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A YEAR AGO, Amazon.com workers like 34-year-old Rejinaldo Rosales hiked miles of aisles each shift to “pick” each item a customer ordered and prepare it for shipping.
Now the eCommerce giant boasts that it has boosted efficiency — and given workers’ legs a break — by deploying more than 15,000 wheeled robots to crisscross the floors of its biggest warehouses and deliver stacks of toys, books and other products to employees.
“We pick two to three times faster than we used to,” Rosales said during a short break from sorting merchandise into bins at Amazon’s massive distribution center in Tracy, California, about 60 miles east of San Francisco. “It’s made the job a lot easier.”
Amazon, which faces its single biggest day of online shopping on Monday, has invested heavily this year in upgrading and expanding its distribution network, adding new technology, opening more shipping centers and hiring 80,000 seasonal workers to meet the coming onslaught of holiday orders.
Amazon says it processed orders for 36.8 million items on the Monday after Thanksgiving last year, and it’s expecting “Cyber Monday” to be even busier this year.
CEO Jeff Bezos vows to one day deliver packages by drone, but that technology isn’t ready yet. Even so, Amazon doesn’t want a repeat of last year, when some customers were disappointed by late deliveries attributed to Midwestern ice storms and last-minute shipping snarls at both UPS and FedEx.
Meanwhile, the company is facing tough competition from rivals like Google and eBay, and traditional retailers are offering more online services.
Amazon has forecast revenue of $27.3 billion to $30.3 billion for the holiday quarter, up 18% from last year but less than Wall Street had expected.
However, Amazon has invested billions of dollars in its shipping network and its reliability is a big selling point to customers, Piper Jaffray investment analyst Gene Munster wrote in a note to clients Friday. He thinks Amazon’s forecast is conservative.
The Seattle-based company now has 109 shipping centers around the globe. The Tracy facility is one of ten in which Amazon has deployed the robots, using technology acquired when the company bought robot-maker Kiva Systems in 2012, said Dave Clark, Amazon’s senior vice president for operations, who gave reporters a tour on Sunday.
More than 1,500 full-time employees work at the Tracy center, which has 1.2 million square feet of space — the equivalent of 28 football fields.
They are joined by about 3,000 robots, gliding swiftly and quietly around the warehouse. The robots navigate by scanning coded stickers on the floor, following digital commands that are beamed wirelessly from a central computer.
Each of the squat orange machines can slide under and then lift a stack of shelves that’s four feet wide and holds up to 750 pounds of merchandise. The system uses bar codes to track which items are on each shelf, so a robot can fetch the right shelves for each worker as orders come in.
Because the robots travel underneath, the shelves can be stacked closely together, which means the warehouse can hold more goods, Clark said.
The Tracy center now holds about 20 million items, representing 3.5 million different products, from bottles of gourmet steak sauce to high-end audio headsets, books and video games. Clark said it can ship 700,000 items in a day, but will hold more and ship more by next year.
The robots will cut the Tracy center’s operating costs by 20%, Clark said. But he was quick to assert they won’t eliminate jobs.
“Our focus is all about building automation that helps people do their jobs better,” he said, adding that workers are needed for more complex tasks such as shelving, packing and checking for damaged items. The system takes the complexity of different tasks into account, rather than forcing employees to work at an inhuman pace, Clark added.
Rosales agrees. Though he works rapidly, he said the robots “actually adjust to your speed. If you’re picking slower, they slow down.”
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Warehouse in Ireland please. Having to wait for parcels to ship from UK is not good enough.
Amazons high tech jobs are based in Dublin. The companies warehouses are based in Britain. It’s cheaper than Ireland.
Yeah that 1 day prime service is shocking! If I order something now I won’t have it until tomorrow ffs!
Amazon consider Ireland as part of the UK geographicaly for business reasons while for delivery reasons they consider NI and The Republic to be the same.I worked there and it used to provide endless hours of fun trying to explain the situation to idiot ‘nationalists and unionists’ who would take offence to this.Then added to that for tax they are registered in Lux.Most likely they will open a hub here at some point but most items will still have to come from the UK. There just isn’t the population here to justify a warehouse system big enough to hold 17m items.
More people out of a job
“hiring 80,000 seasonal workers to meet the coming onslaught of holiday orders.”
are they? some might be out of a job running around the floor picking items. but someone has to look after the robots, repair them and even build them so jobs are created as well.
Simon,that’s a very short term view.
how so. remember back in the 80′s when computers were being brought into the office and work place and we were all supposed to be out of jobs?
Simon, they are doing a physical job that only people could do. You can be very sure that any of these working in these huge spaces will have a very long lifespan unlike anything that will be for sale in the future in PC World etc for the home.
Did you actually read the article?
” They are doing a physical job that only people could do” — bit of a contradiction there
I work in this area (electrical / mechanical IT support) if they have 3000 robots then they need a good load of people to back them up. I would very much doubt that 3000 people were let go to be replaced by 3000 machines.
Machines that run for 24 hours a day need weekly / monthly PM’s. Software upgrades, cleaning and replacing. so while they have a long life span they are continually being looked after unlike your house hold appliances that only get service when they break down,
Support jobs are also much better paid than picking jobs. And at the end of the day, shouldn’t we be using robots and machines to do the more mundane tasks and upgrading our human work force for the better.
Simon the robots will become self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th and repair themselves. Only a matter of time.
Jason,Simon. The PEOPLE that did this job last year are highly unlikely to be be servicing these robots. They have most likely been told that there is no work for them. Not everyone has the capacity to up skill. Amazon and those who follow them have not got the welfare of their seasonal workers in mind and are not trying impress ye, they have long term wage bill reductions driving this practice.
Its called progress….
Jesusdittyfcukinchrist they took are jobs !
To help the employees, who are they kidding. To CUT THE WAGE BILL.
PR*cks
Johnny 5
Irish Water is currently drafting up an army of robots in the form of precision electronic meters to “help” distribute something which is of a basic right.
Correction: “help” control something which is of a basic right.
My thoughts exactly.
What are your thoughts, pray tell?
I am thinking he was just missing an ellipses…
His thoughts are centred around precision.
have your say