Santa's not so little helper: Today's the busiest online shopping day of the year. So are they ready at the biggest grotto this side of Lapland?




It's 'Manic Monday' and shoppers are expected to spend £17million an hour today over the internet. The total outlay will hit £417million in just 24 hours, making it the busiest web shopping day of the year. Sales are expected to peak between 1pm and 2pm when office staff log on from work. Another hectic period will have occured this morning when mothers got home after dropping their children off at school. And the biggest-selling items? They're expected to be Apple iPod Touch, Wii fit, Scalextric and LCD TVs





Should I ever make it to the North Pole and find the great man at work, I imagine Father Christmas's Grotto would look a little like this. I dare say there would be a few marked differences.

His staff would be shorter and, being elves, they would probably have green hats and pointy ears, too. And his loading bays would be full of reindeer instead of the ceaseless juggernauts which rumble in and out at the rate of one every five minutes.

But the overall set-up must be pretty similar. Because if you really want to dispatch Christmas presents to millions of people all over the world - or, indeed, cope with today's predicted £17million-an-hour online shopping bonanza - then you need an operation like this.



Santa's one-stop-shop: The Amazon warehouse near Milton Keynes has everything you can think of - including the author's own book!

Crate expectations: Workers set about making sure the right gifts head towards the right address

It's a multi-storey, fully-automated shopping colossus next to Junction 13 of the M1 near Milton Keynes with a roof the size of eight football pitches and a thousand staff.

It is several times larger than Britain's largest conventional department store - and, unlike Harrods, it never closes. Yet it has no shoppers. And if you think this thing is huge, then you should have a look at its shiny new sibling down in Swansea. It's half as big again.

But don't think of calling this a warehouse or even a distribution hub. In Amazon- speak, it's a 'fulfilment centre'. 'This is all about fulfilling people's wishes,' says European vice-president, Allan Lyall, the nearest thing to Santa in these parts. I can think of another name for it - Retail Hell.

There are, quite literally, millions of different products stored in no particular order, their location governed only by their size and the spare shelving available at the second they arrived.

It is impossible to get your mind around this place - which is just as well because you do not need to. If you want to know where anything is, you don't ask a worker - or 'associate' as they are known. You ask the computer.



These days, Amazon has nearly 100 million customers worldwide and sells everything from jewellery to computers to bibs. It then sends it to anyone anywhere on the planet with a legitimate postal address.

It all began in 1995, at the dawn of the internet age, as a cheap way of selling books. At first, it was based in the Seattle home of its American founder, a cyber-savvy hedge-funder called Jeff Bezos.

It didn't stay there very long. Within three years, he had expanded across America and the Atlantic, opening Amazon.co.uk in this airport- sized beehive in Bedfordshire.

And it's enough to drive the average shopper screaming into the M1 traffic. Here is a system seemingly devoid of logic or classification of any sort. In one open area, I find a column of shrink-wrapped copies of The Times Atlas Of The

World next to a pile of Philips kettles next to a pile of cameras next to a mountain of Wii computer consoles.



An hour later, I am up in one of the endless avenues of multitiered shelving where I pick a random row of merchandise. There is a copy of the American Theatre Book of Monologues next to various opera CDs next to five editions of the AA Golf Course Guide 2008. Hang on. 2008? Why bother stocking copies of a guide book that is a year out of date?

'Someone might want them,' says Allan. 'People still buy vinyl LPs. Jeff Bezos has always had a vision of a place where any customer can find absolutely anything.'

Not even a Princeton-educated multi-billionaire like Jeff Bezos could find his own shoelaces round here without one of the all-knowing computer guns. These hand-held devices are to the ' associate' what the ball of string was to Theseus as he sought the Minotaur in the Labyrinth of Knossos. They are your compass, your friend, your sanity...

The more you are immersed into all this controlled chaos, the more you realise there is nothing chaotic about it. It is, actually, a piece of logistical genius. In management consultant circles, it is a work of art - the Mona Lisa of distribution, the Venus de Milo of shelf-stacking.

