Black Friday - Amazon: behind the scenes with robots and Stormtroopers - what's it really like in an Amazon factory?

Well, after being invited inside Leeds’ LBA5 so-called ‘Amazon fulfilment centre’ (factory to you and me) I now have a relatively good idea of what actually does go on inside these places, and the first thing you should know is that all Amazon factories are equal, but some are more equal than others.

What am I on about? Well: due to the obscene scale that Amazon’s logistics business operates at, delivering ludicrously efficient standards of customer service and satisfaction, as well as having production lines inside the factories, the factories, too, individually and as a collective, are set up like a production line.

Receiving centres do just that: allow sellers - butchers, bakers, candlestick makers - to send bulk batches of the things they make for distribution around the country (world!). It means less faff for Mrs Jones who makes bath bombs on the side, removing the need for the seller to post small denominations to multiple sites for selling on. Amazon does all of that for you.

Then there’s fulfilment centres, like the one I’m about to tell you about in Leeds. These places receive, sort, store and ship out relatively small goods (more on that shortly) simultaneously, sending stuff on to delivery stations, where an army of couriers does the final yards. You probably know the name of yours.

Then, there’s big-stuff centres (my description, not theirs), or non-sortable fulfilment centres. Canoes, patio furniture and the like. So, from a macro perspective, each factory is a person, standing at various positions of a nationwide conveyor belt, responding to your every ‘buy now’ click, to ensure you don’t have to battle into Leeds, park up and pay for parking, like a good citizen who wants to spend his money in town, only to find that a few days later some pencil-necked jobsworth from BaySentry Solutions (whoever they are!) has sent you a threatening letter, insisting you pay them £100 immediately on pain of death for having the temerity to pay them £7.50 for a few hours’ time in their Armouries car park! Honestly, no wonder town and city centres are on their backsides.

Anyway, back to the job in hand: what’s it like inside one of these factories? Well, if you’re hoping for one of those hatchet jobs done by secret camera where Amazon is exposed as a relentless, ruthless enemy of the people, you may as well move on. Nothing to see in that regard, here.

The first thing I noticed, after the sheer size of the place, was the workforce. Young, really young in fact. I felt like a crusty old codger at a sixth form do. And diverse. Fantastically, wondrously, diverse. Clearly benefiting from being situated on the fringes of the multicultural melting pot that is Leeds, but also, perhaps, owing to the smiley Amazon arrow that swoops beneath its name - it is globally recognised and on the evidence I saw, universally welcoming. Oh, and here’s another thing about the workforce, they were happy. We could sense it. Young lads high-fiving in the foyer, a cheerful ‘excuse me, please’ from a lady in a headscarf as I got right in the way of what she needed to do (sorry!). Pickers and packers working alongside HR advisers, finance managers, data analysts and Star Wars Stormtroopers, stomping around in dazzlingly bright, lit-up vests, wielding tablets like light-sabres, ready to trouble-shoot any technical issues caused by great big lumbering idiots who visit for the day and put their hand where a robot might eat it for breakfast, thereby causing safety alarms bells and whistles to go off everywhere (sorry again - yes, that was me … again).

But also on duty: robots. Now, these things are fascinating. The best way I can describe them is resembling one of those robot lawnmowers. They have a lifting deck on top that rotates 360 degrees and they fly around the place picking up cages of stock to be picked from by someone or to be replenished. In essence, the stock comes to a person rather than a person having to run to find the stock. From what I saw, they only go in straight lines, spinning 90-degrees here, 270-degrees there, do not run on tracks, never ever bump into one another, never ever drop a cage and when they’re feeling tired at any given point, take themselves off to a kennel for a re-charge, waving off a pal from the substitutes’ bench whose batteries are full.

Honestly, it’s quite the sight. OK, in the grand scheme of things the stock-bots aren’t moving all that quickly. Probably two or three miles an hour. But in the scheme of carrying around, worldwide, all at the same time, billions, trillions of items of stock - phenomenal. The highest of high-tech being utilised for one end result only: a conveyor belt of happy, returning customers.

Because when you boil it all down, these are factories that make nothing at all. The reality of what’s being done, when you strip it all back, is utterly banal. The constant whir of motors facilitates the moving of stuff from a to b, shelf to customer, in little black crates the like of which your Tesco big shop turns up in, to be labelled (they blow the label on with a blast of compressed air so as not to compromise the package - cool, eh?) and sent out. Packages flying through the air, almost like a printing press, with lasers, scanners and sorters doing the heavy lifting.

In truth, the amazing bit is the symbiotic synchromeshing of mankind and machinery: of tech and talent. I’m not here to do Amazon’s PR for them, they pay people more than me to do that, but there comes a moment where credit must be given where credit is due - and I’m not talking just about Amazon per se, but about what we can achieve as human beings when we put our minds to it - and so if you ever get the chance to have a nosy around inside - take it. Factories have come a long way since I were a lad.

Oh, and by way of a little heads-up, if you can’t reverse-park your car, you can’t go. They make you do that. I think it’s a test. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!