Hamburg, N.Y. (WBEN) - "This is our Super Bowl, so to speak. This is what it's all about. This is what we're here for and what we're here to do, and deliver for the communities that we service."
With just five days remaining until Christmas, workers at the new Amazon delivery station warehouse in Hamburg are working hard to ship out people's orders ahead of Monday's big holiday.
The new warehouse along Lake Shore Road opened earlier this year in September, as WBEN was granted special access to tour the building and get insight into what's going on in the final days of Amazon's peak busy season.
"Right now today, we're really working to deliver for our customers and be able to serve our communities for the Christmas push, the holiday season. Now's the time where this is what it's really all about for us at Amazon, and getting packages delivered," said Mitch Bracco, on-road operations manager at Amazon's Hamburg facility.
Bracco says there are about 100 employees a day that work the one shift at the delivery station in Hamburg. In addition to that, Amazon also has about 150-to-170 routes on the road to dispatch with driving associates that are out delivering packages.
"We are able to service and dispatch upwards of 50,000 packages a day. So servicing 50,000 customers, we cover Clarence to Strykersville, down to Angola and down all the way to Springville," Bracco said. "We have about a 320 square-mile impact that we service and deliver out there for the community. What's exciting now is that we are able to deliver more for our customers, deliver more for you guys out there with the addition of this station, coupling that with our Tonawanda delivery station and then the sort center in Lancaster as well."
So where does the Hamburg facility factor in when an Amazon customer purchases an item online? As Bracco explains, their warehouse is one of the final stops before a package is delivered to its intended destination.
"We have a first mile, middle mile and last mile. When you hit go and you order that package, it gets processed at our first mile fulfillment centers. Your order signal then signals to our system to generate your order, basically. That will then push to our associates at the fulfillment center warehouses, they will pick your product, pack it into its appropriate box, envelope, get the label on there. Then that will then be shipped sometimes direct to us straight from the fulfillment center - depending on where it's at - or it will end up at the middle mile, which is our Lancaster station that we have here, that's our sortation center," Bracco explained. "There it will be sorted down at that next level, and it will start to be distributed again throughout our network, whether that's to our third party providers or us here at the delivery station. Then from that middle mile, it will end up here at the last mile, we'll process it at that midnight timeframe until we start to dispatch at about 9:30 in the morning. Then that's when it'll start to head out to your house and end up on your porch that same day."
Bracco says on average, a package will dwell at the Hamburg warehouse for maybe eight hours, give or take, before it is dispatched right on through the next morning for delivery.
With Christmas just five days away, how much time do customers truly have when it comes to getting a purchase in and having it being completely processed before shipping? Bracco says he wouldn't want to push it much further beyond Wednesday or Thursday.
"We all know being born here and living here what that weather can do at any given moment. That's one of our biggest impactors to being able to deliver successfully for you guys," he said. "I would say you got pretty much until about [today or tomorrow] to really order, to start getting your stuff through, barring any weather complications that we - fingers crossed - don't have. So yeah, you're coming up on time to order now."
