RICHMOND, Texas — So many people do their holiday shopping without ever leaving home these days, so Black Friday and Cyber Monday kick off the peak season for online retailers.
While millions of you are busy shopping from the comfort of your couch, a small army of people and tens of thousands of robots are working 24/7 to make sure those packages get to you.
We got a behind-the-scenes tour of the five-story Amazon Fulfillment Center Warehouse in Richmond, known as Hou6.
It's a massive, modern-day version of Santa's Workshop. From the time you click submit order on Amazon.com, it only takes about 20 minutes for it to end up in front of someone for packaging.
"What you see here is the picking process. It’s actually the first step in our outbound process," Amazon Hou6 General Manager Dan Monson said. "We have a lot of robots at hou6, several thousand."
The robots carry a four-sided pod to a human sorting orders. It is then sent to the packing department on 15 miles of conveyer belts.
The volume is staggering with about half a million different products available at Hou6 alone, 43 million units in total. That's why the building on Harlem Road is enormous.
"We’re 3.7 million square feet, so we’re big. We have more structural steel and concrete than the Empire State Building," Monson said.
Monson said the Richmond warehouse is the size of 64 football fields. The facility sends out about 350,000 items every single day.