Amazon’s Opa-locka facility marks Black Friday and Cyber Monday
Amazon’s year-old Opalocka facility marked 2019’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday events by hosting a tour of its facility for media.
The e-commerce giant has recently come under scrutiny for conditions at some of its facilities. A report from Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting showed dozens of reports filed with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration at Amazon distribution centers across the country, though none at the Opalocka facility, which began operating in September 2018.
Amazon has responded by saying it is meticulous about reporting any incidents at its facilities.
Coinciding with Cyber Monday, activists staged events around the globe to express concerns about Amazon’s business practices, Bloomberg reported. A Miami Herald reporter touring the facility Monday found employees working quickly but without incident. More than 2,000 full-time associates pick, pack, and ship customer orders at the facility, known as MIA1. Base pay for full-time employees is $15 an hour with some medical benefits.
They work alongside tall, yellow, motorized shelves that shuffle back and forth as they retrieve items and bring them to the human sorters.
The company said it planned to process millions of packages Monday. Last year, it said it had processed 180 million items between Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Early reports from Adobe Analytics on Monday indicated another overall record across the retail sector of $9.4 billion spent.
“It’s our Super Bowl,” Amazon spokeswoman Saige Kolpack said. “It’s basically the North Pole around here.”
Rob Wile: 305-376-3203, rjwile