Matteson Amazon Facility Gears Up for a Busy Holiday Season (Matteson, IL) — The Matteson, IL Amazon Warehouse on Vollmer Rd. and Harlem Ave. is gearing up for a busy holiday season. According to the site’s general manager Lamonte Heyward, the facility has hired about 650 employees to help get through the holidays, bringing the total number of associates there to around 3,200. “Over the course of the last two and a half months, we have probably onboarded approximately 650 new associates….in preparation for what today will be, our largest ship-volume since we launched the building a little over a year ago.”

Today, Cyber Monday, will be a record-breaking day for the Matteson facility. Cyber Monday, Black Friday’s digital counterpart, has been growing since the term was first coined by the National Retail Federation in 2005. Each year, Cyber Monday sales have been up over the previous years’, with this year’s biggest online shopping day expecting to hit over $11 billion in sales despite inflation and an overall negative consumer sentiment.

The state-of-the-art Matteson facility was first opened last October and has been ramping up their capacity to help meet that demand. According to Heyward, “Today, we are probably going to move through here about 500,000 units.” According to 2020 holiday shopping data, Amazon holds the highest market share of Cyber Monday shopping sales, at 56% of total online sales for the day.

The employee shortage that has been plaguing the nation does not seem to have affected this facility. Heyward said that the facility is fully-staffed. When working with their staffing agencies, Heyward said that, “They’ve been able to over-deliver.” Employee turnover at the facility is down as well. According to Heyward, Amazon has worked hard to raise employee retention rates by ensuring that employees are happy, understand the culture of the corporation, and are appreciated. The facility has hired a number of temporary employees, however, Heyward said that it is his duty to make sure that the site and job are welcoming to the “white badge” temporary employees in hopes of turning them into “blue badge” long-term employees. He emphasized that their temporary employees are not laid off after the end of the peak season.

The facility in Matteson is ripe with new technology. With robots and people working side by side to get packages out to Midwestern consumers in a timely manner, it begs the question: are people being replaced? Heyward said that is not the case. “All of our processes have an interaction of the human touch. The automation allows us to move the product more efficiently in the building. It doesn’t necessarily replace people. All of our processes have a human element that interacts with our automation or robots.”

Matteson Amazon Facility Gears Up for a Busy Holiday Season

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