Robotic units setting the pace at Amazon center in Goodyear
One thing you notice upon entering Amazon’s new Goodyear facility is motion — people, parcels and machinery — and the sounds of movement. The continuous whirring of mechanization recalls the rumble of roller coaster cars, without the passengers.
Merchandise gets pushed and pulled around by robotic delivery units, sorted, packed and inspected by employees and sent along miles of conveyor belts — 15 miles in all. The 850,000 squarefoot facility, with a footprint of 14 football fields, is smaller than many similar Amazon facilities but highly efficient,
processing 300,000 orders in a typical day, with the capability to go much higher during peak periods.
The 1,500 full-time employees who work at the Goodyear complex are among 32,000 statewide Amazon employees,15,000 of whom were hired over the past year or so as online retailing surged with the coronavirus pandemic and economy lockdowns.
Including all that mechanization “doesn’t necessarily cut down on labor but increases our ability to process more,” said Carson Jorgensen, a senior operations manager.
It seems to be working. Amazon generated $419 billion in revenue over its four most recent quarters, logging a profit of $27 billion.
It can be mesmerizing to watch packages roll down and around all those conveyer belts, but at the heart of the operations are hundreds of Amazon robotic drive units. These mechanized boxes with wheels retrieve stacks of merchandise, push and pull them around, unload, then start all over again, like indefatigable little tugboats maneuvering ships around a harbor.
“They cut down on walking and carrying boxes around and reduce the need for pallet jacks and carts,” said Jorgensen, who started 10 years ago with Amazon as an entry-level associate.
The robotic drive units transport carts of merchandise to employees like Katie Hartson who select the items a customer has ordered and place them in separate bins, completing orders in a matter of seconds before the next robotic drive unit arrives almost instantaneously with a new batch. Computer screens show Hartson a photo and description of each piece of merchandise as it arrives, and a light illuminates the bin where it’s located.
Bar codes on the floor direct the movement of the robotic drive units.
“It’s a fast pace, but you get used to it,” said Hartson, a 30-year-old Waddell resident who joined the company about a year ago.
Benefits, and plenty of criticism
Hartson said she likes the speed and variety of work and appreciates Amazon’s policy of promoting from within, where possible. Like most employees at the Goodyear center, Hartson works four 10-hour shifts a week. “I love the three-day weekends,” she said. The facility
operates 24 hours a days a week.
The company pays a minimum of $15 an hour to full-time employees and offers benefits that include health insurance, 401(k) matching funds, parental leave, disability insurance and financial counseling. There are also tuitionpayment and other programs to help employees improve job skills. The company employed 1.3 million full- and part-time workers, roughly equal to the population of Maine, at the end of 2020.
Yet Amazon and its labor practices aren’t without criticism over low pay, strict oversight of employees and other matters. For example, Ethan Orr, a former Republican member of the Arizona House of Representatives now working at the University of Arizona, espouses unionization and better working conditions for Amazon’s fulfillment workers in Tucson. He also questions the company’s economic impact, dominant as it is.
“Local businesses create over seven times the number of jobs per dollar of sales, pay more in taxes and keep more of their revenue in the local economy,” wrote Orr, a university assistant vice president for government partnerships and community relations, in a recent opinion article for the Arizona Daily Star.
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How items move at center
Operations at Amazon’s Goodyear center certainly are structured and consistent.
The facility itself is virtually identical to the Tucson fulfillment center, which opened in 2019.
Once orders are identified, with products picked out and grouped per customer, they’re sent over for packaging. “The system tells workers what size box to use, and the label on the box tells
what’s inside,” said Jorgensen. “The software identifies every piece of inventory we have.”
Each item passing through the facility gets its own bar-code identification, quickening the pace and helping to ensure accuracy.
Workers inspect for damaged items throughout the process, and the conveyor system can kick out packages for manual checking if, for example, the weight differs from what should be inside.
The Goodyear center processes small- and medium-sized items ranging from cellphone cases to most electronic items to clothing. Larger merchandise such as furniture, bicycles, kayaks and big-screen TVs are handled elsewhere, as are food items headed to Amazon’s Whole Foods Market stores.
Growing Arizona footprint
The advanced Goodyear and Tucson centers are among 50 technologyintensive Amazon fulfillment facilities around the country, which collectively feature 200,000 of those robotic drive units.
Each day at fulfillment centers as at Goodyear, dozens of big-rig trucks unload tons of merchandise that gets identified, labeled, sorted and packaged for customers. Once customer parcels are ready to go, they’re ferried to “middle mile” sortation centers, where the parcels are divvied up further and sent to local delivery stations. From there, they’re driven to customer doorsteps or other drop-off points.
It’s the same process that Amazon has been doing for years, but robotics and other types of mechanization adopted over the past five years do it faster. “It’s a big stepping stone in the fulfillment business,” Jorgensen said.