It’s not the sexiest subject, but Red Hook’s ongoing reinvention as an e-commerce shipping hub has for me piqued an interest in logistics. For all their expected negative environmental externalities, the forthcoming last-mile distribution centers on Columbia Street, along with the planned UPS complex near Valentino Pier, at least offer a measure of historical continuity in a neighborhood that once hosted the world’s busiest freight port. But I’d like to know what we’re getting into, exactly.
Last year, amid a deluge of unfavorable press coverage about workplace conditions, Amazon started organizing propagandistic tours of its fast-moving, ultra-modern warehouses – called Fulfillment Centers – for curious customers. Anyone can book a free one-hour visit; it’s like visiting the Ben and Jerry’s Factory in Vermont. Although Amazon has a Fulfillment Center in Staten Island, the closest one offering tours (on select dates) is in Edison, New Jersey – coincidentally, very near near my parents’ house in neighboring East Brunswick, which made it an easy trip for me.
Amazon, which in July entered talks with Industry City to create a potential distribution center in Sunset Park, accounts for about half of all online retail transactions, but independent vendors make more than 50 percent of the sales on the Amazon platform. To get their products to web customers, small businesses can pay for warehousing and transportation through Fulfillment by Amazon, where their merchandise mingles in the supply chain with Amazon’s own, or they can contract a third-party logistics (3PL) provider for the same service.
Though Amazon operates more than 150 warehouses of one sort or another in the United States, its facilities can’t accommodate its own incredible volume of sales in every market, and the company itself sometimes outsources operations to 3PL providers. Most of my Amazon home deliveries in Brooklyn come from the LaserShip distribution center in Ridgewood, Queens. The developer DH Property Holdings plans to lease its Red Hook properties for 3PL.
I don’t know how much the distribution centers in Red Hook will resemble Amazon’s own, but there’s a fair chance they’ll handle goods purchased on Amazon – as will the facility owned by UPS, a longtime Amazon partner. But as Amazon – which more recently has invested in planes, trucks, and delivery vans – seeks to establish its own end-to-end transportation network, UPS has come to view Jeff Bezos not only as its best customer but also as its most dangerous competitor. In the era of same-day delivery, the race is on to determine who can master the challenges of last-mile distribution, the final and most difficult step in the shipping process, and the one for which the new developments in Red Hook, on account of their up-close access to the New York City market, have been designated. The business magazines say it’s the hottest trend in big-city commercial real estate.
The Amazon Fulfillment Center in Edison situates itself earlier in the supply chain – it doesn’t directly serve Amazon customers. Rather, it receives goods from wholesalers and manufacturers and boxes them for individual shoppers, and then Amazon’s big rigs bring them to regional Sortation Centers, which separate the packages by zip code for transfer to USPS or to Amazon Delivery Stations, which put them directly in the hands of Amazon Flex drivers or Amazon Delivery Service Partners for the final leg of the journey inside a personal vehicle or van.
Labor issues
In the media, the Fulfillment Centers have produced horror stories of inhumane productivity quotas, tightly rationed bathroom breaks, relentless surveillance, union busting, stolen wages, and workplace safety violations (such as excessive heat). Surviving on public assistance despite mandatory overtime, underpaid Amazon employees organized last year and won a $15 minimum wage for all of the company’s US workers, who also can qualify for employer-subsidized health insurance and tuition assistance for community college or trade school. But worker injuries and even deaths, including suicides, have continued. In 2018, Amazon began to pay a few of its employees a little extra to form a pro-Amazon Twitter brigade and tell everyone, in a social media style reminiscent of Russian bots, how much they loved their jobs.
I suspected that the Fulfillment Center tour would have the same creepy flavor, and it does, but to be honest, it’s a great tour anyway. I highly recommend it: it even comes with a parting gift, a stainless steel water bottle that, without the emblazoned Amazon logo, would probably go for $15 online. It presents an implausibly sunny view of Amazon as a workplace – I have no doubt that it sucks for the workers, who have to pass through airport-level security just to get in or out – but the operation itself truly is spectacular. While postindustrial America still hosts pockets of niche manufacturing, the Amazon Fulfillment Center is like visiting industrial China: the high-tech, hyper-efficient hell of the future.
