Skip to footer

In Amazon warehouse, robots outnumber humans 2 to 1

Picking up after last year's holiday shipping snarl, Amazon bolsters its fulfillment centers with robots to cut down employee stress.

|
Scott Sady/AP
In this 2008 photo, an Amazon.com employee grabs boxes off the conveyor belt to load in a truck at Amazon's Fernley, Nev., warehouse. Cyber Monday is expected to be the biggest online shopping day of the year for the third year in a row.
  • By Clinton Nguyen Staff Writer

This holiday season, the busiest workers at Amazon warehouses might not be its workers. The online retail company released about 15,000 robots across 10 of its US warehouses to help along shipments in what is the busiest online shopping period of the year.

Amazon is making use of Kiva Systems, a company it acquired in 2012, to build robots for its fulfillment centers. The company gave reporters a tour of its Tracy, Calif., warehouse, where it deployed about 3,000 robots to help transport packages to 1,500 workers.

Before that, the workers had to walk to their shelves; now, the shelves are brought to them. The orange, 32-pound super-Roombas can lift up to 750 pounds worth of shelf stacks and wheel them to the workers. 

In a BBC investigation last year, an undercover reporter working as an Amazon warehouse worker in Wales was expected to walk 11 miles in a 10-hour shift and find an item every 33 seconds.

Hopefully, it’ll get better this season despite the gradual shift toward online shopping. Just two months earlier, the company hired 80,000 seasonal workers to help with the holiday rush, a 14 percent increase over last year’s seasonal hiring. And even though warehouse work should be more efficient, they say they won’t stop hiring during off-holiday seasons.

“We’re continuing to grow. Growth has always driven hiring,” Dave Clark, Amazon’s senior vice president of operations, tells the Associated Press. Mr. Clark says that the robots will cut centers’ operating costs by about 20 percent, but they won’t be able to do the more manual work of identifying damaged products, shelving, and packaging, so there will still be a need for human employees.

Despite the costs of deploying the robots and getting employees used to the new system, the move would be a way for Amazon to pick itself up after last year’s shipping debacle that left consumers giftless during Christmas. It’s an especially risky time of the year to lose out on customers; the holiday season accounts for a little over a third of its yearly revenue. 

And it could very well be winning back its workers and saving their legs at the same time.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to In Amazon warehouse, robots outnumber humans 2 to 1
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/Tech/2014/1202/In-Amazon-warehouse-robots-outnumber-humans-2-to-1
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe