My 10-mile bike ride to a free tour of the local Amazon warehouse

Did you know that Amazon offers free tours of some of its facilities?

One of those is of the giant distribution facility in Robbinsville, N.J. — 1.2 million square feet, equal to 22 football fields, that opened in 2014. It’s now nicknamed The Beast of the East because it shipped out 1 million packages for two straight days.

I biked to a warehouse tour when I first learned of them back in 2019. It was a fascinating glimpse into this high-tech world then, and it’s just as fascinating to see it again today. Click here to see when tours are being offered in Robbinsville; unlike 6 years ago, there don’t seem to be any weekend dates.

Some parts of the tour are similar to that of 6 years ago: why this site is called EWR4, how there’s no rhyme or reason to how things are stored in the warehouse because technology keeps track of where everything is, how many different sized boxes there are (20) and the largest product stored here is 18 inches. Full-time workers still have a workweek of four days of 10-hour shifts followed by a three-day weekend.

The 250-pound orange robots, now totaling 1,000 in this warehouse, were there back in 2019, moving 1,000 pounds of storage shelves full of items to workers who then had to pull out whatever people had just ordered. (The warehouse has more than 1 million products.) But we didn’t hear of people needing to pick up what fell out of the storage shelves as they moved around, so they must be better at their jobs. (Linda tells me they’re still there and I missed that part because I was focused on my notes.) New are the two Seegrid autonomous vehicles.

Today I learned how this warehouse will be plastic-free in 2 weeks (those blue bubble mailers will disappear; the air pillows already have been replaced with paper), how the machine affixing address labels to boxes hovers and then does it with a puff of air, and also how the employee head count is now 3,000 vs 3,500 I was told six years ago. One reason is that Rhonda the robot has taken over the job of stacking those yellow tote boxes that are filled with items and sent to other warehouses; that eliminated 100 jobs.

A fun stat: the warehouse has 29 miles of conveyor belts.

Workers have an average amount of time in which they are expected to load stock into the storage bins, or pick out items from the bins for an order, or to fill a shipping box with those items. You can “compete” against others “for fun” while loading stock into the storage bins, though that sounded like just another way to make you want to work faster. And if the box size that the computer tells the order packer to use feels too big? Well, they can override that decision, but it eats into the time they have to pack each box.

Six years ago, barely anything was shipped to customers in the original box. Today about 12% of orders are. That eliminates a duplicate box, and of course saves Amazon money too.

We heard about all the ways Amazon gets its boxes to our houses today. What I didn’t know is that Amazon is physically testing drone delivery in Arizona now; maybe we will be seeing it in three to five years.

And if you’re not close to an Amazon facility that offers tours, TIL that you can take a virtual tour.

Unlike 6 years ago, we didn’t leave with a gift (a free metal Amazon water bottles back then). But just like 6 years ago, no photos allowed during the tour. But they have added a final stop for photos with an image of Amazon boxes as a backdrop.

Of course, the tour gives a very positive view of Amazon and of Amazon as an employer. This book written by a Wall Street Journal reporter (of course orderable on Amazon) offers you a different view of its business practices. A good balance.

Finally, here’s the route we used to bike to Amazon from West Windsor’s Van Nest Park, with a more scenic route for the way back. You’ll find bike racks there. Amazingly, there was another bike already there. But we shocked our tour guides when we told them how we’d arrived. Not that we could convince them to bike to work.