How Amazon facilities in Georgia make Prime Day work for customers

Inside an Amazon delivery station in Duluth, operations manager Tyler Deal is preparing for a spike in shipments this week from Amazon’s Prime Day sale.

Workers at the cavernous 150,000-square-foot facility start sorting packages to be delivered to customers well before the sun rises, as part of a sprawling network that helps to make Prime Day work and satisfy the enormous demand for online shopping every day.

While the sale is being held Tuesday and Wednesday this week , the annual barrage of bargains on Amazon typically drives package volumes to swell for three days straight, with higher-than-normal levels for more than a week.

“We’ll see a huge jump,” Deal said.

Credit: Ziyu Julian Zhu/AJC

It’s the tenth year the e-commerce giant has held the sale for its Prime members who pay $139 a year or $14.99 a month for free shipping. Amazon temporarily cuts prices on everything from cosmetics to vacuums to stoke sales during the otherwise slower summer season for retail spending , saying it will offer more than 5 million deals. Last year, Amazon said Prime members bought more than 375 million items over the two-day Prime Day event.

“We are seeing more items that people typically shop for on an everyday basis but come to the forefront of our Prime Day deals. So everything like electric toothbrushes and face cleaners, anything that you would use on a day-to-day basis,” said Amazon spokeswoman Shemeeka Johnson. The company also expects tech items to be popular, such Amazon Echo Buds earbuds.

At the Amazon building along I-85 in Duluth —which was once a Dave & Buster’s — more than 100 workers begin their shifts just after 1 a.m., scanning orders, sorting packages and organizing them onto carts.

Credit: Ziyu Julian Zhu/AJC

The packages are then loaded onto vans that start pulling up at around 10 a.m. Drivers of the vans, who work for Amazon’s delivery contractors, then spend about eight hours delivering all of the packages to doorsteps around parts of metro Atlanta.

The Duluth facility is one of 10 Amazon delivery stations in Georgia. With $575 billion in revenue in 2023, Seattle-based Amazon is the nation’s biggest online retailer. In Georgia, it has nearly 20 fulfillment centers and sortation facilities as well as other locations for Prime Now deliveries, solar farms and a grocery hub, along with its Whole Foods locations.

The Duluth delivery station alone typically handles about 30,000 packages a day, and that rises to nearly 50,000 on Prime Day delivery days, according to Deal. The facility also handles some same-day deliveries in the wee hours of the morning.

Credit: Ziyu Julian Zhu/AJC

“That’s how we’re able to get packages out 24 hours a day,” Deal said.

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