With only three months until Christmas, companies are already planning for the holiday retail rush.
When you go to buy online this holiday season, there’s a good chance a robot is helping to fulfill your order.
The National Retail Federation reports online holiday sales are expected to grow up to 9% over last year. Major retailers including Walmart and Amazon, along with shipping carriers like UPS and FedEx, are investing in robotics.
Amazon’s most advanced fulfillment center, called SHV1, is located in Shreveport, Louisiana. It’s more than 3 million square feet and one of the company’s largest facilities that utilizes nearly 1,000 robots at the center.
“We have a number of different types of new robotics that we’re using to fulfill customer orders,” said Scott Dresser, Amazon’s vice president of robotics.
Dresser explains the facility can run 24 hours a day.
“The robots we designed to run all day long, if they need to,” he said. “Certainly as we come into our peak holiday season, which we’re already getting ready for, that’s something we think about a lot because we will have to run the building almost all day round.”
How robots work in the facility
When a customer orders a product, the robots get to work.
Some move the item out of storage. Then, one of the 2,500 employees sorts it while another packs it before it travels along some of the nearly 15 miles of conveyor belts to get labeled.
The robots have different functions to help move and lift the packages. For example, the robot Proteus hauls pallets and orders across the facility floor, while Cardinal lifts packages into pallets set for delivery.
“Cardinal is lifting packages that weigh up to 50 pounds. … And then we can use Proteus to take the container over to the docks. So a lot of it’s less about performance, more about making sure that our employees are safe,” Dresser said.
The final step is a human loading the packages onto a truck.
Dresser said SHV1 is 25% more efficient compared to other fulfillment centers.
“So if you’re ordering an order here in Shreveport right before Christmas and you need that by Christmas, robots are going to help make sure we get that product to you fast, safely and accurately to your doorstep,” he said.
Impact on jobs
Dresser said that while robots are replacing some jobs, they’re also creating new ones.
“Every time we’re able to grow and expand the network, which robotics has enabled over the last decade, we’re able to add new jobs. … like our robotics maintenance engineers, people that we need in the operation now that we have these new robotics to help us run the building,” he said.
While Amazon’s revenue has grown, its number of employees has held steady at around 1.5 million since 2022, according to the company’s quarterly reports.
“I think the thing that we think of most when we’re deploying a new fulfillment operation or a new process in a fulfillment operation, is how are people and robots best going to be able to do that together?”
Dresser added that Amazon is offering training for employees whose positions are being replaced and said those more advanced jobs pay better.
When asked if those jobs could ever be replaced, Dresser said robots are always breaking down and need assistance — saying humans will be needed for those roles.
