From NyTimes, At Online Giant, It's the Season of Sweat
By SAM HOWE VERHOVE
Larry Davis for The New York Times Orders to Amazon.com may travel through the electronic ether, but human beings still need to fill them, physically. In the pre-Christmas rush, executives like Rick Dalzell, center below, have pitched in to help warehouse employees like J.J. Wandler, left; and Cedric Ross,
"Easy for the customer, sure," said Todd Bradley, a 27-year-old cart runner threading through the maze of shelves at the company's vast distribution center here. "You just kick back at home and wait." Cedric Ross, 29, the training manager, added: "There's nothing virtual about it for us. We've got books to get out the door here."
The Seattle-based company has transformed the world of Internet commerce, offering millions of book and compact-disk titles at discount prices and generally tax-free, all just one click of a computer mouse away. With 4.5 million customers in 160 countries, and with orders coming in around the clock at the rate of more than $20 a second, the three-year-old company and its 34-year-old founder, Jeffrey P. Bezos, are already a marketing legend.
At the end of the day, though -- or at 5 A.M., which is when Bezos and many of the company's other top executives have shown up recently to help at the distribution warehouse, bleary-eyed and all but oblivious to outside events like the impeachment crisis engulfing the White House -- somebody has to put books in boxes. The orders course through the electronic ether, but on the other end of the transaction a human being still needs to fill them.
Indeed, for all the attention paid to the remarkable technology and sophisticated software involved in electronic commerce, a glimpse at this company in action during the frantic pre-Christmas rush suggests that an online store like Amazon.com still needs plenty of old-fashioned elbow grease to compete in the virtual marketplace. Here, amid stacks and shelves and hundreds of old wooden library carts, the company is engaged in an all-hands alert to fill holiday orders on time.
While much of the 1,600-employee business is computerized, a worker still has to walk to a shelf and retrieve a book. And the stock itself is arranged in a numbering system that would drive an old Dewey-decimal librarian crazy. One case here in the warehouse holds copies of "Taxes for Dummies," "The Tao of Sex," Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, the "Goosebumps" children's book series and Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason."
At Amazon.com, the C.E.O.'s place has been at the warehouse.
Normally the orders that come in here are handled smoothly by an energetic army of largely 20-something "associates," who have fast become a literally colorful part of company lore. Many dye their hair in hues that range across the full spectrum, and adorn an impressive number of pierced body parts with jewelry. All have the good fortune to receive stock options in Amazon.com in addition to their hourly wages.
But in recent weeks the company has been so thoroughly deluged with holiday orders that it has hired hundreds of temporary workers here and at its other big distribution center, in New Castle, Del., and brought executives from the downtown Seattle headquarters to the warehouse in an industrial neighborhood here.
Not that those executives are buttoned-down types themselves: at the headquarters, it is far easier to find dogs, which are welcome to hang out there with their masters, than neckties, which appear to be distinctly frowned upon. In any event, some of the company's brainiest talent, people who are usually found designing new Web pages or researching other products for potential sales online, can now be found taking the merchandise off the shelves one book at a time, or pitching in at the loading docks.
With Christmas now at hand, the company says it has largely met its commitment to ship any book in stock out the door within 24 hours. That is a commitment that holds the key to an online company's success, and Amazon.com's ability to expand and keep meeting it is the subject of fervent debate among stock analysts.
Although the company has yet to actually report a profit, its stock has continued to soar, reaching $329 a share today, its highest level ever, before closing at $322.375.
Some analysts say the price still has far to go. Henry Blodget of CIBC Oppenheimer said last week that he expected it to hit $400 within a year, and pronounced the company "in the early stages of building a global electronic-retailing franchise that could generate $10 billion in revenue and earnings per share of $10 within five years." (Sales in the most recent quarter were $153.7 million.) |
