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Inside Amazon’s Secret Warehouse: A Jaw-Dropping Tour You Can’t Miss! Amazon Fulfillment Center

Tour Amazon Fulfillment Center for great family fun. Maybe you live by one. Or, if you are taking a road trip, be sure to look up if there is an Amazon warehouse along the way. Amazon offers free tours which are fun for the entire family.

We toured the Amazon Fulfillment Center in Phoenix, Arizona which is a sortable facility. Amazon offers free public tours at 22 of their locations in North America. They offer tours at 47 sites globally. (Update, we went in 2019; tours stopped in 2020. Amazon is still waiting to resume in-person tours but keep reading to learn about our tour and things to know.)

Teens and adults who order products on Amazon will appreciate seeing the operations firsthand. While on the tour, I saw SO MANY PRODUCTS that I’ve actually ordered on Amazon which was interesting to see. Kids will also find it interesting as it’s a huge space with lots of machines and automation.

I went with my husband, my tween, teen, and my in-laws. We all loved it. Put this on your list of things to do when they reopen. 

Tour Amazon Fulfillment Center

They have currently suspended tours. However, you can learn about our experience from going in 2019, and why you will want to plan a visit when they reopen.

When they do reopen, you will have to reserve online in advance for a scheduled day and time. They don’t allow walk-ins. You will need to:

• Tell them your name as it appears on your driver’s license or ID
• Provide your birth date

You will receive an email confirmation with your tour details. We were told to wear close-toed shoes; no sandals, flip flops, etc., and to bring our IDs. (They aren’t necessary for children.) In addition, they wanted long hair pulled back, no flowing scarves, etc.

Amazon Warehouse Tour Time

When does Amazon offer tours? At the time that Amazon was offering their free tours, they were offering tours twice a day, Monday through Friday. Some locations may offer weekend tours as well.

When you go to the Amazon free tour website, you can choose the date and time you want. When we were going, in June, we booked a month out. At that time, there were many choices of dates and times. After registering, we received an email confirmation.

While You are Waiting for Amazon to Reopen their In-Person Tours

In addition to their live, in-person tours, Amazon also offers three other types of free tours. With a strong internet connection, these are good options while their in-person tours are suspended. They are also ideal for people who live far away and who are curious.

• Live Virtual Tours – 60 minutes; schedule online 
• Video Tours – Watch whenever
• Amazon Future Engineer Tour (AFE) – 60 minutes; schedule online

Live Virtual Tours that are one hour long to replicate the experience of their in-person tours. They offer a Q&A. You register online; they are free. You have to register at least six hours in advance. Once they are filled, the option will not appear.

They also offer Video Tours which you can watch on demand.

Their Amazon Future Engineer Tour is for teachers and students to show the engineering and computer science behind their operations. This is an educational option for robotics clubs, Scouts, etc. as well. They offer a Q&A session.

What Cities Have Amazon Fulfillment Tours?

In the United States, 16 states have free Amazon tours. One Canadian province does as well. These are the Amazon locations that offer tours:

Arizona: Phoenix

California:

• San Bernardino

Colorado: Thornton

• Jacksonville

Indiana: Jeffersonville

Maryland: Baltimore

Massachusetts: Fall River

Minnesota: Shakopee

Nevada: Las Vegas

New Jersey:

• Robbinsville Township

Tennessee: Chattanooga

Utah: Salt Lake City

Washington: Seattle (Headquarters tour; you can also tour The Spheres on select Saturdays)

Wisconsin: Kenosha

Canada: Ontario

Hopefully wherever you live, there will be one close by.

How Much are Amazon Tours?

The great news is you can tour Amazon Fulfillment Centers for free! It is free and fun for the entire family. 

What is the Age Minimum for an Amazon Tour?

There is a minimum age of six years old to take the warehouse tour. On our tour, there were 24 people. In addition to our family, there was one other family with tweens and teens. Under 18 must be accompanied by an adult.

It’s fun to go with your family or friends. We went with our family of four. I also invited my in-laws to go. Whether or not you are a frequent Amazon shopper, you will be awed by the tour.

Parking at Amazon Warehouse Tour

When You Get to the Amazon Tour

At the Amazon tour we went on in Phoenix, there is a small lobby with a few chairs. We could see into the warehouse. There were two employees checking people in and verifying IDs.

How Long is the Amazon Tour?

