UPS: STAND AND DELIVER
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FORTUNE.COM // JANUARY 2020
the line. Via a small gap in the conveyor belt and a sys-
tem of carefully placed bright red lights and mirrors,
the cameras snap pictures in a fraction of a second of
all six sides of every box, without slowing their flow. An
image-processing system instantly decodes the desti-
nation information inscribed on each box’s label and
decides which of more than 300 exit bays in the facility
has the correct departing truck to take the box on the
next part of its journey, whether to a nearby home or
business, or to another city, state, or country.
As packages zip out of the scanner, each is joined by
a shadow companion moving at the same speed along
the side of the conveyor. They take the form of little
black rectangles—UPS calls them “shoes,” and they’re
about that size. Each package gets accompanied by
a pair, or a bunch, depending on its size and weight.
These are some smart shoes, though: They whiz down
the line, escorting a box, and then, just when thecompany stands more than a fighting chance in its uneasy
rivalry with Amazon, the e-commerce giant that is UPS’s
biggest customer but is increasingly expanding into logis-
tics and delivery work too.
Every day, hundreds of tractor-trailer trucks from UPS
and big customers like Walmart, Target, and, yes, Amazon
trundle into the Bankhead neighborhood and pull up at one
of the hub’s 104 unloading bays. UPS workers quickly roll
up each truck’s back door and unload the contents onto an
intake conveyor belt. That belt cleverly extrudes deeper into
the truck as the “UPSers” empty the contents, shortening
the distance that the worker needs to carry packages.
But it’s not until the package exits the truck that the
technology gets truly mind-blowing. It sounds impossible
to believe, but the average box spends only seven minutes
inside the terminal, a building that’s so large, I can barely
see from one end to the other. UPS doesn’t usually allow
outsiders into the center during its busy season—from
Black Friday through Christmas—but made an exception
for Fortune the day after Cyber Monday.
Each intake belt zips boxes of almost every size and shape
up away from the trucks to larger consolidating belt lines,
which in turn move them toward the center of the build-
ing. (Really big packages, like your 80-inch LCD screen TV,
are known as “irregs” and get shunted off to a special area.)
Once consolidated, each wave of boxes approaches one of
the brains of the operation: the scanner tunnels.
Approaching one of the tunnels isn’t for the faint of
heart. Clambering three stories up on the slatted metal
catwalks has already put me on edge. The noise from the
whirring belts drowns out any conversation below the
volume of a yell. And when I get up close to the belt, I in-
voluntarily jump back—the speed of the packages pouring
down the line triggers a reflexive, defensive reaction in my
brain. Despite the hundreds of UPSers on the job at the
facility, our four-person tour group seems to be far from
the nearest help if something goes wrong.
Taking a deep breath and focusing on the task at hand, I
can see that the stream of packages offers evidence to back
up a boast that UPS CEO David Abney made to me earlier
that day. The company delivers for nine of the 10 largest
U.S. retailers by revenue, Abney says, not to mention much
of the rest of the industry. Sure enough, the boxes stream-
ing past show a grab bag of logos of every company I can
think of that sells online, from Amazon’s smile to Wayfair’s
box cross to Target’s bull’s-eye. (Plus some I’ve never heard
of—Etrailer.com?)
The scanning tunnel, it turns out, isn’t really a tunnel:
It’s a metal frame the size of a small SUV. The frame holds
six high-speed cameras, made by Italian automation spe-
cialist Datalogic, that perch over, next to, and underneath