
Introduction to the Fulfillment Center
The tour began by making our ~30 person group wait in at an entrance, outside of a security gate. The tours suggest arriving early, and they proceed to start late.
The first stop is a classroom where they show you a brief presentation about the fulfillment centers in their current state, with previews of what they're working towards in the future.
One of the most surprising takeaways for me was when the tour guide conducted a basic assessment of our group:
How many of you all are Amazon Prime members? » ...About 10 people, or 1/3rd of the room raise their hands
How many of you all sell on Amazon? » ...I was the only person to raise their hand
Following that, she called on me asking what I sold. I protected my niche and gave her the category of my first product (as if the people in the room with me were somehow lying and planning on stealing it... haha).
I expected to be surrounded by likeminded Amazon sellers, looking to get more insights into the inner-working of what made their business work. Not the case.
After the informative video & Q/A session ended, we all put on headsets and proceeded on our guided tour of the facility. The headsets were required due to how loud it was inside - it would've been extremely hard to hear without them.
Picking & Packing
When you send goods in for FBA, humans manually pick the goods from the loading dock and scan them in to verify having received them.
They're then scattered throughout the warehouse and shelved. Sometimes, some cartons will be redispersed to additional locations at no charge to you.
Following a sale, a human walks through the massive warehouse amidst a maze of shelves in search of the product(s).
I've heard that Amazon is working on a Google Glass style wearable tech for their employees to help them find things in the most efficient manager possible. This makes a lot of sense if you've seen how vast the shelf space is.
The more future-forward fulfillment centers eliminate the need for a human to search out the shelf that has the product they need.
Instead, small Roomba-like robots travel to the shelf, slide underneath the shelf, and extend an arm from beneath it that raises the entire shelf off the ground so that it can be carried to the human who then only needs to pick & pack the product from the shelf.
You can visit the Amazon Robotics website by clicking here, or by clicking the image above, and you can see the robots in action as they bring the shelves to the Amazon employees, instead of vice versa.
So in this example that they shared with us, humans aren't removed entirely from the equation, rather, tech & automation are leveraged to increase their efficiency.
Touring the Amazon Facility
What stood out most was the size of the facility. It was absolute MASSIVE, and build up on multiple floors.
Our tour guide mentioned that 13 of the original fulfillment centers would fit into the center we were visiting on that day.
Another thing that stood out was how the products were seemingly randomly dispersed through the shelves. We could walk for 5 minutes and I would spot a duplicate item, located over 100 yards from where I first spotted the initial.
At face value this made no sense to me, but I'm sure it's part of a well thought out, bigger picture.
They mentioned that dropped items become Warehouse Deals, which if you're not familiar with, are a great way of finding Amazon products at reduced prices. Items that expire are donated to charity.
The floor layout was sectioned off. Some areas were full of rows and rows of conveyor belts with people either scanning items for intake or packing items to be shipped out.
image credit: bizjournals.com
Much of the space was occupied by shelves of product. In some areas, they were stacked high and could've been how they store oversized goods that wouldn't be able to be moved by a single person.
In Summary
I don't think I could work at one of these places, between the loud noise, the lack of natural light, and being surrounded 24/7 by concrete & machinery.
That said, one interesting this I noticed is that the tour guide never used the world employee - instead, they said "associate" - & it was definitely intentional. Maybe they don't want their "associates" feeling any resentment towards their boss who just so happens to be the richest man in the world?
One last interesting nugget was that they cited "associate safety" as justification for the move towards using robotics in the future (& in turn, laying off many "associates").
Amazon isn't liable for the health & safety of unemployed ex-associates!
Jeff's got it all figured out.