Some kind of home base of supercomputers – whose unfathomable algorithms, every time you click the buy button on your browser, determine the fastest possible homeward path for your purchase among myriad potential routes within a national logistics network – appears to control every movement inside the fully linked-up Fulfillment Center in Edison. Ubiquitous bar codes, motion sensors, and artificial intelligence ensure that everything’s in its right place from the moment the goods leave their trailers and enter the enormous, semi-automated merry-go-round of bins and conveyor belts, which loop for miles within the 900,000-square-foot facility.
The Fulfillment Center, which in a 24-hour period can process hundreds of thousands of Amazon orders, has 2,000 human employees, but the size of the building makes their presence feel sparse. They load and unload the trucks, store the goods upon receipt, and retrieve them when sales occur, at which point they box them for shipping – essentially, they perform nearly all the tasks that we traditionally associate with warehouse labor. Amazon Robotics just helps them do it a lot faster.
Friendly robots
The main difference is that they don’t have to haul the merchandise from one side of the warehouse to another anymore or even keep track of where it is. Instead, they operate fixed stations for “stowing” and “picking,” and all-knowing Roomba-style robots – each of which can hold 1,500 pounds – come to them, bearing mobile storage units (about seven feet tall) where workers can place incoming goods or fetch outgoing goods. Computer screens tell them where to place the merchandise and then where to find it within the multi-shelved unit, which automatically registers all additions and removals.
The slightly wobbly storage units look like something a college kid would buy from Target for their first apartment. With a (probably false) appearance of precariousness, they balance on top of the robots, which, moving like oversized hockey pucks along the warehouse floor, shuffle them from one place to another, depending on which products customers are clicking on at home. Without bumping into one another, the robots navigate tight spaces with a nearly choreographic grace. On the whole, Amazon’s machines, for all the menace of the company itself, have an oddly likable, almost whimsical quality – especially the slightly fussy automatic label applier, which, with a delicate puff of air, stamps the packages without touching them.
Despite my discomfort at gawking, I kept surveying the workers for signs of discontent, but presumably the managers warn them to be on their best behavior when visitors enter the building, and the well-rehearsed, personable employee leading my group of about 10 retirees wore an impenetrable shell of good cheer. She mentioned that all workers get two 30-minute breaks during their 10-hour shifts (full-timers typically work four days a week). Management had partitioned off one corner of the Fulfillment Center as a semi-private prayer area, with several rugs on the floor.
The facility – 16 football fields inside a gray box – was noisy (some workers wore earplugs), but on a hot day outside, the temperature was comfortable. If Thor Equities really decides to build a last-mile distribution center at 280 Richards Street, it could be bigger than the building in Edison: the zoning allows for 1,333,200 square feet, and because it would function not in the fashion of a suburban Amazon Fulfillment Center (which transfers packages to semi-trailer trucks) but as an enlarged Delivery Station (which passes them off to smaller home delivery vans), the facility would almost certainly generate significantly more freight trips per day. It sounds chaotic, and for the sake of the workers, I hope at least that the architect in Red Hook decides to let a little more natural light into the building than the one in Edison did.
For its part, Amazon officially has no workers; it has “associates” – presumably because work sucks, or at least it does within the bleak economic arrangement where people have to sell their labor 10 hours at a time for the purpose of enriching the world’s wealthiest man or else face homelessness. Work becomes more than a means to ward off starvation when the workers have a stake in what they’re building, but in cases of wage slavery, it’s probably safer (from a PR perspective) to mystify what’s going on.
Even so, human labor thus far remains essential inside the Fulfillment Centers. Unless the self-driving trucks (for long hauls) and aerial drones (for last-mile distribution) of the future turn out to be nothing but hype, Amazon and other forward-thinking logistics providers may eliminate their delivery drivers before they can do away with their warehouse “associates” – which would be a relief to all the homeowners in Red Hook, who, in their concern over new traffic in the neighborhood, might be willing to tolerate instead a mildly annoying buzzing overhead.