We were in the Amazon building a total of 58 minutes, though these will vary by location and the tour guide. (Our guide seemed to try to keep it moving along.) This included checking in, sitting in the room getting instructions, going on the actual tour, returning the headsets, and being escorted back into the lobby.

Is There a Lot of Walking?

After waiting in the lobby, you will walk to a room with tables and chairs where you will hear the instructions and get the headsets.

After this period of sitting, for the remaining duration of the tour, you will be walking and standing. The actual tour, including people’s questions, took about 40 minutes.

There were stairs. One person in our group was in a wheelchair and was able to take the elevator which was right there. They also also service animals (dogs).

Taking Photos While You are on Amazon Tour

You can take pictures outside of the Amazon building as well as inside the lobby. After that, you aren’t allowed to take pictures or video.

About 3/4 into the tour, you will stop in an area which overlooks the deliveries. The tour guide will take your picture and either email or text it to you. More on this below.

It’s Amazon!

Taking an Amazon tour is an amazing opportunity. We learned the Phoenix center is the size of 28 football fields!

Going on an Amazon Fulfillment Center tour means you get to go behind the scenes with this mega operation!

They have streamlined their processes so well… truly it’s a well-oiled machine. Haven’t you ordered something from Amazon and had it in less than 24 hours? It’s truly remarkable how they do it. And you get to see it for yourself.

What Happens on Tour Amazon Fulfillment Center

• After you check in and it’s time to start the tour, the tour guides will lead you to a room.
• On your way to the room, you will be walking in the warehouse. You will see lots of products piled up in different areas. Also, you may see some employees.
• Once you are in the room, the tour guide will give you a short talk. They also talked about the benefits of working for Amazon. They really seem to care for their employees.
• The tour guide gave us a disposable water bottle to take with us. In addition, they gave us headphones with disposable ear covers.
• Then the two guides lead us through the different areas in throughout their fulfillment center. This includes the entire process from finding the products in the warehouse, to packaging, to shipping.
• There is a photo opportunity during the tour.
• We returned the headset at the end of the tour. 
• They gave everyone a reusable Amazon water bottle to keep.

Is it Loud?

The Amazon Fulfillment Tour is loud but not unbearably so. Because you have the headset, you will be able to hear the tour. The only difficult part is sometimes, it was hard to hear the questions and answers. If you are lucky enough to have a tour guide who loudly and clearly repeats the question (we didn’t) and then answers for people in the back to hear, it will be great.

Amazon Warehouse Tour Review

We loved it! It’s rare in today’s world that you can go on factory tours. Very few remain throughout the United States due to liability reasons.  To be able to go inside the mammoth Amazon center is fascinating.

Anyone who has ever ordered anything on Amazon, from the typical to the obscure, will find it interesting and will learn a lot.

It’s also likely you will leave with a sense of wonder and awe that they process so many orders each day. The scope and scale is truly unfathomable. Even though they have honed it, they continue to improve their processes.

You will get to see a lot of the fulfillment center. You are right in it, walking past employees, seeing the employee awards on the walls. In addition, you will see lots of different products as well. We saw at least five things we had purchased from Amazon!

After leaving there, I had such a higher respect for their employees, that I started doing two things differently:

• Instead of ordering from Amazon whenever I think of something, I keep a running list on my phone. Now, I place orders less frequently, and bundle them together. 
• I’m a Prime member and usually have many options to choose shipping speed. In most instances when possible, I choose the 3 – 5 day option instead of the 1 – 2 day option. 

Amazon employees work hard!

Seeing the Products in the Warehouse

It was interesting to see how they put the products in areas seemingly-randomly throughout the warehouse and how automated it is so that everyone can easily find the items. They place and store items in a random order which they said is more effective for them than grouping all the same types of products together.

So many products

We were able to walk to one section lined with yellow containers — “pods” — each packed with unrelated products. These pods contained thousands of different types of products.

The guide explained how the employees, the “pickers,” found the products to fulfill the orders using bar code scanners. There were random Lego sets next to plastic forks next to rubber gloves and a hammer.

We saw a yo-yo next to gardening shears and a stationery set.

It was interesting to see how this random system worked for them. At first, I thought they were people’s orders because it was so random.

But think about what you order on Amazon. Oftentimes, it’s very different types of things!

Packing area

From there, we went to the packing area. They showed us how the products are put into boxes and envelopes and how they seal them with tape. They had automatic label and tape dispensers. We were also able to see where the shipments come in off the delivery trucks.

