How an army of robots — and humans — help your holiday gifts arrive by Christmas
Amazon’s fulfillment center in Opa-locka is aptly named: It fulfills the impossible-seeming task of having almost any item imaginable shipped directly to one’s door in a matter of hours.
A few clicks of a mouse set into motion a veritable ballet of autonomous functions and approximately 2,000 human packers in Northeast Miami-Dade that allows a shopper, or his intended recipient, to pick up packages from their doorsteps.
But how does Amazon — and other e-commerce shippers including Target and Walmart — really work to deliver more than an estimated $135 billion in e-commerce sales this holiday season, up from $119 billion last year?
To find out, two Miami Herald reporters toured the 850,000-square-foot Miami-Dade facility of the Seattle-based e-commerce giant.
Published reports in the New York Times and the Guardian have charged the company with harsh working conditions at some of its warehouses, but a recent report by the Center for Investigative Reporting on Occupational Safety and Health Administration found no issues at the Opa-locka facility, which opened in September 2018. When Herald reporters visited recently, they saw no safety issues.
They did find hundreds of the facility’s 2,000 workers intensively focused on sorting, packing, scanning and shipping the tens of thousands of small-to-medium-sized items that pass through the center daily during the busy holiday season.
As soon as a Miami-area Amazon customer hits “purchase” on an order, an army of 10-foot-tall yellow shelves are summoned. They sit on top of robotic, Roomba-like droids that spin and whir as they navigate around each other.
When a shelf receives its virtual marching orders, it glides across the facility’s massive floor — the size of 14 football fields —until it reaches a human sorter who — delicately — places the shelved item into a tub. Shelves continue to queue in front of this human until he or she has grouped a full order. The human workers then send the tub on a conveyor belt for packing in one of Amazon’s distinctive boxes, scanning, and shipping.
The whole thing happens in about 10 to 15 minutes.
Around the corner, at the United States Postal Service’s nearly 600,000-square-foot Royal Palm facility on NW 57th Avenue, thousands of packages ordered via competitors Walmart and Target are on their way to doorsteps.
Senior Royal Palm Plant Manager Juan Gonzalez estimated the facility will process and deliver 270 - 280 million pieces of mail to South Florida ZIP codes during the holiday season. That’s about twice the holiday volume when the operation opened in 2009.
E-commerce has been a game changer for the 244-year-old governmental organization. To handle the volume, the USPS has deployed handheld scanners to floor workers, speeding the process and limiting errors. Any backlogs experienced in the early years of the e-shopping boom have been eliminated, he said.
Packages then go to local post offices throughout the county and on to apartments and houses on those familiar striped white trucks.
And yes, some of those packages have been ordered through Amazon, which gets about 37% of all e-sales. Other Amazon deliveries come via Brown (officially known as UPS). The company said it hired 3,000 extra workers in the Miami area to handle this year’s holiday rush.
Some others come via FedEx, though Amazon recently announced that third-party sellers, which execute approximately half of Amazon’s orders, can no longer use FedEx due to errors.
For procrastinators and habitues of one-day delivery, Amazon increasingly puts packages on navy vans emblazoned with the company’s signature smile-swoosh. Amazon uses third-party drivers to make those deliveries.
For shoppers who bought via Walmart and Target websites, packages will make the journey via one of the major parcel carriers.
While both Walmart and Target declined to provide details of their Miami operations, equity analyst and e-commerce expert John Zolidis said those two companies have found a way around building new distribution centers; instead, they rely on existing area stores where customers can quickly pick up their own packages at curbside.
Said Target, “over the past several years, we’ve made our 1,800+ stores the center of all that we do — including our digital business,” via a statement. “Because 75% of Americans live within 10 miles of a store, we’re able to accommodate Target runs and fulfill digital orders quickly.” About 80 percent of its digital orders are fulfilled by a store, the company said.
Walmart declined to comment. But Zolidis says the same is true for the value-price department store, whose retail outlets sit within 10 miles of about 90% of the U.S. population.
For those who have missed online-order deadlines, brick-and-mortar retailers are happy to help. Most are open until 5 or 6 p.m. Tuesday.
This story was originally published December 23, 2019 at 6:00 AM.
