E-commerce warehouse<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

W<\/span>ASHINGTON (AP) \u2014<\/strong> When the robots came to online retailer Boxed, dread came, too: The familiar fear that the machines would take over, leaving a trail of unemployed humans in their wake.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had a lot of people asking me, \u2018What is going to happen to us?\u2019\u201d says Veronica Mena, a trainer for the e-commerce startup, recalling the anxiety that rippled through her co-workers after company executives announced plans to open an automated warehouse in nearby Union, New Jersey.<\/p>\n

Yet their fears didn\u2019t come to pass.<\/p>\n

When the new warehouse opened this spring, workers found that their jobs were less physically demanding than at the older, manual warehouse in Edison, New Jersey. Instead of walking thousands of steps a day loading items onto carts, employees could stand at stations as conveyor belts brought the goods to them.<\/p>\n

And rather than cutting jobs, the company added a third shift to keep up with rapidly growing demand.<\/p>\n

What happened at\u00a0Boxed<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 and has occurred elsewhere \u2014 suggests that widespread fears about automation and job loss are often misplaced. Automation has actually helped create jobs in e-commerce, rather than eliminate them, and stands to create more in the years ahead. By accelerating delivery times, robotics and software have made online shopping an increasingly viable alternative to bricks-and-mortar stores, and sales have ballooned at online retailers.<\/p>\n

The surge in e-commerce has required the rapid build-out of a vast network of warehouses and delivery systems that include both robots and human workers. The robots didn\u2019t take jobs from people because many of the jobs didn\u2019t exist before.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not looking to do the same work with half the people,\u201d said Rick Zumpano, vice president for distribution at Boxed. \u201cSince we\u2019re growing, we need everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Newer robotic technologies do loom as a threat to some e-commerce jobs. Startup robotics companies are developing robot arm prototypes, for example, that can pick goods from shelves. Those devices may replace some workers over the next decade.<\/p>\n

But the explosion of e-commerce and the ease of automation are leading e-commerce companies to build more warehouses. So even if each warehouse employs fewer workers, the proliferation of new warehouses is projected to generate hiring across the industry.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, jobs have been lost at storefront retailers, which have suffered under the e-commerce onslaught. Venerable chains such as Toys \u201cR\u2033 Us, RadioShack, and Payless ShoeSource have all filed for bankruptcy this year.<\/p>\n

There are widespread fears that things will get only worse for the nation\u2019s 16 million retail workers. Self-checkout kiosks and experimental stores like\u00a0Amazon\u2019s Go, which has no cashiers, could theoretically eliminate millions of retail jobs.<\/p>\n

But worries about a \u201cretail apocalypse\u201d have missed a more important trend: E-commerce actually leads to more jobs by paying people to do things we used to do ourselves.<\/p>\n

When people shop online, tasks that once filled their days \u2014 driving to a store, searching through aisles for a product, bringing it to a cashier and paying for it \u2014 are now done by warehouse employees and truck drivers. People spend less time shopping than in the past, research shows.<\/p>\n

Joe Song, an economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch who has studied government data, has found that working women are spending less time shopping \u2014 nearly 25 hours less per year compared with a decade earlier. Song attributes the time savings mainly to e-commerce. Families increasingly outsource shopping to e-commerce employees, just as many have long outsourced other household tasks to child care workers or house cleaners. In each case, jobs are created.<\/p>\n

That means the bankruptcies and store closings in the retail sector aren\u2019t the complete picture. While jobs have been lost in stores, much more has been gained from online shopping. Michael Mandel, an economist at the Progressive Policy Institute, calculates that the number of e-commerce and warehousing jobs has leapt by 400,000 in the past decade, easily offsetting the loss of 140,000 brick-and-mortar retail jobs.<\/p>\n

Amazon accounts for much of the additional employment. Yet it\u2019s also at the vanguard of automation. Since 2014, Amazon has deployed 100,000 robots in 25 warehouses worldwide. At the same time, it\u2019s nearly tripled its hourly workforce, from roughly 45,000 to nearly 125,000.<\/p>\n

Its use of robotics has shaved the operating costs for a warehouse by about 20 percent, according to a report by Deutsche Bank. Such savings, in turn, have lowered the cost for Amazon to open new facilities \u2014 and hire more workers.<\/p>\n

