If you ever get an opportunity to tour an Amazon Fulfillment Center, jump at it. I toured the one in Coppell today. It's stunning what takes place.

A few takeaways:

1. The work area covers 1,100,000 sqft, but you can more than double that due to multiple floors. It is larger than Terminal D at DFW Airport.

2. All workers on the floors are paid at least $15.00 per hour.

3. They receive full benefits starting on Day-1 of their employment.

4. Amazon will pay 95% of their cost for a technical degree or a two year associates degree. They will pay $3,000 per semester for any employee wishing to obtain a degree from a four year university. They will need to attend their university online so that they can continue their full time employment. Amazon doesn't care whether the degree they are pursuing benefits Amazon or not.

5. Both husband and wife are given Maternity Leave. If the husband does not want to take Maternity Leave, he can be paid for that benefit instead.

6. They work a four-day work week.

7. The Coppell Fulfillment Center processes 1,000,000 orders a day.

8. The amount of robots and technology at work was stunning. The robots remind me of the Roomba vacuum cleaners. They can move under four-legged pods (rectangular, and about the height of a man) that hold products, lift up those pods and then begin moving them around the floor of the Fulfillment Center, delivering their products to the designated Pickers (humans). The floor of the FC is covered with a grid of sensors. Computers register when a pod has moved off a sensor and makes that spot available for another pod. It is like a mass of pods rushing around a chess board trying to get to a designated Picker so they can have products pulled and boxed. The process was mesmerizing to watch.

9. The robot also knows when its battery is low, takes itself out of service, and proceeds to a recharge station for a quick or slow charge depending on the work load at the time.

10. The loading of products into the pods was equally fascinating. The different bins would light-up on the pod to show which bins could receive product and which were full.

11. The overall sense after watching the work being done was that the humans were working for the robots, instead of the other way around. The robot told the human which product to put where. It also told them at the other end, which product, in what bin, went in what size box. The human just had to watch their computer screen and follow the software cues.

12. The Coppell facility handles small to medium sized products. (We watched one young lady that could pick the product, fold the box, load the product, tape & tag the box, and grab the next one in about seven seconds; 400 an hour according to her supervisor.) She took a break four hours into her shift. Products were just flying down the conveyors.

It was something to see.

Sounds very impressive. I like the take on the employee's benefits. That says a lot for a company.

13. Yesterday, they had over 24,000,000 individual items on hand at the fulfillment center.....and they know by a proprietary system, exactly where each of the 24,000,000 items are at any moment. The numbers just boggle the mind.

Just ordered a solvent spray gun from amazon. Ca. Came in an mailing envelope marked SFC. That stands for Straight From China, no Bull.

Grizz

Maybe a little bit of bull.

I think you may be referring to the Chinese logistics company, SendFromChina. http://parcelsapp.com/en/carriers/sfc-service

https://www.sendfromchina.com/