ARLINGTON, Wash. — It's one of the biggest and busiest buildings in the Northwest. Amazon's latest fulfillment center in Arlington is the largest in Washington state - processing tens of thousands of orders every single day.
"This building is roughly 3 million square feet of storage so we can store up to 40 million items in the building," said Bruno Arnal, General Manager of the facility known as PAE2. "What we are doing, we are receiving inventory and we are storing inventory in the four floors above me. As soon as you buy on Amazon.com we will pick it, pack it and put it in a trailer to deliver it safely, efficiently and as fast as we can to your door."
But before your order reaches your door, every item goes through a labyrinth of conveyor belts and is handled by both humans and advanced robotics.
“We have two big phases. The first phase is called 'inbound,'” said Arnal. "A trailer comes, we unload the trailer, we transfer whatever is in the trailer into small totes, you will see them around the building, they are yellow totes that can store up to 30-inch. Then it's going to a Storer. A Storer is going to grab an item and put an item into a shelf, and the shelf is being moved by robots."
"If you click, I'm going to buy this one [on] Amazon.com, then as soon as you click, we will start the process called 'outbound,' which is going to put this item into a tote, the tote is going go from the third floor to [the] packing area," said Arnal. "We have two types of packing. One is what we call single shipment, where we would pack one item into one box, and the other one is multiple shipments."
Once packed, the orders move on to more robots.
"They're going to the AR sort station - Amazon Robotic sortation platform, and it's going [to] sort points, which is a zip code. And then go to a trailer and at the trailer we go to a delivery station downstream to go to a customer."
To protect their workers, Amazon employees work at several different stations during a work week to avoid repetitiveness. That's just one of many reasons Marysville resident Dominique Grashoff has loved working here ever since she first walked in the doors.
"I was like, this is for me. It is chaotic, it is moving so fast. It's everything that my mind and I need," said Grashoff. "I started at the facility when we launched here back in August, and I was promoted within three months."
Though Amazon's Arlington fulfillment center is still less than a year old, the 2,500 plus locals who work here have already made it one of the best fulfillment centers in the country.
"The building is thriving, the building is growing very well. Snohomish County is very supportive of this building as well," said Arnal. "These are the things that are exciting to show, and to brag about."