Every order from an Amazon customer starts an elaborate dance between workers and robots at the company’s new warehouse south of Orlando International Airport.
The order is sent to an employee, who grabs a bin and waits for a Roomba-like robot to grab a shelf full of merchandise.
The robot carrying the 7-foot shelf moves over to the waiting employee, and white light flashes on the particular shelf where the item can be found.
Gloved (human) hands grab it, and the employee compares it to a picture on the screen, scans it and puts it in the bin.
From there it’s headed to packaging for a box and address label, the final step at the 855,000-square-foot warehouse that ensures millions of items seamlessly arrive on customers’ doorsteps every day in Central Florida and beyond.
It’s repeated over and over again 24 hours a day — well, except for lunch and breaks.
For the first time Thursday, Amazon opened the doors on the facilities for a tour, showing how 1,500 employees there deliver everything “from A to Z” in two days or less to Central Floridians.
Amazon started operating the warehouse in August, with its four floors of merchandise helping to solidify Amazon’s grip on the e-commerce world.
Amazon sold $40 billion worth of goods from its online stores in the fourth quarter of 2018, a 13 percent increase over the year before.
The company has been using an increasingly large network of what it calls “fulfillment centers” in the United States to make sure it has the capacity to fill the increasing demand for online purchases.
The newest design in warehouses shows not just how far Amazon has come in shipping items quickly, but how hard the company is working to shake off early reports that its fulfillment centers subjected workers to 115-degree heat and other health risks trying to keep up with high demands.
“The narrative that Amazon is an ungenerous employer at a time when the company’s sales, profits, and valuation are soaring does not play well among many customer segments,” said Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail, which follows retail trends.
Shortly after the Orlando warehouse was completed, the company announced that the minimum wage for all of its employees would be increased to $15 an hour, countering complaints that Amazon warehouse wages were actually lower than competing jobs in the industry.
“It brought more people, but it was even better for the people that worked here who were told that they would be getting a raise,” said Kirc Savage, general manager at the Orlando “MCO1” fulfillment center. “It was life-changing money. Someone told me that now they would be able to move out of their parents’ house.”
All employees, whether full-time or part-time, also have access to health insurance. Other perks include a discount on Amazon purchases and tuition reimbursement. The company also offers classes in fields such as web development and training to become a dental assistant.
Savage said nearly all the employees at the center are full-time workers. Most work four 10-hour or three 12-hour shifts. A handful of workers are part-time because they chose to work a weekend schedule composed of two 12-hour work blocks, Savage said.
Warehouse worker Anny Garcia Santos said she followed Amazon to Orlando from Hazelton, Pennsylvania, where she started working in 2011.
Born in the Dominican Republic, she was worried her accent would prevent her from moving up in the company.
She became a process assistant when she moved to the Orlando facility in October, essentially a floor supervisor for employees packaging orders. Amazon said a process assistant, the highest level of hourly employee, makes between $15 and $18.50 an hour.
“I was running away from the snow,” said Garcia Santos, who brought her three kids and husband with her. “There are good opportunities to advance here.”
The Orlando Amazon fulfillment center is one of seven such facilities in the state and 125 nationwide, including two in Jacksonville and in Lakeland, Ruskin, Tampa and Miami. There is also a Prime Now hub in Orlando, Tampa and Miami for same-day orders and a campus pickup location near UCF.
Amazon runs two types of fulfillment centers. The kind in Orlando carries any items less than 18 inches in length and the width of items such as books, Blu-ray discs, wooden puzzles for toddlers and underwear.
The other type, such as the warehouse in Lakeland, carries bigger merchandise such as mattresses and flat-screen televisions.
Even with 1,500 employees needed, the Orlando center was quickly staffed after it opened and running at full speed, said Savage, a mechanical engineer by trade who previously worked at the Lakeland fulfillment center.
The facility is regularly hiring to keep staffed, but Savage said they no longer need to do large hiring sprees to keep up.
The company will hire some employees at the holidays, but only 200 to 300 to keep up with demand, said Amazon spokeswoman Shevaun Brown. It will try to convert 90 percent of their seasonal workers to permanent employees, she said.
Not all the workers at the warehouse are involved in sorting and shipping packages. A handful work in IT, robotics, maintenance, safety and human resources.
But even with hundreds of workers on a tightly engineered schedule to deliver goods, things still go wrong, Savage said.
Items fall off carts and block robots, conveyor belts stop working and employees fall behind. Loud bells ring when there is a mechanical problem, and a supervisor will dash over the check the problem.
Still, Savage said the goal is to deliver all these packages with minimal drama.
“The biggest change here is the amount of volume that comes through here and how smoothly it all happens,” Savage said. “But it takes a lot of planning to make that all happen.”
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