Ramstad: Amazon’s huge fulfillment center in Shakopee is teeming with robots

For my money, the best deal Amazon offered during its Prime Day summertime sale last week was the free tour of its giant fulfillment center in Shakopee.

That joint was jumping.

Data released this past weekend showed orders soared 30% by revenue for retailers during last week’s e-commerce promotions, many of them filled with the assistance of robots.

I first took the public tour of Amazon’s Shakopee site a few years ago, in the pandemic era, and it wasn’t nearly as busy. Visitors and workers wore masks, and everyone kept a bit of distance — not too difficult in a building that’s three-quarters of a mile long.

Last week, the parking lot was filled, and the limitation on visitors was different. During peak shopping and shipping times like Prime Day, Amazon confines the twice-daily tour groups to 10 people, instead of 25.

I encourage you to sign up for a tour of the Shakopee center, or one of the 28 others nationwide available on amazontours.com. You’ll be amazed. And you won’t look at the Amazon app or the box that arrives at your door in the same way ever again.

“People look at us as a little bit of a mystery,” said Kara Hille, a Minneapolis-based spokeswoman for the company, now the world’s second-largest by revenue. “The tours have been a great way for us to engage with our communities.”

I booked my latest tour after seeing a story in the Wall Street Journal that Amazon’s usage of robots, now just over 1 million worldwide, was closing in on its employee count of 1.5 million.

A few days later, the Minnesota Star Tribune carried a new report about safety concerns in Minnesota warehouses. An activist group’s complaints about Amazon spurred a state law for warehouse safety in 2023. The state hit Amazon with a $10,000 fine last year. That was one of the smaller penalties among the 15 fines levied against warehouse operations in Minnesota, though the only one publicized by state officials.

Repetitive work has long produced conflict between workers and employers, spurring the evolution of safety standards in the nation’s factories over the last century. As e-commerce became popular and warehouse work became more factorylike, it also fell under scrutiny.

Amazon is at the leading edge of making distribution and logistics simpler and less stressful. But to be clear, it’s still hard work.

Turnover at Amazon’s fulfillment centers is high. While the company innovates on automation to improve its output, it’s also in a race to stay ahead of worker attrition. The Journal reported that the average number of employees Amazon had per facility was at the lowest level in 16 years, even though its revenue is about 30 times greater.

As soon as a visitor walks into the Amazon site in Shakopee, they hear a steady roar from the conveyor belts and rollers that move boxes and bins through the center. Employees wear hearing protection, and visitors receive headsets that have microphones, like video-gamers and broadcasters wear.

About half the building is used as the warehouse, and it’s divided into four floors. The other half is for packing goods and sorting them onto trucks for shipping. That part is divided into two floors.

The warehouse section is filled with thousands of shelving units, called pods. About 7 feet tall, each pod has six or seven rows of shelves that are broken vertically into cubbyholes.

Autonomous robots, dubbed “Hercules,” drive up underneath the pods, lift them slightly off the ground and ferry them around the warehouse. Because the cameras on the robots don’t need lights, the warehouse part of the building is mostly dark.

After goods arrive at the fulfillment center, workers stow them in the pods randomly. A camera watches the worker, taking note of the cubby where the goods were placed. When the pod is filled, the robot takes it away into the darkness to wait for a customer to order an item from it.

The randomness surprised me, but it’s the only thing that makes sense for dealing with such a huge quantity of goods. Orders come in at random, so the most efficient way to store and retrieve is at random.

“If we stored all the books in this far corner and all the toothbrushes in that far corner, it would take longer,” Hille said.

For goods that are ordered most frequently, Amazon operates what it calls “sub-same day” centers, including one in Brooklyn Park. It’s from that type of center that the company is able to fulfill an order for, say, a phone charger or toothpaste, in two hours.

When orders come to the shipping side of the Shakopee fulfillment center, workers at packing stations put them into boxes and seal them up. However, they don’t add an address label. Instead, they put a barcode sticker on the box and send it down a conveyor.

A minute or so later, the box reaches a point where that barcode sticker is scanned. Then the address label is dropped on top. And the box heads to a plane or a sortation center, on the way to your doorstep.

Amazon has made it so that no one who knows what’s inside a box knows where it’s going. And no one who knows where a box is going knows what’s inside it.