Inside one of Amazon’s robot-centric fulfillment centers on Cyber Monday
On Cyber Monday, the busiest shopping day of the year, an Amazon fulfillment center in Robbinsville, New Jersey, located on the border of the New York metropolitan area, swirls with activity as the e-commerce giant prepares to package hundreds of thousands of items.
For online retailers like Amazon, Cyber Monday necessities year-round planning in preparation. The 1.2 million square foot fulfillment center in Robbinsville — the size of 28 football fields — is the first stop for a package on its way to a nearby Amazon customer’s doorstep. It’s also just one of hundreds of such centers that are busy packing and shipping items on Cyber Monday.
Inside, packages in bright yellow bins crisscross through the Wonka-like facility along more than 14 miles of conveyor belts. Underlying the elaborate logistical dance is a system of a couple thousand robots that work in tandem with 3,000 human workers to fulfill customer orders.
After Amazon receives an order, it kickstarts a process that the company refers to as “pick, pack and ship.” Roomba-esque Hercules robots, which can lift as much as 1,250 pounds, ferry four-sided shelves filled with inventory across the warehouse floor to human workers, also known as “pickers,” who manually sort the inventory to fill customer orders. Next, items travel along conveyor belts, where eventually they’ll reach an employee who packs them up for shipping and verifies their final destination. Then, boxes are pushed from the conveyor down slides to the correct trucking bay, at which point they’re eventually transported to “middle-mile” and “last-mile” facilities.
Given that Amazon captures more than 40% of online sales in the U.S., Amazon is poised to see record-breaking sales on Cyber Monday after shoppers already spent $10.8 billion on Black Friday, a whopping $1 billion more from 2023, and a new record, according to Adobe Analytics. Cyber Monday will likely be the biggest shopping day of the season yet, with consumers expected to spend a record-breaking $13.2 billion to $13.5 billion, per Adobe.
Still, Amazon faces stiff competition from Chinese e-commerce upstarts like Temu and TikTok Shop. TikTok Shop drove more than $100 million in U.S. Black Friday sales, a company spokesperson told Modern Retail. Chinese e-commerce sites are expected to capture 21% — or $160 billion — of global e-commerce sales outside of China, according to Salesforce, Modern Retail previously reported.
Amazon has been making an aggressive push to appeal to deal-hungry shoppers. For example, Amazon unveiled its Temu-esque discount store “Haul” last month, and the retailer is discounting everything sold through Haul by 50% for a limited time during the holiday shopping season. Amazon also kicked off its holiday sales event earlier than ever, running from Nov. 21 through Dec. 2, an extra day of sales compared to last year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping event.
On Monday, Modern Retail spoke with Sarah Rhoads, Amazon’s vp of global workplace health & safety, as well as Jenny Freshwater, Amazon’s vp of fashion and fitness, about how the company prepares for online shopping’s busiest day of the year.
What does success look like to you this holiday season?
Freshwater: We started out with the biggest Black Friday on record. We had more customers shopping. We had more sales. Today, we hope to top that.
With five fewer shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year, how does Amazon go about planning for the holiday season, especially crucial online shopping days like Cyber Monday?
Rhoads: We spend the majority of the year preparing for this time of year. Planning pretty much starts in January, and we review our holiday period. “What are the things that went really well? Were there opportunities to optimize a bit more?”
What I will say specifically about the shorter holiday period is that we started our sales earlier this year to ensure that our customers were able to take full advantage of a normal sale period that they are accustomed to. From a demand perspective, we hired 250,000 employees to help ensure that we have the capacity that’s needed to handle this sale period. [This was the same number of seasonal employees that Amazon hired last year.]
Last year, Amazon introduced its regionalization strategy, which shifted fulfillment from a national network to a regionalized model of eight interconnected regions in smaller geographic areas. How is that playing a role this holiday season given the shortened shopping calendar?
Rhoads: It’s going great, actually. We’ve become more sophisticated at getting the more common types of products closer to our customers, so those items have less distance to travel, which means faster speed of service for our customers. In fact, 76% of items ordered are within a couple hundred miles of where our customers are. That helps us keep our prices lower, as well.
Is Amazon seeing an impact this holiday season from newer e-commerce players like Temu and TikTok Shop?
Freshwater: Our customers are really anchored on the wide selection that we have, the lowest prices, the fast and free shipping. That’s what’s worked for us, and it continues to work for us.
What has consumer demand been like for Haul so far? Can you describe Amazon’s approach to introducing Haul to customers?
Freshwater: The response has been positive. We have price points across a wide range of products, and so you can really get gifts for everyone at every price point. Anytime we launch a new experience, we have to inform customers that that experience exists. And so, what better way than with super-low prices?
President-elect Donald Trump has promised to impose tariffs as high as 60% on goods imported to the U.S. Tariffs have the potential to cost shoppers up to $78 billion in annual spending power, according to the National Retail Federation. How is Amazon preparing for that?
Freshwater: It’s certainly a situation that we’re watching very closely and preparing in terms of education, and we’ll continue to watch it as it plays out.
How are Amazon fulfillment center employees working in tandem with robots?
Rhoads: It’s a very collaborative environment with our employees. But more of the jobs — 30%, in fact — require a more technical skill set to maintain that automation. The robots don’t maintain themselves. We need folks to do that, as well.
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