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Mandel points out that it\u2019s a lot like what happened more than a 100 years ago when Henry Ford\u2019s installation of assembly lines \u2014 an early form of automation \u2014 helped reduce the price of cars, which boosted demand so much that Ford needed more workers.<\/p>\n

Robots have displaced many manufacturing workers in the past two to three decades, enabling factories to produce more with fewer employees.<\/p>\n

Yet e-commerce and warehousing are growing far faster than manufacturing is \u2014 a crucial difference that lessens the impact of automation. E-commerce sales are surging roughly five times as fast as storefront retail sales, according to market research firm Forrester. By 2022, they\u2019re expected to account for 17 percent of all retail sales, up from 13 percent this year.<\/p>\n

From a handful of distribution centers in 2000, Amazon now has more than 240 warehouses and smaller delivery facilities, according to MWPVL, a consulting firm. Those warehouses have created tens of thousands of jobs and boosted wages in some communities, which many local employers call \u201cthe Amazon effect.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Amazon is not the only company that has experienced growth due to e-commerce.<\/p>\n

Walmart, the world\u2019s largest retailer, recently opened its sixth e-commerce campus near Orlando, Florida. Like the others, it includes a million square foot warehouse.<\/p>\n

Walmart is also expanding its online grocery pickup service to 2,000 stores, double the 1,000 where it is now available. It allows Walmart\u2019s customers to order groceries online but requires more workers, not fewer. Ravi Jariwala, a spokesman, says Walmart has created a new job classification \u2014 \u201cpersonal shopper\u201d \u2014 to do what customers once did themselves: Pick and package orders.<\/p>\n

And XPO Logistics, which ships mostly appliances and other heavy goods, has hired 3,000 warehouse workers in the past year to keep up with growing e-commerce, bringing its total to 26,000. It\u2019s adding a million square feet of warehouse about every four to six weeks, says Ashfaque Chowdhury, president of XPO\u2019s supply chain in the Americas and Asia.<\/p>\n

Chowdhury says items that many people wouldn\u2019t have felt comfortable buying on the internet not long ago \u2014 from refrigerators to treadmills to furniture \u2014 are becoming routine online purchases. And the company is also planning to open a million square foot warehouse in the Midwest exclusively to handle returns.<\/p>\n

All these trends have been helped by automation\u2019s ability to hold down costs, such as Walmart\u2019s use of drones to help track its warehouse inventory.<\/p>\n

Still, a tour of Boxed\u2019s gleaming new warehouse in Union makes it easy to see why people worry that automation costs jobs. Everywhere you look you see machines and rows of neatly organized pallets of goods.<\/p>\n

But not so many workers. Through the 140,000-square-foot building, two miles of conveyor belts quietly whisk plastic bins containing customers\u2019 orders. One machine stamps mailing labels on boxes. Spread thinly along the conveyor belts, roughly three dozen workers operate on the floor.<\/p>\n

Among the first stops on the conveyor is a four-story-high robotic contraption known as \u201cPerfect Pick.\u201d It enables one employee filling orders to choose from 700 items. An automated container, the iBOT, zips up and down and back and forth among the Perfect Pick\u2019s shelves, where products are stored.<\/p>\n

The iBOT retrieves small items \u2014 health and beauty products and snack foods \u2014 and brings them to the employee, who places them in bins.<\/p>\n

At Amazon\u2019s much larger warehouse in Baltimore, there are more workers, but also a lot more robots. They lift shelves of goods and roll them to the company\u2019s pickers, who select items that customers have ordered before the robots return the shelves to storage.<\/p>\n

Even so, there are still jobs at both warehouses for people to do. At Boxed, the bins glide from the Perfect Pick to other employees, who select additional items to complete an order. A separate group, the packers, puts everything in pastel-hued boxes for shipment. Fitting multiple items of different shapes and textures into a box is something people still do much better than robots.<\/p>\n

Barbara Ward, 56, is a packer at Boxed, and like all her colleagues, she writes a thank-you note for each order she packages. It\u2019s part of Boxed\u2019s effort to preserve some aspects of the conventional shopping experience. When a customer has ordered diapers, a packer might write a congratulatory note.<\/p>\n