For Amazon shoppers, Prime Day is as simple as finding an item they like and purchasing it.
But at the Haslet Air Hub at Fort Worth Alliance Airport, the Seattle-based e-commerce giant is pulling out all the stops to make sure items are delivered on time, even if it means sending them airborne.
From autonomous robots to top-of-the-line aircraft, Amazon’s Haslet Air Hub is responsible for sending more than 700,000 packages through North Texas’ vast, blue skies on July 16 and 17 to fulfill the orders of millions of customers. It’s the kind of hectic and buzzing day Amazon waits for every year.
“It’s one of the most exciting, biggest and busiest days of the year for us,” said Allie Payne, Amazon regional public relations specialist. “We have to prepare for it months in advance.”
Amazon is marking off two important dates for this year’s Prime Day. The company is celebrating the Haslet Air Hub’s five-year anniversary as well as the 10th iteration of Prime Day, the company’s annual members-only sale which offers huge savings on items throughout the platform.
The number of packages processed at the Haslet Air Hub increases by 75% because of the traffic Prime Day drives every year. But it’s something the facility is well-equipped to handle through its fleet of hundreds of robots and aircraft.
“We’re really offering customers that same-day and next-day, ultrafast shipping, which is the benefit of being a Prime member,” said Marchel Sebacuzi, general manager of the Haslet Air Hub. “Lots of these deals are going to be on the customers’ doorsteps today and tomorrow. So it’s really exciting for us to get it to them.”
The 570,000-square-foot facility has more than 1,500 employees and still has room to handle more capacity as customers continue to order from the platform. At its peak, it the Haslet Air Hub can handle 800,000 packages per day, but the facility has yet to reach that much traffic.
For some packages, the Haslet Air Hub is the penultimate location before a customer’s home. Packages first have to go through an Amazon fulfillment center and then may have to soar through the skies to reach a customer’s home.
The Haslet Air Hub handles inbound and outbound traffic from other major U.S. cities like Seattle, Portland, Las Vegas, Nashville and Baltimore.
For inbound and outbound packages, they enter the hub through an aircraft and get dropped off at the facility. From there, a package enters a long journey where it is transported around the gigantic facility on conveyor belts and on top of robots using QR codes to navigate itself to employees who help it onto platforms that resemble water slides.
Then, a package may have to go on another flight to reach its final destination or move to a delivery station before it’s loaded onto a van for final delivery.
The Air Hub is serviced through Amazon Air, the company’s cargo airline with aircraft including the Boeing 767, 737 and the Airbus A330.
“It was all based on aircraft availability when we sourced them because we want to maintain the same fleet type,” Sebacuzi said. “That way, we’re not having a variation of multiple aircraft. But we do have a team that is solely dedicated to fleet sourcing and a lot of our fleet management that worked with the major players like Boeing and Airbus helped us source the right aircraft for our business.”
Because of the Texas heat, Amazon also takes some precautions when sending its employees outside the hub and onto the airport apron.
The company has hydration stations around the site filled with water bottles and gives workers cooling socks and towels.
Texas is one of a few states around the country that have taken steps to not require employers to give employees heat exhaustion breaks, meaning Amazon had to implement these solutions on its own, Sebacuzi said.
“This is an Amazon initiative that came from suggestions from our employees,” he said. “At the end of the day, it’s something we need to take a lot of pride in and I’d be willing to go on a limb to say that Amazon goes above and beyond.”
Leaning on small businesses
Shoppers may not realize it, but the majority of items they purchase are from small businesses. Sixty percent of the items people purchase on Amazon come from small businesses, the company said.
It means that for people like Femi Oyenekan, founder and CEO of Dallas-based wipes producer Simpleaf, Prime Day is one of the biggest days of the year for his business. He started the company in 2017 and has always been on Amazon. He recently moved his product to Whole Foods and is looking into how to expand into other stores like H-E-B.
To make that a reality, he’s needed places like the Air Hub to cut costs for himself. Though Amazon takes a small cut of each product sold, it’s worth it in the long run, he said.
“To me, you can’t afford not being on Amazon. Think about it, Amazon is a good way to get feedback on your product, allows us to closer study our market and save costs. We could never do infrastructure like this for ourselves,” he said.
There are more than 39,000 Texan independent sellers on Amazon, a small but important fraction of the company’s total 10 million sellers. Amazon’s revenue hit $574.8 billion revenue in 2023.
With so much more traffic on the way, some at the Haslet Air Hub predict it’s only a matter of time until it finally meets the 800,000 packages per day capacity. When that day arrives, Amazon and its workers say they’ll be ready to meet demand.
“It’s all based on the aircraft we have in our fleet at any given point in time. This is a mega facility, so we would need more flights to reach that volume,” Sebacuzi said. “We think it would happen during our peak season, which I fully expect we should realize at some point.”
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