Cyber Monday Has Online Retailers In Overdrive To Fulfill Orders
(CBS) -- On this Cyber Monday, it's crunch time for online retailers, scrambling to fill orders that are coming in fast and furious for the holiday shopping season, reports WBBM's Regine Schlesinger.
At the Amazon Fulfillment Center in Kenosha, the company's Tom Cook says they're processing orders at the rate of 500 items per second.
"The Fulfillment Center here in Kenosha is a million square feet - the equivalent of 28 football fields, so it's a huge facility," Cook said. "We've got more than two thousand employees that work here every day. They're fulltime employees that work year-round."
Podcast
Plus more seasonal workers and robots that do the sorting, processing and packaging on 11 miles of conveyor belts.
Then, there's the shipping. That's where companies like FedEx and UPS come in. Susan Rosenberg with UPS says it's busy but not chaotic.
"It's very controlled," Rosenberg said. "We've been doing the holidays for 108 years."
A couple of years ago, shippers were having problems getting all the packages delivered in time for Christmas. She says UPS has fixed that with new technology and automation. The company also has a meteorologist on staff to work around weather obstacles.
