As big as 10 football pitches, operating 24 hours a day, with more than 2,000 workers constantly on the move — this is the Amazon warehouse that will speed thousands of packages to Londoners on Black Friday.
Amazon’s “Fulfilment Centre” in Hemel Hempstead resembles nothing so much as the vast warehouse seen at the end of Raiders Of The Lost Ark.
And it is only one of 10 such sites in the UK now gearing up for what the company expects to be its busiest ever pre-Christmas sales event.
Last year Amazon sold 5.5 million items across Britain on Black Friday, at a rate of 64 per second, with the peak arriving at 8.29am. This year extra staff have been hired at the Hemel Hempstead site to pick, pack and dispatch thousands of parcels every hour.
The warehouse deals with small to medium-sized items, such as computer games and toys. Order pickers walk the aisles with trolleys, scanning products on shelves. These are packed, put on conveyor belts, labelled and made ready for dispatch.
General manager Henry Low, 41, said: “We ship out thousands of products every hour, on the hour. We expect this Black Friday to be our biggest deals event yet, with double the amount of deals this year compared to last year.
“We’ve prepared for months. Customers love the idea they’re able to get deals in early and save money in time for Christmas.”
Staff work 10-hour shifts, four days a week. Mr Low would not reveal targets set for product-pickers, saying it depended on the product, but he insisted they were “achievable”.
Amazon has denied it GPS-tracked staff movements. In 2013 an undercover reporter for BBC Panorama in Swansea filmed himself walking up to 11 miles a shift, picking a product every 33 seconds. In August the New York Times raised questions about staff welfare.
But Mr Low said: “It’s not the Amazon I recognise. If we treat people in [that] way, people will leave. Look around you, my team are super-pumped up. We’re super-customer obsessed.
“We work hard, have fun and make history. We care about our associates deeply in terms of health and wellbeing. There’s a fair amount of manual work. We explain it to employees before they join and find that many enjoy this physical activity.”
Employee Kaushik Patel, 59, said working at Amazon kept him fit: “If I’m walking all the time, that keeps me going.”
