SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Amazon is opening up select facilities that will show every part of the process of how they get items off the web and onto the customer's front porch.
Tours for the Sacramento and Tracy Fulfillment Centers will be opening up in February for the general public. While the tours are new to the region, they aren’t new to Amazon as whole.
The company has been offering public tours at some of their facilities for about the past four years, according to Amazon PR representative Lauren Lynch. However, the program's expansion will now be encompassing 23 Amazon locations across the United States, with a total of three tour locations in California.
“It’s interesting to see what happens inside fulfillment centers,” Lynch said. “It’s not something that a lot of people have had exposure to.”
Inside the fulfillment centers, Amazon is offering a tour highlighting everything that happens from the moment a customer clicks “buy” on their website.
From families to classrooms, people will be to see the cycle of an order being picked from the Amazon inventory to being sent off to a waiting customer.
Lynch added that the Amazon Robotics, formerly known as the Kiva System, will also get to be seen in action. These robots head to the inventory to pick up pods and bring them to pickers, making work more efficient and faster.
“These robotic drives are about the size of a coffee table, and they kind of look like a large Roomba.”
For students or families with kids interested in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, the tour offers a chance to see the STEM field in action and to what an education in those fields could lead.
While the tour isn't inherently STEM based, it is a major part of how Amazon stays efficient and something that tour-goers will be immersed in during the tour. Some tours might even provide some hands-on activities for touring school children, however, those activities aren't standard.
To book a tour, parties can visit their website to schedule tours for their Sacramento and Tracy locations once they open up to the public in February.
An opportunity in Tracy
For the City of Tracy, the announcement of these tours marks an exciting development as their downtown continues a surge in momentum and other projects attempt to bring in additional tourists.
In regard to the Amazon tours, Tracy has been taking inquiries about potential tours since the building opened up.
“There’s always been an interest in how Amazon works, and so very soon after that, we were having people come and say ‘hey, can I get a tour…’ because they were talking about the Kiva System and the robotics system that they have,” said Barbara Harb, Economic Development Analyst.
Often times, those requests would come from schools hoping to show visuals of what opportunities are available in STEM to students.
For those youths interested in STEM, Harb said that it gives them a chance “to see how another industry may work-- to potentially draw them into another field they may not have been considering before.”
With Amazon’s announcement, the tour has become another feature for the city’s growing tourism efforts, which include their craft beer events in April and November, the Downtown Tracy Wine Stroll that attracts people both locally and from the Bay Area every year, and their popular Legacy Fields sports park.
Notably, it also follows the announcement of a new aquatics center that the city hopes will be a significant attraction.
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