Coppell Chronicle Vol. 4, No. 3
Let’s Look Inside an Amazon Facility • Coppell Has a Second, Ill-Defined ZIP Code • Trustees Discuss Tax-Ratification Election • How Did Coppell Vote in Primaries?
Let’s Look Inside an Amazon Facility
Did you know Amazon offers tours of its facilities to the general public? The corporate behemoth has four buildings in Coppell, and your correspondent recently toured the one known as FTW6.
Amazon’s facilities are named after airport codes. Our tour guide said the company avoids double digits in its designations, so even though FTW6 is within the DFW International Airport flight path, its name alludes to Fort Worth’s Meacham International Airport because there were already nine Amazon buildings named after DFW.
FTW6 boasts 1 million square feet of space and was the largest Amazon facility in the world when it opened six years ago, our guide said. It has 2,500 employees at the moment who can sort 1 million boxes during a 10-hour shift. She said their shifts are actually 10 and a half hours; they get two 30-minute breaks, but only one of them is paid.
The facility is open around the clock on every day of the year except Christmas and New Year’s Day. However, it was closed on Saturday for maintenance. Anybody who was scheduled to work yesterday — including our tour guide — got a paid day off. According to Indeed, most Amazon employees in Coppell make between $15 and $17 per hour.
Although Amazon has battled organized labor, the company promotes clubs for its employees who are Black, Latino, Asian, LGBTQ, military veterans, hard of hearing, or physically disabled. We were taken through a hallway highlighting entry-level employees who have been promoted to management positions. As we walked along the mile-long tour route, I noticed a series of Mamava lactation pods for nursing mothers. Nearby, there were several prayer mats hidden behind wicker screens, affording a lesser degree of privacy to Muslim employees.
There’s a designated drop-off area near the front door for visually impaired employees. In the middle of the parking lot, there’s a covered shelter where people without vehicles can wait for rideshare services.
(See “Coppell to Keep Helping Commuters via Lyft” in Vol. 3, No. 29)
I spied a few vending machines along the tour where employees could buy drinks or snacks, but they were outnumbered by the vending machines offering supplies such as safety vests, safety goggles, earplugs, and box cutters. The fulfillment center is filled with high-speed conveyor belts and slides, and our guide said it’s tempting to take a ride on them. However, she said doing so would be the quickest way to transition from an Amazon employee to an Amazon customer.
The center of FTW6 is split into four levels. Our guide took us to one of the open-air areas on the facility’s edges, and that was the only place where photos were permitted. Another person on the tour tried to snap a picture of what I’m going to describe next, and our guide kindly reminded her that photography was not allowed.
The bulk of those four levels are off-limits to humans. Behind a chain-link fence, a small army of robots that resemble Roomba vacuum cleaners zip around the floor while carrying soft-sided shelving units. Each set of shelves appeared to be four columns wide by 11 rows high, and they were filled with small items that Amazon customers had ordered.
(Our guide said FTW6 doesn’t handle anything larger than a microwave oven. FTW2, which is one block to the east on Bethel Road, is devoted to bigger items.)
The robots would zoom up to an opening in the chain-link fence, where an employee stood on a raised platform. A computer told him where to find a particular item on the soft-sided shelf, and then it told him which of five bins to place it in. He punched a button after completing each task, and the computer told him what to do next; it sometimes told him to take a break. A separate screen turned his work into a video game, allowing him to compete with his peers if he chose to. Although the employee we observed was working quickly, he did not seem interested in the competition.
The operation temporarily ground to a halt as soon as we approached his station. A technician stepped behind the fence to repair something, after suspending the robots’ activities for safety’s sake. They would not have been able to avoid him because they navigate by scanning QR codes on the floor.
I was one of a dozen people on my tour, and that group included four children. Click here if you’d like to take your own tour, but please note that Amazon believes FTW6 is located in Grapevine. That discrepancy provides a good segue to the topic of my next article.
Coppell Has a Second, Ill-Defined ZIP Code
I recently received a package with a return address that included an odd ZIP code: 75099. I initially assumed this was a typo and that the address should have been Coppell’s 75019, but it turns out our city has a second ZIP code. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you exactly where it is.