Before we got to the shipping sorting section, we were able to look down at the area where the deliveries came in.

Can you imagine all the products Amazon receives each day? There are thousands that come in and thousands they send out.

Our tour guide said they try to reuse the boxes that they receive deliveries in. The rest get recycled. At the Phoenix Fulfillment Center, we were a story higher looking down on this area. This is where we were able to get our picture taken.

Photos Inside the Amazon Tour

You have a chance to stand alone or with whomever you came with to get your picture taken with the center in the background. They gave us some props to hold, including Amazon boxes. We posed with the deliveries down below.

The staff below was on a break or a shift change. I’m thinking they arrange the tours around this to give the employees some privacy.

After taking our picture, they asked for a cell phone number and texted us the picture. You can have it emailed if you prefer. It seemed like everyone in our group got their picture taken. It went quickly. While we we were waiting, we were busy looking out at everything.

This section was a little rushed — it is Amazon, after all! — so we didn’t feel we could ask for a second picture of just our kids.

Amazon Fulfillment Center Phoenix tours

They had different areas for packages with expedited shipping versus packages with slower shipping. It was amazing to see the different conveyor belts and areas for packages that were sending out in one day, via Amazon Prime, and for slower shipping.

We loved visiting the Phoenix warehouse and look forward to touring other fulfillment centers in other locations… even if it was a Sortable warehouse again. No matter which Amazon location you visit, you will surely learn something new and see new things.

What We Liked Seeing at the Sortable Warehouse

• It’s free!
• It was fascinating to be inside.
• They really seem to value their employees. It made me wish I lived closer to an Amazon center to work there.
• There is a fun Amazon sign to take a picture of when you enter or exit.
• They handed out headphones — not ear buds — which were comfortable. In addition, they gave us disposable ear covers to put over them.
• They seemed to schedule the tour when there were less staff around… we liked that. It helped give their staff more privacy.
• We were all blown away by the way they sorted things randomly.
• At the end of the tour, they gave everyone a reusable Amazon water bottle.

Downsides to Amazon Tour

• It felt a little rushed. I’m sure all of us could have thought of 10 questions and lingered around each step in the process.
• Hit or miss on tour guide.
• Can be difficult to hear questions.

Tour Amazon Warehouse Options: Sortable, Non-Sortable, Robotics

Depending on which location you visit, you will see different things. There are three types of warehouses to tour Amazon Fulfillment Center.

Sortable facility

The Phoenix Fulfillment Center is considered a sortable facility. This is where they have everything from pin cushions and bags of candy to blenders, pillows, backpacks, planters, and poker sets.

Non-sortable facility

These fulfillment centers ship larger items such as furniture, rugs, etc. These Amazon facilities ship large items and won’t have all the smaller items we saw on our tour. 

Robotics sortable facility

These centers ship products smaller than a typical-sized microwave. Robots work alongside the workers to ship products. You can find out which center you will be visiting when you click on the city on Amazon’s website.

• When you scroll down, go past the FAQ section, to the Site Information section.
• You will see 01.
• It will say 01 The Fulfillment Center.
• Read the paragraph to learn if that location is Sortable, Non-Sortable, or Robotics sortable. 

Personally, I think going on any Amazon tour would be amazing. If you will be near a facility that offers them, schedule a tour! I would see the Sortable tour again, even in Phoenix, because it was that good. When traveling elsewhere, I would make it a priority to schedule a tour as well. 

Tour Amazon Fulfillment Center Field Trips

It would make for an excellent field trip. It would be an ideal outing for Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, Cub Scouts, and other organizations and clubs. Amazon makes special accommodations if you have a group of 20 or more. Adults and children will enjoy it.

Tour Amazon Headquarters in Seattle

Oh how we wanted to do this when we were in Seattle in 2019! Unfortunately, the times didn’t work out for us because we needed to get to the airport. You can tour Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle, Washington. Amazon is Seattle’s largest private employer.

They are also temporarily closed. However, when they reopen, you can take an Amazon headquarters tour.

Two Saturdays a month, they open The Spheres to the public. When they open again, this is surely something to put on your Seattle to do list. Seattle Spheres is their outdoor botanical wonderland. They also have a greenhouse and so much more.

Amazon is a Great Place to Work

Something we learned at the Amazon Fulfillment Center tour is that employees definitely walk and stand a lot. It also seems like it would go quickly because of all there must be to do. You can tell they treat their employees well.

