At the Amazon fulfilment centre in Brampton, employees prepared for the Super Bowl of the shopping season.

The centre, which opened in August 2016, is 856,000 sq. ft., can hold millions of items and employs more than 1,000 people full-time. For the shopping rush that starts with Black Friday, they’ve added more seasonal employees to handle the extra demand.

The Brampton centre on Heritage Rd., is the newest of the six Amazon centres in Canada, and the fourth in the GTA. There is a second centre in Brampton, along with one in Milton and another in Mississauga.

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It’s also the only centre in Canada to employ Amazon Robotics, a series of self-moving shelves that travel at 1.5 metres per second.

“We’re expecting a record-breaking year this holiday season,” said Marcelo Affonso, the director of operations at the centre.

Last Cyber Monday, Amazon shipped out 64 million items worldwide, processing 740 items each second.

A Hungry Hungry Hippos game is one of several million products that will be shipped out over the weekend from an Amazon fulfilment centre in Brampton. (Richard Lautens / Toronto Star)

At the centre, casually dressed employees lift boxes, pack shelves and scan items, wearing dark grey safety gloves.

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The process at the centre starts with workers receiving inventory from inbound docks. Then, they’re taken to robotic shelves for storage. Employees stand on platforms to reach the highest shelves.

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Once a product is scanned and stored, it becomes instantly available on Amazon’s website.

When it’s time to ship, the products travel down a conveyor belt in bright yellow buckets to the ground floor. Employees work at stations equipped with cardboard boxes overhead, bubble wrap, seemingly endless rolls of paper and a screen for scanning.

Once an item is scanned, the machine reads the dimensions and shoots out a suitable box with the right amount of tape.

Then the package goes to the “slam machine” where a metallic press stamps the shipping label onto the box.

Then, carriers arrive at the centre, pick up the packages and deliver them to customers around the world.

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It’s a rhythmic, repetitive process, where the machines hum constantly, and watching the products move down conveyor belts and slide down chutes becomes hypnotic.

Some Amazon Cyber Monday deals include a dog camera that allows owners to interact with their pets when they aren’t home, and an Amazon Echo, the company’s smart speaker, which comes with a Canadian accent.

Small business owners have taken advantage of Amazon’s platform to sell their wares.

Tara Reid sells jewelry through Starletta Designs and has been selling on Amazon for two of the 10 years she’s been in business. She credits Amazon with allowing her to devote herself to the business full-time.

“Within three months of starting on Amazon, I left my day job,” she said. Reid has sold her jewelry to people in 27 countries and works from her home in Belleville.

Steven Aikman sells organic skin care products through All Natural Advice, a company he founded seven years ago. He said the company went from “a small mom-and-pop business to a medium-sized enterprise” after selling on Amazon for five years. He has been able to hire a team of 15, and half of his sales are outside Canada.

Aikman says that online retail offers more opportunity than traditional brick and mortar stores, and that his company is proof of that.

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“Look around us, Sears is no longer here, Toys R Us is going, those traditional stores, clients don’t want to go there, they want to go online,” he said.

“We were able to take a small mom-and-pop shop as a Canadian business and now we have no borders, no walls, our reach is coast to coast.”

Correction – November 25, 2017: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said the Amazon fulfilment centre in Brampton opened in this past August, is 856,000 sq. ft., can hold 10,000 items and employs 700 people full-time.