Outside is the Po Valley, vast expanses of nothing lit by the pale sun of an autumn day. But that is not just any day: it is Black Friday, when millions of Italians go hunting for bargains on computers and smartphones. Many look for them on Amazon, which opened its tenth Italian distribution center thirty kilometers from Bergamo a year ago.
Inside, in a 60,000-square-metre building, nobody runs, nobody gets excited: it is full of signs that indicate how and where to move, following the direction of travel and without climbing the stairs two by two. In addition, for some years the special offers on the site have been spread over an entire week or even more, so the impact of Black Friday today is no longer as relevant as it once was.
We went to an Amazon warehouse on Black Friday. Here’s what happens
The dance of the robots
A distribution center works like this: there are hundreds of square shelves with products, which are lifted and moved by small robots, similar to those that clean the floor; depending on the orders, they approach the operators’ workstations, then a light illuminates the position where the object to be shipped is located, which is picked up, checked by scanning the barcode and placed in a container (tote). The container is then transported with conveyor belts to the lower level, where it is emptied and the various products are packaged and destined for shipment.
The dance of the yellow pods enclosed in a huge fence is pure science fiction: silent, precise, they move like in an endless Tetris, patiently waiting their turn and then disappearing from sight. In the various shelves the objects are arranged in a random order, the tablets for the washing machine next to the computers, the shoes next to the dolls. Or even not, but it doesn’t matter because everyone’s position is recorded in a gigantic database that changes constantly: on such a large scale it makes no sense to divide products into categories as in a normal supermarket, and however counterintuitive it may seem, the chaos is the only real order possible. The key word is flexibility, and in fact many workstations work in both directions, even the storage of goods is random.
The human side
Downstairs human intervention is more evident: the product or products must be retrieved from the container and placed in a package, an envelope for shipping; computers help to choose the box and everything needed for packaging. When the package is ready, another conveyor belt takes it to the shipping truck. Every movement of the goods is monitored by a control center which looks like that of the motorways; and deep down in the distribution center are miles of conveyor belts.
Products ordered on the Amazon site usually arrive at home in less than 24 hours, because each warehouse serves the closest user base. However, if a product is not available locally, the order management system looks for it in the other distribution centers, from which it is shipped directly to the buyer.
A curious detail: in Cividate and in the other centers that use pods there are only small to medium sized objects, at most a laptop or a video game console; the bulkier goods are stored in traditional warehouses, those with large aisles full of shelves. Twelve years ago, when Amazon arrived in Italy, they were all like this, today logistics has been completely rethought. Last year, the e-commerce giant invested over 4 billion euros in our country (38% more than in 2020), for a total of 12.6 billion euros since 2010. There were 150 employees at the time, while today there are 17 thousand, of which three thousand hired in 2022 alone.
At BGY1, as the center of Cividate al Piano is called in the code, over 900 people of 100 nationalities work, plus as many seasonal workers, and it is not for nothing that all the stations have flags. Around you see many young people, but also some older ones, many girls, many with the veil. They alternate in eight-hour shifts, from 6 to 14, from 14 to 22 and from 22 to 6. In the building there is a bright canteen, a cafeteria, and also workstations for those “going through a period of emotional difficulty family or social”. The atmosphere is concentrated but relaxed, nothing to do with the frenzy of those who are looking for the best deal on the internet at the same time.