The packages come roaring down the conveyer belt, rectangles of all dimensions arrayed as if they were racecars jostling for position. They hit the turn and, just like those imagined racers, fall into line.
It’s a contraption called the “singulator,” a warehouse technique for shifting boxes into single file so they can be scanned and sorted to their destination.
Amazon’s $180 million Troutdale warehouse is filled with contrivances like the singulator, from automated tape-dispensers to low-slung robots. They’re all engineered to manage the 1.5 million items packed into the 855,000-square-foot facility – a mammoth facility the size of six Costcos.
The Troutdale facility is the biggest of three similar warehouses Amazon has in the Portland area. A fourth, even larger, will open in Salem later this summer to house big items.
Amazon is showing off the Troutdale site, which it calls PDX9, for its first anniversary this month. It’s the first time the company has allowed the media inside since the site opened. (Amazon acknowledges the “9” designation is a misnomer, since it’s the company’s third major distribution facility in the region, but isn’t clear on why it chose that number.)
Amazon says the intervening year has given it time to shake the bugs out of the new facility, which now employs 2,000 – a third more than the company initially forecast.
The past year has also come with continued scrutiny of how Amazon and other tech companies operate, with critiques of sales practices and working conditions – including a protest last month outside two warehouses in the Portland area.
Though the warehouse has grown into one of the region’s largest employers, relatively few people are visible in any given part of the cavernous facility. Instead, the logistical triumphs for which Amazon is famous are all on display inside PDX9.
Nothing is more striking than the robots that fetch items from rows and rows of portable shelving.
They look like the flat robotic vacuum cleaners you see in homes, but much bigger. Amazon’s weigh 320 pounds apiece and can lift more than double that. Amazon says there are “hundreds and hundreds” of such robots at work in Troutdale.
The robots race among the stacks at speeds up to 5 feet per second, navigating by means of QR codes stamped on the floor and a computer that tracks their location, sending them into the stacks to fetch shelving with an item a customer ordered and monitoring to ensure two robots don’t collide.
In a conventional warehouse items are typically organized by category – electronics in one area, bath products in another. But Amazon uses a technique called “random stow,” with items stacked among the shelves without any visible organization. Shaving cream is alongside Bluetooth headphones; DVDs are right next to dental floss.
Amazon finds the system works fine because the computers know where every item is. When a customer orders something a robot brings an entire shelf to an employee, who picks the product off the shelf and puts it in a bin.
Those bins end up before another employee who boxes the contents with other items from the order. Amid the constant, engulfing hum of the conveyor belts, a machine behind the worker inflates plastic cushioning to buffer the products. Another machine by the worker’s elbow spits out tape to seal the package before it races away to UPS trucks.
The pace of work is unrelenting, reflecting Oregonians’ insatiable consumer appetites and the desire to have their orders in hand right away.
“This warehouse, like others, just has a high rate of repetitive motion and other types of injuries,” said Jamie Partridge, a retired postal worker now with the PDX Amazon Workers Solidarity Campaign.
The organization, associated with the Democratic Socialists of American and Jobs with Justice, says it represents Amazon employees who say they cannot speak out themselves for fear of losing their jobs.
The Oregon Occupational Safety and Health Administration said it has conducted six inspections of Amazon sites over the past three years. Complaints about dust, vehicle emissions and heat triggered the inspections, one of which led to a citation for Amazon for lacking an effective safety committee and another resulted in a warning letter over heat issues.
None of the inspections was in Troutdale.
Amazon has come in for consistent criticism over the past year for working conditions inside its facilities, with employees complaining they face the prospect of losing their jobs if they don’t maintain a rapid pace of work and others saying the physical work is straining their wrists, elbows and backs.
“It’s the intensity of the work, the speed-up, that causes the problems,” Partridge said.
Last fall, amid mounting criticism, Amazon raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour across the company.
“As a company, we work hard to provide a safe, quality working environment for the 250,000 hourly employees across Amazon’s U.S. facilities, which includes our Portland area sites, and any reports to the contrary are false,” Amazon spokeswoman Shevaun Brown said in an email Friday.
Amazon measures employee performance over a long period of time, she said, and offers coaching to help underperforming workers improve.
“We encourage anyone to compare our pay, benefits, and workplace to other retailers and major employers in the Portland metro and across the country,” Brown wrote.
— Mike Rogoway | twitter: @rogoway | 503-294-7699