Back in April, Amazon invited Gizmodo Australia on a tour of its fulfilment centre in Kemps Creek, about 45kms west of Sydney. The tours are open to the public, with Amazon touting the endeavour as: offering a “behind-the-scenes look at how online orders end up on doorsteps around the country, giving small business owners a chance to see how Amazon picks, packs, and sorts thousands of products ready for delivery”.
The fulfilment centre tours are a bizarre offering, but Australia isn’t the only location they’re offered. Worth noting, too, Amazon started doing these virtually from Sydney last year when COVID was still making its presence known, but now they’re IRL and….I get it. For a few reasons. The first is that robots are cool, supply chains are cool, and Amazon packs and ships a shitload of gear. But, the U.S. warehouse working condition-sized elephant in the room is also another reason the company would open its doors up.
There has been no shortage of news emerging from Amazon’s U.S. fulfilment centres. By almost all accounts, Amazon warehouses are not pleasant places to work. People face dangerous conditions, difficult quotas, and near-instant retaliation for failure to meet expectations.
As I wrote when covering the announcement of the virtual tours back in August last year, it isn’t just overseas Amazon is making headlines for the wrong reasons.
A few years ago, the ABC ran an exposé on the shopping giant’s local operations, the Sydney Morning Herald ran something similar, too. The SMH reported back in 2018 that some of Amazon’s Australian workers had described how they were being monitored and analysed every second of their workday. The ABC piece, meanwhile, described how a public-facing video of Amazon’s Melbourne warehouse didn’t represent what really goes on inside the fulfilment centre.
Naturally, with all this in mind, plus the promise of robots, I took them up on the offer to attend the tour, with about an hour spent on the warehouse floor, looking at kilometres of conveyer belts, boxes, and a few people here and there that were allowed to speak with me.
It really is overwhelming
The first thing you’ll notice upon entering the fulfilment centre floor is just how big this place is. Per my tour host, the warehouse spans 200,000 square metres across four levels – as they put it, about the land mass of Taronga Zoo. Inside, Amazon stores up to 20 million items sold on Amazon.com.au, smaller ones that can fit into something that looks like this (you’re looking at the yellow shelving in the background):
But more on that in a second.
As my tour started, hosted by a man who clearly loves his job, I met another staff member who was friendly and had a lot of nice things to say about the people he worked with. I was then told about what each conveyor belt ‘shoot’ was for – ie, sending poorly packed items back to be reboxed, or boxes that weren’t scanning correctly, etc.
There’s no denying this place is so meticulously organised. Every second of the process is accounted for, it comes as no surprise reports would say this goes for people, too.
Marketplace sellers can send products they are selling on Amazon.com.au to the fulfilment centre. It’s received, then unpacked and scanned and sent upstairs to the set up you can see in that pic above. The easiest way to think about this is that those yellow things each have numbers, each of those shelves within that yellow thing have numbers, and the system knows exactly where X item from X supplier has been loaded. When a customer orders that product, that yellow thing comes forward for packing. How? You may ask? Well, they are robotic.
So, when you order a product from Amazon.com.au, it’s found, boxed, sent downstairs to be packed, then it heads out for shipping. There’s minimal intervention from humans here, but they do oversee the process – from what I was shown.
Objectively, it’s cool. The whole thing is one giant, scheduled and structured movement where it seems everything has been thought of. You want something delivered merely hours after you order it, this is how it’s done. At the cost of people-power.
It will come as no surprise to you reading this that I am a nerd. I love a robot. And the fulfilment centre is full of them. It’s also full of a lot of exceptional innovation, the culmination of which is on show for everyone to see.
The Amazon staff I was allowed to chat with, film, and write about as part of the tour were all kind, were all from diverse backgrounds, and all undertaking a range of roles within the fulfilment centre. I asked about the conditions being presented in various reports in the media and that wasn’t something they could speak to. Not that I’d expect that, the staff I spoke to were trained to host tours, not answer global PR questions.
Amazon is running tours for the public, which can be booked via this link. You’ll get what you expect – a free way to entertain kids and adult-sized kids who love a robot. What you won’t get is a realistic view of what really goes on inside Amazon.