Sacramento’s Amazon facility is open for tours. Here’s how that package gets to your door
Ever wonder how that little brown Amazon package can arrive at your door in just two days?
It isn’t magic – though the speed and ease of shopping through the online retail behemoth might make it seem so. In all likelihood, your order went through a dizzying series of conveyor belts, storage bins, robot transporters and, yes, even a few human hands at Amazon’s Sacramento fulfillment center.
The center, known as Amazon SMF1 because of its location east of Sacramento International Airport, recently opened up public tours, putting the life cycle of any given order on full display for interested customers, who walked through the cacophonous 855,000-square-foot facility on a recent Wednesday afternoon wearing radio headsets.
“We have a really high saturation of Amazon fulfillment down in the Inland Empire in Southern California and then we also have fulfillment centers in the Central Valley, and then up through Tracy and Modesto, and then Sacramento is kind of the jewel on top of all of that,” Amazon spokeswoman Shevaun Brown said.
When inventory from vendors enters the doors of Amazon SMF1, it is first checked into a cloud database and stowed away into what tour leader Amber Lord referred to as pods.
These pods, which are large, bright yellow storage containers with a multitude of smaller storage units, are shuttled around a warehouse on the backs of autonomous robots that navigate by scanning barcode stickers on the ground and can even charge themselves by heading over to designated power stations.
“We call them Amazon Robotics,” Lord said. “They look a little bit like orange Roombas.”
Amazon employees hand-pack the pods before the robots carry them off. The SMF1 facility contains more than 4 million unique kinds of items, which are all randomly stored, Lord said.
Screens at the employees’ workstations show stopwatches counting after they scan each item and stow them away, so they can track their own efficiency, Lord said. The facility’s 2,000 employees work 10 hours per day, four days per week, with two 15-minute breaks and a 30-minute lunch break daily.
“Like any workplace there are certain metrics that we look to for people to reach for success, but here at Amazon we really work with people to make sure they’re in a role that they’re going to succeed at,” Brown said.
Amazon employees make a minimum of $15 per hour, Lord said, and employees at SMF1 can make as much as $18.85.
Brown likened the storage process at the fulfillment center to that of a library, with vast yellow shelves of vendor items ready to be purchased online through Amazon once they’ve been put away.
And here’s where you click buy.
Your purchase pings a robot, drawing it out of storage, and leads it over to a picking station, where another employee will pick out that specific item based on pictorial instructions from a nearby screen, Brown said.
From there, it will travel over some of the 17 miles of conveyor belts housed in SMF1, out to packing employees who fold up boxes and place your item inside, Brown said.
Machines blast a shipping label on the boxes with what Lord called a little kiss of compressed air – the final step before a package is ready to be loaded into a truck and delivered.
Some of the packages are sent to the airport to be flown elsewhere in the country, Brown said, but SMF1 mostly serves the Northern California market.
The fulfillment center ships hundreds of thousands of orders per day, Brown said, and the upcoming holiday season will ramp that up.
Tour programs began in 2016 at a handful of select Amazon sites, but the demand was great enough for the company to expand tours to Sacramento, Brown said.
Amazon SMF1 opened in October 2017 and tours began in early 2019. They were briefly halted in April after a tour guide left the company, but Lord was recently hired to continue them.
Tours will continue into mid-November, and another season of tours is planned starting early next year. For more information, visit aboutamazon.com.