Online shoppers will get a double dose of Amazon Prime Day this year.
The online retail giant has extended its self-made day of deep discounts to two days, which will run through the end of the day Tuesday.
Increasingly, Amazon is making Same Day shipping available in major markets like Dallas-Fort Worth. And that is only possible because of the systems the company has in place. Of the nine Amazon fulfillment centers "giant warehouses full of items ready for purchase" operating in the state of Texas, three are in North Texas: Dallas, Fort Worth and Grapevine.
To step inside one of the Grapevine facilities, called the Coppell Fulfillment Center, is to enter a seemingly never ending whirlwind of activity. The only thing more noticeable than the many miles of conveyor belts weaving through the facility, and the millions of individual items available for purchase and delivery at a moment’s notice, is the background noise of machinery in motion that fills all 1,000,000 square feet of the building.
Employees — called associates by Amazon — perform a variety of tasks with quirky-sounding names; they are pickers, packers or shippers. And they work in concert with an army of robotic assistants, designed to do the heavy lifting and increase the efficiency of the entire process.
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"With the efficiency of the robotics technology a customer can click buy, and the amount of time for when that item becomes available has significantly shortened," said Brenda Alfred, an Amazon Operations and Public Relations manager. "What used to take basically hours is now reduced to minutes."