Thousands of little blue robots whiz this way and that inside an expansive warehouse in Gates — pausing only to avoid collisions, and to tip packages into open chutes in the floor.
The three floors above are filled with storage totes packed with clothes, home goods, children’s toys and more, being ferried about by still more little blue robots.
This is one of several dozen Amazon fulfillment centers that are stocked with robotics. The machines here work alongside 2,500 employees. And for the coming weeks, this center will operate 24/7, hitting new records in customer orders, with an expected peak volume of 2.5 million orders a week.
Steve Hill has been preparing for months.
"Our big volume is going to start on Black Friday, and then really transition through until the day before Christmas,” said Hill, site leader at the Gates facility. "We're anticipating the most orders to come in within the first two weeks in December.”
This is the shortest holiday shopping season in five years, with less than four weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Still, retailers — both online and with brick and mortar stores — are expecting a stronger year this year than last year.
“It seems like every year post-pandemic, we're getting a little bit better, seeing a little bit more revenue and a little bit more traffic in all of our stores,” said Kelsey Dorado Bobersky, spokesperson for the Retail Council of New York State.
Online sales expected to hit a record $240 billion this year nationwide. And Cyber Monday is the biggest shopping day of the season, according to Adobe Analytics — estimated to account for $13 billion of the total.
For Amazon, fulfillment centers (robotic or not) are the first step in processing your order. Delivery centers like the one in Henrietta are the last, before items are trucked to your doorstep.
The Gates center opened a year ago and still is ramping up. It stands five stories tall and encompasses 2.6 million square feet — the equivalent of 45 football fields. The center employs twice as many robots as people, even after adding 800 new staffers in the past couple of months.
"We're expected to do almost 400,000 more customer orders than we've ever done,” he said. “So it's going to be a great experience, a fun experience for our associates who have been training for this.”
Employees work four-day weeks with shifts running between 10 to just under 12 hours. Mandatory overtime will add a day. To make it “fun,” there will be some special meals provided, raffles and food giveaways. Hill and his leadership team dress up in holiday costumes.
“And, you know, obviously, we’re all going to work very hard,” he said.
The rechargeable robots have names like Hercules and Pegasus, and look like industrial-sized Roombas. But instead of vacuuming, they lift and ferry merchandise.
The operation relies on artificial intelligence, or AI, to take in and stock 26 million items, then process orders. And to direct all that robot traffic — four floors, each with 1,100 or more robots — as items are stored and retrieved, boxed or bagged, labeled for shipment and sent on the most efficient route possible.
Hercules robots move the storage pods filled with merchandise, queueing up with the requisite consoles at workstations where staffers retrieve the ordered items and send them off to be boxed or bagged, and address labels affixed.
Then staffers or robotic arm robots place the packages on the Pegasus robots that zip around like roving conveyer belts, dropping the packages down chutes that lead to conveyer belts and slides that lead to the loading docks and trucks.
All told, Hill said, there are seven miles of conveyance track inside the Gates facility.
If your Amazon package has a sticker that reads ROC1, it started or passed through here. It is one of 10 fulfillment and sortation centers in New York state, but these robotic centers are just in Rochester, Syracuse and Staten Island, so far.
There are nearly three dozen such centers nationwide.
While Amazon plans on hiring thousands of seasonal workers for the holiday nationally, the latest hires here can stay on — and more will be hired after the holidays, officials said, as the volume of online shopping continues to grow and the center takes on more of Amazon’s business.
“We don't just deliver here in Rochester and Buffalo, and the surrounding Western New York area,” Hill said. “We actually service the entire Northeast.”
As far west as Cleveland, as far south as Pittsburgh and east all the way to Boston, New York City and down to Washington, D.C.
Includes reporting by news director Randy Gorbman.