We walked past an employee break room which was large and comfortable-looking. Amazon seems to be an incredible company. It’s up to each household to balance it with shopping locally. They give back to their communities as well.

We were happy were were able to see everything from the shipments coming in, the areas the products were stowed in, the packing section which included boxing, labeling, and taping, and the shipping out section.

It was fun to part of the Amazon excitement. We appreciated all that goes into their operations. As much as we try to buy local, you can’t beat the convenience of Amazon. It was incredible to be inside their operation and to try to fathom how they can get all these products to their customers overnight or in days.

We felt “part of the group” being Amazon Prime subscribers.

It’s a really great tour for families. Most companies do not offer tours. Kids will really enjoy seeing behind-the-scenes. See other factory tours we were on in Denver, CO and Milwaukee, WI .

Tour Amazon Fulfillment Center warehouse

See for yourself how Amazon fulfills millions of orders each day!

It’s fascinating they open up their world to the public, especially in times when so many companies do not. 

They train and offer steady employment for area residents and should be viewed as an asset to the areas in which they are located.

Please note, we visited the Amazon Fulfillment Cente r in Phoenix, AZ in June 2019. Currently, their tours are suspended. Hopefully, you can take one of the Amazon Fulfillment Centers tours next year. There may even be one in the area in which you live. It’s truly a wonderful free tour.

In the meantime, as I stated above, you can take advantage of the free Amazon tour from home. They offer Live Virtual Tours that last an hour. You need to register in advance online, and they are free. While it doesn’t match the experience of actually being in the fulfillment center, it is still definitely interesting to see.

They also offer prerecorded Video Tours that you can click on and watch whenever it’s convenient.

See which products are made in America . Note to Amazon: We need a Made in USA filter!

Review: Amazon Fulfillment Center Tour

Amazon recently started offering tours of select fulfillment centers across the country and they happen to have tours available in Illinois! I couldn’t help but book an immersive tour for our family to check out what goes on behind the scenes. The Amazon Fulfillment Center in Monee is the only facility in our area that offers tours.

What to Know Before Booking

• Children ages 6 years old and older are allowed on the tour, but you are not allowed to bring infants or any children under 6.
• The entire experience lasts about 1 hour and 30 minutes, depending on how many questions your group asks along the way.

Amazon Tour Review

As expected, the facility is huge. There aren’t visitor spots in the parking lot, so you can park anywhere in the lot. When you enter the building there is a security window and they told us to wait in the lobby for the tour guide to come out at our scheduled time. We got there 15 minutes early as the confirmation email suggested, but we found that to be unnecessary. However, once the three tour guides came out and checked us in, we did not wait to enter and start the tour, so don’t be late or you will miss it!

Before the Tour

After entering, we were brought into a conference room. The warehouse floor is loud, but they gave us headphones which dampened the ambient noise and allowed us to hear the main tour guide even if we were in the back of the group. Our group had about 12 people, which seemed to be close to capacity. When we saw the presentation slides come up, we were a little worried that we would be stuck in the conference room for a long time, but it only took about 5-10 minutes. They went through some basic information about Amazon and it’s founder, Jeff Bezos, the mission of Amazon, the Monee facility’s local outreach programs that they participate in, and safety when you go out on the floor.

Definitely go to the bathroom before the tour begins, especially if you bring kids. Although they offer to take you during the tour if necessary, it’s not along the path and you will have to catch up again.

The Monee, IL Amazon Fulfillment Center (aka MDW7 to the employees) is 850,000 square feet and handles all of the small and medium-sized products, most of which come from small to medium-sized businesses and include all products that are 18 inches and smaller.

Walking Tour of the Amazon Fulfillment Center

The tour guides consist of people that work on the floor in various jobs, so you could ask them questions about how things worked throughout the tour. They said the tour would last about an hour and ours was 50 minutes.

There is a lot of walking and stairs. An elevator is available and they seemed accommodating with special needs, but they ask that you let them know ahead of time. We walked the third floor and followed the entire process from when products come in at the docks from trucks to packed boxes going to all of us who order from them.

We were expecting robotic arms and more equipment when in reality it’s a lot of people handling the products multiple times. However, there are a lot of aspects of the tour that were impressive. Their robots look like huge Roombas that move and rearrange product towers to bring them to various people either storing the incoming products or pulling product to be sent for an order. You can see the orange robots in action in the photograph below. It looks simple, but when you think about all of the coordination and programming, it’s pretty impressive! These robots can lift up to 1500 lbs.

