First in state: San Bernardino
San Bernardino
warehouse: 1.2 million square feet
seasonal
Conveyor belt
system: Eight miles long
Amazon orders,
San Bernardino - Christmas presents flew by overhead at an amazing speed en route to their destinations Monday.
No, they weren't moving through the sky in a red sleigh pulled by reindeer.
With 24 days until Christmas, toys, games and electronic gadgets were piled into yellow plastic bins that zipped by at up to 25 mph and up to 15 feet in the air on conveyor belts inside an Amazon fulfillment center in San Bernardino on Cyber Monday - the busiest day of the year for Internet sales and Amazon.com.
'Customers ordered 426 items per second last year,' said Scott Stanzel, director of Amazon's consumer communications. 'We expect this to be even busier this time.'
According to the National Retail Federation, 127 million people were expected to shop online across the country Monday, down from about 132 million who planned to do so last year. ComScore reported desktop shoppers spent $1.74 billion on Cyber Monday 2013. That year, Amazon's Cyber Monday sales totaled 36.8 million items.
The online shopping giant has five fulfillment centers in California. The San Bernardino warehouse, which was first to open, stretches over 1.2 million square feet on East Central Avenue.
On Monday, more than 2,000 employees and seasonal workers stowed, picked, moved and packed goods. Without a pointy ear in sight, they wore T-shirts, gym shoes, gloves and sometimes reflective vests as they handled merchandise that had been shipped to the center during an inbound peak period over the past month.
'Our associates who are working full-throttle today are working to get customer orders out the door,' said Ashley Robinson, public relations manager for Amazon's West region operations.
Some workers stored or 'stowed' wares by product bar code and bin number on shelves in a main floor area known as the 'pick module.' Items are entered into a computer system via hand-held scanners. The three-floor San Bernardino warehouse handles small- to medium-sized goods, while the Redlands center has big items like TVs, kayaks and furniture, and the Moreno Valley center has apparel.
The San Bernardino center's colorful shelves were crammed with things like baby blankets, cutting boards, stuffed animals, glow-in-the-dark space puzzles, Wii games, knitting kits, fly fishing waders, smoke alarms, cellphone earbuds and rubber chicken chew toys for dogs.
Other workers 'picked' items off the shelves and loaded them into yellow bins that were placed on an 8-mile system of conveyor belts and whisked to the mezzanine-level packing area above. There, more people packed items into cardboard cartons.
From time to time, blue lights sparked atop poles at each packing station as workers called for more boxes and plastic bubble packing material.
'Problem-solving' process assistants like Kathleen Jelley of San Bernardino worked the floor, arranging for more supplies, or troubleshooting problems and answering questions when packers switched on flashing, beeping red-light signals that are also atop their poles.
'We're pushing out a lot of volume today,' said Jelley, who described Cyber Monday as 'exciting.' 'We are overstaffed and using people anywhere we can.'
Boxes were placed on more conveyor lines, weighed and affixed with shipping labels before being sent on, in single file, to shipping docks and trucks.
The rest of the shopping season will continue to be busy at the center. A few workers even tell their kids they labor in Santa's workshop, said Robinson.
They get special holiday meals and may take part in ugly sweater contests and sing Christmas carols. At the end of the season, associates will be awarded commemorative T-shirts for working during the busiest time of year.
'It's a badge of honor to get through a peak season,' she said.
Contact the writer: 951-368-9444 or shurt@pe.com
Posted by Unknown on Tuesday, December 2, 2014 - Rating: 4.5
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