In the UPS warehouse, which focuses on super fast shipping

Retail warehouses tend to all have the same pulse. They’re a hive of workers, with forklifts and boxes, moving goods from point A to point B. But the UPS Velocity warehouse near Louisville, Kentucky, was designed for e-commerce. And it’s oddly quiet.

“So we have a little over 700 robots,” said Thomas Stearman, director of industrial engineering at Velocity, “and they’re working 24 hours a day.”

Velocity’s 900,000-square-foot facility, which opened last winter, is staffed by more robots than humans. The warehouse isn’t just for processing and shipping orders. It stores inventory directly from the manufacturer—although the word “warehousing” is used loosely here. Most retailers that use the warehouse turn over their inventory every few months.

“We want to process volume. We don’t want this to be a storage facility,” Stearman said. “We want incoming items to be turned over.”

The one- and two-day shipping that Amazon has made ubiquitous has put pressure on nearly every other retailer to catch up. Meanwhile, the massive growth of e-commerce—sales have nearly quadrupled in the past decade, according to the Census Bureau—has put pressure on retailers and shipping companies to streamline logistics to shave minutes off the process.

Because UPS retail customers at Velocity sell mostly online, they want to move quickly to capitalize on trends and get products out quickly. Five brands are stored in this warehouse, with one prominently displayed during the tour.

“She’s one of our biggest clients and fastest-growing brands,” Stearman said.

Marketplace can’t name the brand because of the UPS deal. All we can tell you is that it’s a new apparel company that focuses on lingerie and loungewear.

Being new means the brand is still learning how to be nimble. This is one of the most difficult parts of shipping logistics. You have to be ready to take advantage of that overnight shopper who needs (or wants) something tomorrow. For next-day delivery via airfreight, Velocity can take orders up until 11 p.m.

Let’s stop for a moment and realize how normal this has become — that you can have a glow-in-the-dark phone without leaving your bed, buy a vegetable spiralizer at 10:59 p.m., and have zucchini noodles for dinner the next day.

Here’s what happens when you click “buy” and go to bed: It creates an immediate buzz at UPS. If it’s a popular item, it’s probably already in a priority area for things that are expected to sell quickly. That requires UPS and its retailers to do some forecasting.

“Let’s say there’s a sale coming up, well, (we’ll ask) what items are going to be included in that sale so we’re ready as soon as the orders are placed,” Stearman said.

With one-day shipping, every minute counts. UPS can’t afford to waltz into the deepest depths of its warehouse, one item at a time, and expect to ship it across the country in 24 hours. So if a product goes viral and gets more clicks, the inventory will creep closer to the front of the warehouse, eventually joining the sea of blue boxes full of all sorts of popular products. Stearman calls it the dance floor.

“We were considering putting a giant disco ball over it,” he said.

This is where the robots live. They look like Roomba vacuums, but they’re maybe four times bigger—big, flat disks that glide under piles of blue bins. The robots take them to packing stations on the other side of the floor.

“And we like to call them that because they really spin and it looks like they’re dancing,” Stearman said.

Robots move around constantly, constantly re-prioritizing boxes of items as UPS computers gather more data on what’s selling. Once orders are complete, humans take over. They pack, seal and label boxes.

“We have some things that make it easier,” Stearman said. “But it still requires a human touch for us to actually do it.”

Leaving this warehouse isn’t the end of the journey, though. Many of the packages are headed to the airport, just 15 minutes away on the motorway, for a one-way flight tonight.

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