There are thousands of conveyors bringing totes, envelopes, and boxes to various places in the building to be filled, checked, labeled, checked again, and sent out to be delivered. Pusher arms send the boxes down different chutes depending on where they are going.

At the end of the tour you go back to the conference room where they give you either an Amazon water bottle or infinity cube. They also give you a brochure about Amazon and the company.

The Bottom Line

The tour is definitely interesting if you haven’t seen the inside of a packaging factory before. It’s mind blowing how automated the ordering process is, especially considering that all of the products are kept randomly in different bins and shelves. The robots that move the product towers seem to dance gracefully and seamlessly across the warehouse floor, bringing the correct product to stationary workstations and the people that work there are friendly. The tour guides sprinkle little bits about job opportunities at Amazon and brand loyalty throughout the tour, but we definitely were able to see the facility and how it works.

Although there wasn’t as much automated machinery as we thought there would be, this tour ranks higher than the Albanese Confectionery Factory Tour in Indiana where you just look through the windows at candy being made and the Jelly Belly tours in Wisconsin where you ride through their storage warehouse and watch videos on TVs along the way.

How to Prepare for Your Amazon Tour

• You need to wear closed-toed shoes (we recommend gym shoes because there is a lot of walking)
• They check you in with your drivers license, so make sure you bring it in with you. People under 18 years old do not need to bring an ID.
• Be prepared to tie your hair up so it is above your shoulders. They had extra hair ties when we got there, but I would bring one just in case.
• They say that no photographs are allowed, but halfway through they invited us to take pictures, so take your phone with you.

Amazon Fulfillment Center 6605 Monee-Manhattan Road Monee, IL 60449 Click here to schedule a free tour.

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1 Comment . Leave new

We visited Dunstable site it was incredible how slick the site is, I was envious as I had worked in industry before and only wish the technology was available then. Amazon seem to look after their staff and are aware of different shift patterns to facilitate them. Well worth a visit

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What you see on Amazon’s public warehouse tours

Anybody can sign up to visit an Amazon fulfillment center for an hour, where a tour guide will show you the robot-heavy process of sorting and shipping your packages.

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Heike Geissler wrote her 2018 memoir of working in an Amazon distribution center in Leipzig, Germany, as a novel. This is probably partly for legal reasons, but mainly to give her space to make the story feel more universal, as much of it is written in the second person. “You,” the reader, are the one being scolded by your manager for pausing to read the back of a book you’re supposed to be passing from box to box.

“You don’t quite understand how a fortune could be made out of these things on either side of you and out of books and data carriers and a program and a website, a fortune that’s still growing,” Geissler writes in Seasonal Associate . “Nor do you understand why that fortune is not allowed to have a reverse effect on the hall, to add a little comfort or shine. It’s not as if you don’t realize the fact that the fortune is deliberately prevented from flowing back toward the employees; you simply don’t understand it, and of course it can’t be understood.”

“You spend 10 hours on foot, there’s no windows in the place, and you’re not allowed to talk to people — there’s no interactions allowed,” former Amazon warehouse employee Seth King told Vox last summer . “I got a sense in no time at all that they work people to death, or until they get too tired to keep working. I felt I couldn’t work there and maintain a healthy state of mind.”

Last November, Chavie Lieber reported for Vox on what the holiday season is like in an Amazon fulfillment center, quoting another employee who said “everyone works six days a week. The associates work 10 hours a day, the managers 14 to 18. It’s mandatory overtime, the hours are not voluntary, and they are all on your feet.” In March, a Staten Island warehouse employee was fired for a minor safety violation and filed a lawsuit against Amazon, claiming that his real infraction was attempting to lead a unionization effort the month prior.

And though outrage about the conditions in Amazon facilities has escalated in the past few years, hideous accounts go back to at least 2011, when the daily newspaper in Allentown, Pennsylvania, reported that the heat index in its local warehouse had reached 102 degrees, workers were collapsing, and those who left because of the heat were receiving disciplinary points. The managers called 911 so many times that, rather than shutting down operations until the heat wave passed, Amazon ended up just paying for a fleet of ambulances to remain stationed outside.

It’s with all this looming large in the public mind that this year, Amazon started offering tours twice a day at 46 of more than 250 sites worldwide. (Previously they were offered only a few times a month at five sites.) Anybody can sign up online, as I did, without signing a nondisclosure agreement or promising to keep what they see to themselves. “Come see the magic,” the website suggests . “Tour one of our fulfillment centers and see first-hand how we deliver to you.” There is, this suggests, nothing to hide.

