Amazon rushing to beat the holiday clock

Kenosha plant operating 24/7 to fulfill gift orders

The moment you click “Place Your Order and Pay” on Amazon.com, a series of precise technical, mechanical and human steps are set in motion — a process that doesn’t stop until there’s a package on your doorstep.

And with Christmas coming up Sunday, that process is relentless this week at Amazon’s operation in Kenosha.

In its second holiday season in operation, Amazon’s colossal order fulfillment center in Kenosha is abuzz around the clock as computers, robots and people hustle to get gifts to their destinations in time to make it under the Christ-

mas tree.

“The facility is humming right now,” said Amazon spokeswoman Nina Lindsey.

The 1 million-square-foot fulfillment center — roughly the size of 20 football fields — has hired more than 1,000 seasonal employees to help pick and package orders and perform other jobs for the holiday push, temporarily boosting employment by 50%. When the rush is over, some of those employees will stay on permanently as America’s No. 8 retailer continues to revolutionize the industry.

Normally, the fulfillment center has about 2,000 employees, with another 500 or so at Amazon’s next-door 500,000square-foot “sortation” center, where orders that already have been packaged up are sorted by ZIP code and given to the U.S. Postal Service for delivery.

The Kenosha facilities, which opened in the summer of 2015, are outfitted with the latest in robotics and other technology, Lindsey said.

Lindsey said the Kenosha fulfillment center, which is among more than 70 regional Amazon centers in the U.S., specializes in smaller items, such as toys, baby products, books, electronics, DVDs and Kindle Fire devices.

“So there certainly are a lot of holiday gifts being fulfilled for our customers at this facility,” she said. “This facility will ship mostly to the region. That’s one of the things we look at when we place a new fulfillment center — being as close to our customers as possible.”

According to Lindsey, here’s what happens when a customer clicks to place an order on Amazon:

“Our computer algorithm will determine where the item is that you purchased and the fastest way to get it to you. Most likely, because you are in the Milwaukee area, that will come from our Kenosha fulfillment center,” she said.

Once the computer finds the item, she said, “it will cue up that order to our Amazon robotics to have a robot go and pick up the shelves that house that item and bring it to one of our employees, who’s got to pick it out of the shelf and put it in a yellow tote and put the tote on the conveyor.” In other words, the robots bring the item to the employee filling the order — the worker doesn’t have to go get it.

The conveyor then takes the item to Amazon’s “outbound” operations, where another employee will pack it and prepare it for shipment. Then the item goes on another conveyor that transports it to the correct loading bay door. A truck

then delivers the package to the buyer’s door.

Amazon doesn’t disclose detailed volume statistics for individual fulfillment centers.

“Our fulfillment center will pick, pack and ship thousands and thousands of individual customer orders on any given day,” was all Lindsey could reveal.

But she did offer an anecdote to help illustrate the pace.

“Last year on Cyber Monday, which was our busiest day of the year and historically is our busiest day of the year, customers worldwide ordered 54 million items on that one day,” Lindsey said. She noted that translates to about 625 items per second.

Public earnings reports show Amazon’s phenomenal growth not only in the U.S. but around the rest of the world, where it has another 149 fulfillment centers.

Last year, according to the company’s annual report to securities regulators, Seattle-based Amazon posted net sales of more than $107 billion. That was up from $48 billion five years ago.

Through the first nine months of 2016 Amazon had sales of $92.2 billion, compared with $71.3 billion in the same span in 2015. That puts Amazon on course for another record year.

“That’s been the trend of the last couple of years,” Lindsey said. “I can’t predict the future.”

But the future looks bright for Amazon and its Kenosha operations.

The company says, in general, its jobs pay 30% more than traditional wages for retail roles. It also offers a college education program for employees.

“We will actually prepay up front the cost of tuition for our associates to go back to school in fields that are related to in-demand industries,” Lindsey said. “Nursing, for example. The skills that they’re learning in those courses don’t even have to be related to jobs at Amazon. It’s a really appealing offer.”

The company, in addition to boosting the local economy by building its $250 million distribution site on 165 acres east of Interstate 94 between Burlington Road and 38th St., is striving to be a good corporate citizen.

Amazon’s fulfillment center recently donated $5,000 to the Shalom Center, a nonprofit organization that provides food, shelter, housing and support services to the homeless and low-income population of Kenosha. It also has donated more than 95 pallets of products — items such as clothes, food, toiletries and toys — to the Shalom Center this year.

“They’ve been a good community supporter in what they’ve been doing, and they have created a number of jobs for the community and the region,” said Kenosha Mayor John Antaramian.