GARNER — Garner is getting a big delivery. On Tuesday, Amazon took local leaders inside the four-story fulfillment center the retail giant is building there.
The visitors got a behind-the-scenes, hardhat tour of the construction site and plans for the building.
Rob Packett, Amazon’s regional director of operations, directed the tour group through the cavernous surroundings
It’s a warehouse, sure, but Amazon, being Amazon, makes it sound trendy: A fulfillment center.
“Obviously, it’s fulfilling your order,” Packett explained. “You’ve placed an order, and you’ve placed your trust in us to get it to you quickly.”
Pickers and packers and shippers — 1,500 full-time employees in all — will work together to get stuff out the door and to the customer’s door.
When the project is complete, they will work across four floors, each 700,000 square feet, filled with products, people and programmable machines.
Those machines, which Amazon calls “drives,” look like robotic vacuum cleaners. Each is able to carry a 1,500-pound pod filled with books, electronics, toys — whatever the order. Following bar codes on the floor — a digital map, if you will — the drives know where go.
“The pods come to them,” Packett said. “They’re working at the stations. They send the product to the stower and the picker.
“It’s kind of amazing. It’s like poetry in motion, because you’re having thousands of drives and pods move down these little highways.”
Garner and state leaders toured the soon-to-open Amazon fulfillment center Oct. 22, 2019. (Bryan Mims/WRAL)
The fulfillment center is also a phoenix, rising from the ashes of the ConAgra Foods plant, where an explosion in June 2009 killed three workers and led to its permanent closure.
For years, the land sat dormant. But Garner leaders wooed Amazon to the site and announced the project last summer.
“The robots make us efficient; the associates make us wonderful,” Packett says.
The Garner center is Amazon’s fourth fulfillment center in North Carolina. It is scheduled to open in 2020.