So last Thursday morning, I drove to the Amazon fulfillment center in West Deptford, New Jersey — named ACY1 because of its proximity to the Atlantic City airport, though it is also only about 20 minutes from Philadelphia.

The town website’s homepage boasts about business opportunity — great infrastructure, low property taxes, the presence of NuStar Energy. It’s a generically prosperous enough town, with a population of slightly more than 20,000 mostly white, middle-class Barack Obama and Chris Christie voters , nearly half registered as independents. It hosts the Senior Little League Baseball Eastern Regional Tournament every year, its main claim to fame, and is in the midst of refurbishing and repurposing its historic port on the Delaware River.

The Amazon facility is set back in the woods off the town’s interstate exit, in a row with a solar farm, a construction company, and a behavioral health compound. It has a several-hundred-car parking lot and is about the size of a megaplex movie theater. ACY1 employs 2,000 people, out of 17,500 employed by Amazon in the state of New Jersey. The company employs more than 647,000 people around the world, 125,000 of those at American fulfillment centers like the one I visited.

Since I know what Amazon’s typical line is on the matter, I’ll say now: This is, obviously, a fraction of the 1.5 million people Walmart employs in the US (2.2 million globally), and I am not arguing that the way Walmart has and does define the American worker is anything less than extremely important , probably more important than Amazon’s definition at this moment in time. But since Amazon would also like us to believe that it is the future, and big-box retail is the past, it bears a lot of consideration: What does this work look like at its public-facing best, when everything is as pleasant as it can possibly be made to seem?

My tour included a grandmother escorting two girls and one boy between the ages of about 6 and 10, one older man who was alone, seven businessmen who later told me they run the third-party Amazon fulfillment business Paragon Trading Post (and also told me, unprompted, that they made $5 million last year), and me — identified quickly as a reporter by my tour guide, who suggested that the tour was off the record, though it was not, but I’m going to refrain from directly quoting anything he said out of respect for this clear confusion.

He led us through a row of blue and orange subway turnstiles, past ID-activated vending machines full of safety gear and Tylenol packets and about a dozen paper signs offering “Amazonians” career support, day care advice, mental health assistance, and other nice things. All this was underscored by a tour script that focused — before we had even exited the first stairwell — on the $15 hourly wage in the facility, as well as its 50 percent 401(k) matching, robust health benefits, and free community college classes.

We listened to him through headsets because the general hum of the building made it too loud to speak normally. His narration was funny and warm; he never sounded overly careful or guarded, and when he couldn’t answer questions, it never seemed as though it was because the answers were secrets.

Still, what he showed us of the building made me feel like my brain had been dropped in a vat of Alka-Seltzer.

I assume you are familiar with Lee Ann Womack’s twice-platinum 1999 graduation slideshow classic “I Hope You Dance,” which includes the entreaty “I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean.” In 1999, this lyric was about the ocean. In 2019, this lyric is about the inside of an Amazon fulfillment center. It is too much to be understood, even in panorama view.

At any one moment, I could see and comprehend the presence of about 30 of the moving, four-sided, enormous bookshelf-like robots dancing around, covered in stuff , called back and forth by the QR codes on the floor. But there were thousands in the building, stretching past where I could see them. Standing on a narrow bridge overlooking the ground floor, I could see a row of open doors on the edge of the building, on and on, again past my line of vision, steadily fed by conveyor belts covered in individual Amazon packages. I could not exactly understand that each conveyor belt led into the back of a tractor-trailer truck, despite being told this was the case.

At one point, the grandmother on the tour bent over and pointed the younger girl’s attention toward one of the moving towers just as it spun away from us, saying, “Ooh, did you see the Aveeno lotion?” As if recognizing a product was akin to seeing a celebrity.

I took note of the celebrities I saw: soccer ball, laundry detergent, Fancy Feast, Pop-Tarts, kombucha starter kit, protein powder, paper plates, maxi pads. I realized at a certain point that I was holding my breath, hoping not to see anything I had ever ordered, as if that would be the first moment at which I would have to acknowledge my personal involvement. (Never mind that during my two-hour drive, I had swiped away a text message from Amazon announcing that my Tigi hairspray would be arriving later in the day.)

