Life inside Amazon's £500m warehouse in Sutton Coldfield where robots make life peaceful

Life inside Amazon's £500m warehouse in Sutton Coldfield is extremely busy around Black Friday and the Christmas period. But robots are making work 'peaceful' there.

Daily Star journalist Harry Thompson carried out a shift to see how what goes behind the iconic brown parcel. He described robots being the "king in this great capitalist jungle."

He said the warehouse is "spooky" and sits in "deathly silence" broken just by the electronic hum of scores of robots whizzing across passages like a giant game of Pac Man.

READ MORE: Birmingham bus stabbing probe as police seek to trace masked man

He wrote on the Daily Star: "What is truly staggering is how your order gets from the left side to the right side without the fuss, noise or the chaos you might associate with what my guides called ‘busy season’.

View gallery

"Everything about it was peaceful. First boxes from suppliers are sent to a section called Predicant, where staff break down boxes and put sellers' products into separate containers before sending them off to a place called Stow.

"This is where today’s robot-oriented world becomes apparent. Above the ground floor, three identical replicas stack on top of one another, each human-friendly margin encircling a central labyrinth of tightly-packed yellow columns called ‘bins’. Each bin stands around 10-feet tall and stands around 12inches from the ground, filled with everything from books to bin bags."

Harry said that orange jacks worn by humans emit a signal which stops the collisions with bots along narrow corridors. He said there's no one in sight. But the bots operate on a computer algorithm which is referred to as "the background."

Continuing the process he said that a "conveyor belts of goods whizz almost silently by, funnelled down from ‘Pickers’ who take items off the bins delivered to doors at the edge of the central labyrinth by bots."

He adds: "Once packaged up, either here or in conveyor-belt oriented picking zones on the ground floor, parcels move into the Slam section. Despite appearing to slam labels onto parcels using compressed gas, the place actually got its punky title because it stands for Ship Label Apply Manifest, which is slightly less rock and roll.

"As each package is given its shipping label, a text is fired off to the customer telling them their order has been dispatched, and from here it runs along a conveyor belt down and chute and into a large container where it awaits its lorry.

"From here it’s on to a local hub before delivery just in time to save some poor fool who forgot their loved one’s birthday/valentines/Black Friday(?)/Christmas. My legs ached and my brain was frazzled from trying to comprehend this wild, spooky place but in the era of hyper-mechanised efficiency, this beautifully controlled chaos makes a nation’s next day delivery demands make a lot of sense."