Kiva robots help Amazon employees on Cyber Monday
TRACY, Calif. (KGO) -- Cyber Monday is getting major help from robots at Amazon's warehouse in Tracy, California.
It's the busiest online shopping day of the year. The National Retail Federation says 127 million people are expected to shop online Monday.
VIDEO: Bay Area holiday shopping guide
There are hundreds of people working inside the brand new one million square-foot warehouse.
There are millions of products at the warehouse waiting to be shipped out and there are hundreds of robots doing the grunt work.
Thanks to these robots, your Cyber Monday orders can travel from your desktop to your doorstep in as little as half a day.
"It could be picked and on the truck in as little as 15 minutes," Amazon spokesperson Dave Clark said.
Amazon has 3,000 Kiva robots in operation at their Tracy fulfillment center, a building the size of 29 football fields.
The robots basically pick up and then hand off products to human workers, who take it from there.
"They're job is to bring inventory that customers had purchased over to these pickers, so they can pick em' and send them over to outbound to go out in a box for the holiday," Clark said.
On Monday, the busiest cyber shopping day of the year, Amazon expects to fill as many as 700,000 orders at the center in Tracy alone, one of 50 the company has in the United States.
"Cyber Monday last year was our busiest day all year. We were seeing orders at the rate of 426 items per second and we think this day is going to be even bigger," Amazon spokesperson Craig Berman said.
While the robots do much of the work, there are still thousands of people working at the warehouse to make sure Amazon's millions of customers get the right item in the right box and right in time for the holidays.
To check out out our Cyber Monday guide to map out your shopping quest, click here.