When things fall off the bookshelf robots, we were told, specialists have to shut off the QR codes for the parts of the floor surrounding the dropped item, then organize a special operation to go out and retrieve it without getting clocked by a tower that doesn’t know they’re there. They are called the “floor health team,” and that’s their job at ACY1.

But there are two main tasks related to these robots: picking and stowing. Employees stand at individual, half-enclosed stations at least 15 feet apart and either “pick” things off the robots, scanning them and then dropping them into a yellow plastic bin called a “tote,” or they take things out of the totes, scan them, and “stow” them in the robots. They are connective tissue, bending and scanning and placing, then bending and scanning and placing. There’s no music, no possible way of speaking out loud to another person, and no decisions to be made.

Back on the ground floor — though we did not talk to any employees — we met a robotic arm named Trudy, which sits in the middle of the huge space lifting heavy totes. Trudy is surrounded by rows and rows of packing stations, where employees are told by a computer which size box to use for the items sorted for them by the computer, before a computer spits out a piece of tape the exact right length to close it. Watching the shipping labels get stamped on by a different robot, the older girl on the tour asked if Prime orders are handled differently than regular orders. She was assured that all orders are processed the same way no matter who is placing them, that everything is valuable to someone — and though she nodded in response to this policy of egalitarianism in purchasing, I could tell she was chewing on it, maybe a little unsure about the notes it struck.

“Is this all a matter of life and death? I’ll say no for the moment and come back to the question later,” Geissler writes at the beginning of Seasonal Associate . “At that point I’ll say: Not directly, but in a way yes. It’s a matter of how far death is allowed into our lives. Or the fatal, that which kills us.” Later, she does come back to it, and adds, “I can’t prove that the work kills anyone. ... They’re all standing upright and working well[.]”

Afterward, we were thanked for our time and presented with instructions about an online survey, as well as new water bottles that read “Amazon FC Tours,” then escorted back through a lobby, exposed only then to the backside of the entryway, which read “Work Hard. Have Fun. Make History.”

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The Warehouse Tour: A Short Read Paperback – May 23, 2018

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"At no point in reading The Warehouse Tour by K.A. Cummins did I suspect how this would end, and would recommend this short escapade to anyone who likes horror and sci-fi...with a side of honey." -Readers' Favorite Jill Baker's brother and his friends disappear during a haunted Halloween tour in an old warehouse. Everyone believes the teens ran away. But Jill’s convinced something sinister lurks in inside, hiding behind the masks and costumes. As her options dwindle, Jill must be willing to face her fear and enter the warehouse if she hopes to uncover the truth.

A young adult sci-fi horror short.

• Print length 52 pages
• Language English
• Publication date May 23, 2018
• Dimensions 5 x 0.13 x 8 inches
• ISBN-10 1987500504
• ISBN-13 978-1987500509
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (May 23, 2018)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 52 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1987500504
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• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.4 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5 x 0.13 x 8 inches
• Best Sellers Rank: #9,925,397 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books )

About the author

K.a. cummins.

K.A. Cummins is an award-winning author and an artist. She explores storytelling in a variety of mediums, blending the wonders of science with the power of imagination. She seeks to offer readers adventurous narratives that spark imagination and inspire grace for themselves and for others. When she’s not crafting stories, Cummins loves learning, collecting fun socks, and venturing outside her comfort zone to try new things—at least once!

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Where you can tour an Amazon fulfilment centre in the UK

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While public tours of our fulfilment centres are paused due to COVID-19, we invite people to take a virtual tour .

Doncaster, England (LBA2) Plot IP1, iPort Avenue New Rossington, Doncaster DN11 0BG United Kingdom See location on a map

Dunfermline, Scotland (EDI4) Amazon Way, Dunfermline KY11 8ST United Kingdom See location on a map

Dunstable, England (LTN4) Boscombe Road, Dunstable LU5 4RW United Kingdom See location on a map

Manchester, England (MAN1) 6 Sunbank Lane, Airport City Altrincham, Manchester WA15 0QA United Kingdom See location on a map

Peterborough, England (EUK5) Unit 1, Kingston Park Flaxley Road, Peterborough PE2 9EN United Kingdom See location on a map

Rugeley, England (BHX1) Towers Business Park Power Station Road, Rugeley WS15 1LX United Kingdom See location on a map

Tilbury, England (LCY2) London Distribution Park Windrush Road, Tilbury RM18 7AN United Kingdom See location on a map

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