HOUSTON - Online retail giant Amazon opened the doors to its Houston fulfillment center Friday.
The building, located near Ella and Beltway 8, is the size of 14 football fields. A team of about 1,500 employees works around the clock to pick, pack and process orders. The official grand opening was pushed back because of Hurricane Harvey.
“This is the first stop of what we call the 'last mile,'” said general manager Sarah Smith.
Smith took us on a tour that moved nearly as quickly as the workers inside the fulfillment center. One stop was alongside some 26 miles of conveyor.
“So once that customer hits 'buy,' we’ll extract it from our inventory and ship it from here,” Smith said. “Then it most likely will go to a delivery station.”
New inventory arrives in an area where humans work with automation to carefully catalog every item so it can be easily located later.
“I’m a liaison between multiple outbound processes,” said employee David Michalak.
In other words, the former oil rig worker makes sure things aren’t interrupted. Michalak told us he took a job with Amazon during a downturn in the energy industry.
“There’s always going to be happy people. There’s always going to be people not having a good day and whatnot,” Michalak said. “But overall, I think we have very good morale, and everybody works together to bring each other up.”
Despite criticism about its labor practices, Amazon says the average employee earns $15 per hour before overtime. That’s in addition to a full benefits package. As for customers, multiple fulfillment centers in Houston could result in even quicker delivery times.
“Amazon talks about how customer-centric we are,” Smith said. “But for me, even though we’re shipping several hundred thousand packages a day, every single one of them matters.”
Amazon now has nine fulfillment centers like this one across Texas. Governor Greg Abbott, who attended Friday’s grand opening, said he hopes to see others.