Lisa DeJong/The Plain Dealer

ETNA, Ohio -- E-commerce giant Amazon plans to start accepting applications Monday for workers to staff its massive fulfillment operation in North Randall, a tiny village east of Cleveland.

That 855,000-square-foot facility is scheduled to open in the fall on the site where Randall Park Mall stood for nearly 40 years. The operation, where workers will pick, pack and ship small items such as books and consumer electronics, is projected to employ more than 2,000 people.

Amazon, a publicly traded company based in Seattle, has been criticized at times for working conditions and pay at its distribution facilities. In the Columbus area, new fulfillment center associates make between $14.80 and $18 an hour before benefits. Nationally, the company's starting pay is $15 an hour, on average.

In North Randall - and at another fulfillment center set to open in Euclid early next year, on the former Euclid Square Mall site - workers will have access to health and dental coverage and retirement-savings options starting on the first day. After a year of employment, they'll be eligible for near-full tuition coverage for studies related to high-demand jobs, such as truck driving or nursing.

E-commerce is a fast-growing business in Ohio, which ranked seventh among the states in the total number of jobs in the industry in 2016, according to an Associated Press analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. That year, 10,647 Ohioans were employed by e-commerce, nearly a five-fold increase from 2007.

To get a sense of what workers will see in North Randall - and how Amazon's fulfillment process works - a Plain Dealer reporter and photographer toured one of the company's Columbus-area facilities, in Etna, in May. Here's what we saw:

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Lisa DeJong/The Plain Dealer

The Etna fulfillment center, similar in size to the North Randall and Euclid buildings, is a 24-7 operation with roughly 3,700 employees. The facility opened in autumn of 2016.

Associates generally work 10-hour shifts four days a week, with two paid 15-minute breaks each day and a lunch break.

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Lisa DeJong/The Plain Dealer

A huge American flag hangs near the entrance to the Etna fulfillment center, where employees stash their belongings in lockers before heading out to the floor.

The building is divided into two sections. At one end of the sprawling industrial space, there's a four-level area where products, 50-plus percent of them coming from small to mid-size businesses, come in to be inventoried and stored. At the other end, there's a more open, two-level area where workers pack up orders and load them onto trucks for shipment.

Every step of the process - many executed by humans, but some carried out by robots - reads like one move in an elaborate, carefully choreographed dance.

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Lisa DeJong/The Plain Dealer

When pallets of products arrive at the fulfillment center in Etna, they're unloaded into yellow plastic totes and sent upstairs to employees like Jaime Knapp, a 38-year-old "stower." Knapp takes items from the totes, scans them and stashes - or stows - the inventory in vertical towers called pods.

The minute Knapp scans the items, they become available for purchase on Amazon.com.

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Lisa DeJong/The Plain Dealer

Orange-and-black robots maneuver the tall, heavy pods around the floor, carving gridlines as they follow a scripted path. Amazon added the robots to its operations in 2012, in a push for safety and efficiency, and will incorporate robots at both the North Randall and Euclid facilities.

A company spokeswoman said Amazon has bulked up hiring and training for employees to work with the robots. Several thousand workers are currently taking robotics courses.

Employees are physically separated from the robots by a fenced-off perimeter but can direct the hefty gadgets - and pause them to make repairs - using a Kindle, a hand-held electronic device.

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Video courtesy of Amazon

Amazon employees say the robots weigh as much as an NFL linebacker.

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Lisa DeJong/The Plain Dealer

Sam Chizmar, 64, works at a "picking" station in Etna. When a shopper orders something - a book, toiletries, a stuffed animal or a tablet, for example - a robot grabs the pod where that item is stashed and brings it to Chizmar.

He grabs the item from its vertical bin, puts it into a yellow tote and, once the container is full, sends it along to be packed, labeled and shipped.

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Lisa DeJong/The Plain Dealer

Mark Huber, the 40-year-old incoming general manager of the North Randall facility, stressed that Amazon is serious about finding ways for employees to grow professionally.

As part of his training, Huber - a former Navy pilot who also has worked in manufacturing management - had to try his hand at every fulfillment center job.

"How do we make the job safer?" he asked. "And how do we make more investments in employees?"

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Lisa DeJong/The Plain Dealer

A perch at the edge of the stowing-and-picking floor offers a bird's eye view of the vast packing-and-shipping area in Etna. Throughout the fulfillment center, Amazon has quality-control checkpoints and areas labeled "problem solve."

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Lisa DeJong/The Plain Dealer

The yellow totes travel on a conveyer belt from the stowing-and-picking areas down to the packaging floor, where every worker's station is equipped with cardboard boxes, tape and other packing materials.

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Lisa DeJong/The Plain Dealer

Isaac Butler, 42, grabs shoppers' orders from totes and packs them. He scans each item upon arrival, and Amazon's system tells him what size box to use and prints out the appropriate amount of tape.

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Lisa DeJong/The Plain Dealer

Butler applies packing tape to a box before placing it on a conveyer belt to be labeled and shipped out to a customer.

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Lisa DeJong/The Plain Dealer

Packages travel along miles of conveyer belts that wind their way through the fulfillment center. The customer's information isn't added to a package until close to the end of the process.

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Lisa DeJong/The Plain Dealer

At an area called the "Slam" station, machines scan, weigh and apply shipping labels with customer information and tracking details to boxes. In mere seconds, the system checks to see that the box is the right size for the item inside and that the box is the correct weight. If anything seems off, the belt sends the box to a quality-control area to be opened and re-checked by a person.

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Lisa DeJong/The Plain Dealer

Once checked and labeled, packages travel along conveyor belts toward the shipping area.

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Lisa DeJong/The Plain Dealer

Packages that are ready to ship are consolidated on the north side of the building.

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Lisa DeJong/The Plain Dealer

The system then sends boxes down spiral slides to be put in a queue for loading onto trucks.

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Lisa DeJong/The Plain Dealer

Workers stack the packages inside trucks, which are backed up to loading docks that line the building. As the trucks fill up, the conveyer belts leading into them retract, making room for more pallets.

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Lisa DeJong/The Plain Dealer

From the fulfillment center, packages make their way to Amazon sortation centers - there's one in Twinsburg - and other locations within a few miles of customers. Then the boxes make their last, short trips through the postal service, other shipping companies or drivers such as Amazon's Uber-like Flex fleet.

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Lisa DeJong/The Plain Dealer

At the end of their shifts, employees walk through metal detectors to leave the Etna fulfillment center. Amazon's motto - "Work Hard. Have Fun. Make History." - adorns the wall above the front doors.

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Video courtesy of Amazon

Amazon employs more than 6,000 people in Ohio, and its workforce here is growing.

The company has secured state and local financial incentives - state job-creation tax credits; substantial "revitalization" grants OK'd by JobsOhio, the private, statewide economic-development corporation; municipal tax breaks; and public spending on infrastructure near its sites - for its projects, including the North Randall and Euclid facilities.