Two fundamental processes are at work here. The first is bringing in millions of different items and putting them somewhere. The second is finding them again and sending them out.

Allan takes me to the starting point, a concrete expanse next to 30 loading bays where all incoming products are scanned and plonked in yellow crates. These automatically shoot off to a far corner of the Amazon jungle where the computer has identified a bit of empty shelving. An 'associate' merely has to move the contents from crate to shelf.



Meanwhile, out in the real world, you or I might decide we want to send the AA Golf Course Guide 2008 and a Philips kettle to someone in Timbuktu. We type our order on our keyboard and - ping! - it is instantly digested by the omniscient computer which redirects our command to the nearest ' associate' on picking duty. It doesn't matter if it's 2am. This place never sleeps (except on Christmas Day).



Everyone's doing it: Experts say £17million will be spent every hour today on online stores

Santa logs on: Just what kind of a global distribution network does the great man have?

Each 'picker' is allocated precisely enough orders to fill a trolley and the gun even calculates the fastest route between products. It's like shopping with sat nav.

So our kettle and book end up in an orange crate which is automatically propelled to somewhere called 'binning'. 'Binners' then separate orders and push them to 'shippers', who pack them.

The computer even tells them which one of 15 differently-shaped pieces of cardboard to wrap them in for the optimum fit. Perhaps it also tells them when it's time to go to the loo or do something about their wedding anniversary.

Suddenly, I spot a tiny ray of human creativity in a far corner. It's the gift-wrapping department. And they really are wrapping by hand. How do they choose which wrapping suits which customer? Er, they don't.

The computer has already decreed red paper for small packages, broad gold paper for big ones and assorted silver boxes for funny shapes. It must be said, though, that the staff seem to like all the automation. Many have worked here for years.

Once an order is packed and ready to go, the Amazon monster weighs it, labels it and, in the blink of an eye, flings it into the right chute for the right bin for the right lorry. Here, over a few seconds, is a random list of destinations: County Cork, Austria, Australia, Wirral, Somerset, London . . .

Amazon has five monsters in Britain (Milton Keynes, Swansea, two in Scotland and a temporary Christmas plant in Peterborough). More than half of the company's global business is outside America and much of that is handled via Britain and Germany.

With 10,000 staff under his wing, Allan Lyall is running an outfit the size of a major airline.

So, what is the failure rate? 'I think it's nought point nought nought something per cent,' says the 49-year-old Scottish systems expert, somewhat surprised that anyone should voice such a silly thought. They may be cocky, but don't you wish this lot were in charge of baggage-handling at our airports?

I cannot resist a shameless vanity exercise, even if it does make me look just like that Yellow Pages ad (remember dear old JR Hartley hunting down his book about flyfishing?). Can the computer track down a certain Monarchy: The Royal Family At Work by, ahem, Robert Hardman?

No problem. Not only do they find my book on one shelf, sandwiched between Led Zeppelin DVDs and Farrow & Ball: The Art Of Colour, but I'm elsewhere too. Moments later, I find my book sitting between The Oxford History Of Music Volume 5 and Erotic Confessions (I wonder which will sell out first).

While flattered to be in several places at once, it turns out that this is standard. Allan explains it is deliberate policy to scatter batches of the same product all over the building because it is more efficient.



If a 'picker' has to find a copy of, say, my book plus a Philips kettle, it's much easier if there are random quantities of both near each other rather than at opposite ends of a building the size of Stoke-on-Trent.

Today, this entire system will undergo the greatest challenge in its short history. For some reason, online shopping reaches its peak on the first Monday of December. Last year, 'Mega Monday' at Amazon saw a best-ever 1.4million British orders in 24 hours and the computer has calculated that 2009 will beat that record by up to a third.

This is astonishing and faintly depressing for those of us who prefer to leave our shopping until Christmas Eve. However, help is at hand. Amazon promises it can deliver December 24 shopping to certain postcodes by the same evening, just like Father Christmas.