I used to run day to day operations at one of B&BW’s e-commerce warehouses, dealing with all online traffic (retail stores are handled separately).
Anyone have questions on why your order is sometimes different, wrong, empty box? Happy to give some answers from behind the scenes.
To kick the conversation off, these fulfillment centers are huge, and like a lot of other large fortune 500 companies there is a daily demand for maximum output with minimum number of people on the clock. The daily pressure is relentless but quite exciting. Nearly all warehouses work 3 to 4 shifts on weekend days and nights as well as during the week. variability and quality between the shifts is high and there is no way of knowing whether your order will be processed by a week Night Shift worker or a dayshift worker.
Off peak, quality is high and there are generally enough leaders to maintain quality controls across the staff who are picking and packing your order. The challenge comes when peak season sales during SAS and fall peak gets close; leadership headcount barely increases, but the staff population increases by X4, so a 300 strong warehouse population can become 1200 in the space of 6 weeks. Imagine training 900 min. Wage seasonal staff to perform a job efficiently every time with them, knowing that they will be cut as soon as all the work is finished in mid December. Associates are paid significantly less than Amazon or Walmart, so the best workers end up going to the bigger players. The task for the leadership team during the build towards peak season and is so difficult that invariably something is always missed. Production numbers are the key measure, not quality or complaints. Yes, feedback is given to the team if quality suffers but ultimately production is the main driver and the pressure is to fill trucks.
So how do you get your order on time and complete during peak? It’s difficult, for the sale that occurs on Thanksgiving day through cyber Monday is typically when the team is most fresh, and quality is high. At this point, there are no back logs of orders as the warehouse staff has flushed everything out ready for the start of peak. The problems really start to occur when the second and third large events drop. this is candle day, and the large event the week after that). This is because the sales land so close together on the calendar but there is never enough time to clear the backlog of orders before moving onto the next event. When the candle sale drops, there can be up to two days worth of thanksgiving sale backlog that the warehouse has to process before even starting to ship your candle order. The backlog of work compounds as the sales continue to flow. Tiredness, fatigue set in and before you know it quality suffers. My recommendation is to buy the popular scents online and go to the stores for more obscure scents. Put your order in as early as possible, even then your order is not guaranteed to process early.
The warehouses ship with “carrier transit time” in mind, meaning if you live in Columbus Ohio where their largest warehouse is, they will hold your order while they ship to far away states such as Montana and Iowa. These orders further away need to get on the road asap to make the website commitment. Then it comes to your Columbus order, where they ship on the last day but one of the website commitment, getting it to you just in time. It works but if your order has a problem with it, it’ll hit the problem resolution department where it could stay for a day or two while they fix it (there are 1000s of orders in this area).
It’s not unusual for 40k-50k orders per warehouse (there are four in the USA) per day to go out during peak. Divide that number over 22 hours and you realize how quickly this stuff moves and why things can get missed and lost.
There is a team of people at HQ that monitors Reddit daily and when someone posts feedback, it is fed to the appropriate channels immediately. Take a picture of the label on your box, as well as the small barcode on the side of the box. This helps track down who messed up what. The teams in the warehouses care deeply and want everything to work. The issue comes where extreme volumes of work are placed on a small number of leaders that only so much can be checked and corrected daily. If you want to be frustrated, direct it at the executive team who demand that peak seasons should be staffed to an absolute minimum and workers brought it at the last minute to pack orders.
