美国国家公共电台 NPR Online Retail Boom Means More Warehouse Workers, And Robots To Accompany Them

 

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

There's a good chance something you've purchased once passed through the hands of a picker. These are the warehouse¹ workers who pick, pack and ship to us all those products we order online. We'll learn more about them and the challenges they face from automation on this week's All Tech Considered.

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CORNISH: From member station KQED we have two stories. First up, reporter Sam Harnett takes us to a distribution hub on the outskirts² of the Bay Area.

SAM HARNETT, BYLINE³: Patterson High School is about two hours east of San Francisco. It's surrounded by the farmland of California's Central Valley, which produces half of the country's fruits, vegetables and nuts. But this group of students isn't learning how to be farmers. They're training to work in warehouses⁴.

HILARIO GARCIA: So let's do some driving. Drive right there, forward and backwards⁵ driving.

HARNETT: Teacher Hilario Garcia is instructing a student perched on a virtual reality forklift simulator.

JUSTIN LOCKHART: It's fun. It makes class really fun.

HARNETT: The machine's part of a whole mock warehouse the school built for vocational courses to train students like Justin Lockhart.

JUSTIN: And it's just a course that's kind of nice, especially in the town we're at where it was just all once farming, has now turned into a big logistics and distribution center out there. You got Amazon.

HARNETT: Amazon is one of a dozen distribution centers just down the road. The county here has struggled with unemployment. But since 2000 warehouse and transport jobs have more than doubled from 4,000 to over 9,000. Those workers keep the stream of items flowing to customers, most of whom are in the richer urban areas to the north and west. At this CVS distribution center, Mariela Zepeda's nimble fingers snag everything from bottles of pills to boxes of condoms. Zepeda has to move quickly to ship these orders. The company tracks her progress.

MARIELA ZEPEDA: It's heavy work, but it definitely beats fast food chains or anything like that.

HARNETT: For one, pay is better. Zepeda, who's also a part-time college student, says she makes $14.79 an hour. Companies advertise entry-level wages of $11 to $14, sometimes with benefits. It's a good start, Zepeda says, but it isn't the kind of job you can support a family with, not in Patterson. It's close to the Bay Area, which means housing isn't cheap.

ZEPEDA: Me by myself, like, no kids, like, no nothing, maybe I could get by. But I don't know, if you're trying to, like, feed a family, I - no, definitely no. I don't think so. I think a lot of places are like that, too.

SHELLEY BURCHAM: We know that there are citizens that require these entry-level jobs or, you know, that's their skill set. But we want to kind of up the game.

HARNETT: Shelley Burcham is the economic development manager for Tracy. It's another distribution hub about 30 minutes north of Patterson. Burcham wants jobs Tracy can build a community around. Jobs that pay enough for people to own a house and raise a family here, jobs in industries like tech and high-skilled manufacturing. Right now most people who live in Tracy don't work here.

BURCHAM: About 70 percent of our resident workforce⁶ actually commutes⁷ out of Tracy every day.

HARNETT: Do you know where most of them go?

BURCHAM: They go to the Bay Area.

HARNETT: Patterson and Tracy are just two of many small towns that have become distribution hubs to feed wealthier urban centers. There's union outside of New York City, Riverside by Los Angeles and many others. While companies continue to hire human pickers for their warehouses, they're also automating⁸ the work. For NPR News, I'm Sam Harnett of KQED. And now I'm passing off to my colleague Queena Kim, who will tell us what those robots are doing and what they're not.

QUEENA KIM, BYLINE: The Amazon fulfillment center is huge. It's about 1 million square feet. And the best way to describe the experience is it's like walking through a ginormous machine.

ASHLEY ROBINSON: It's the conveyance¹⁰ (unintelligible).

KIM: I know you can barely hear her, but that's Ashley Robinson. She's an Amazon spokesperson. And what she's saying is that noise, it's the conveyance, or what most people call conveyor belts.

ROBINSON: And we've got miles of conveyance here in this facility.

KIM: In front of us, three stories of conveyor belts moving an endless stream of yellow plastic boxes carrying customers' stuff. At a lot of warehouses humans still move things, but here it's mostly been automated¹¹.

ROBINSON: It's all part of the symphony of Amazon fulfillment.

KIM: The conductor of that symphony - a computer. It keeps track of every item in the warehouse with the goal of getting stuff to you, the consumer, as quickly as possible.

ROBINSON: These are the Amazon robots. They're orange, square-shaped.

KIM: The robots look like huge hockey pucks, like 3-feet-wide hockey pucks. The robots' job - to fetch the stuff customers order online. To do this, the robots glide¹² around the warehouse through a labyrinth¹³ of thousands of portable storage units, the shelves crammed¹⁴ with a random¹⁵ assortment¹⁶ of stuff - books, paper towels, board games.

ROBINSON: I'm seeing some bottles of vitamins. It looks like there are some ink cartridges¹⁷ for printers. I'm seeing a zombie bobblehead toy up there.

KIM: When the robot finds its storage unit, it glides¹⁸ underneath¹⁹ and lifts it up, and then delivers it to a human worker. They're called pickers. On the day I was there the computer told the picker to grab what looked like a fantasy board game. The picker found it, scanned it and placed it on the conveyor belt.

ROBINSON: So in a traditional fulfillment center where the associate would walk to the different items it can take hours to fulfill⁹ a customer order. With the robotics it can take minutes.

KIM: So is this a sign we're entering a new industrial revolution? Karen Myers is a scientist at SRI, one of Silicon²⁰ Valley's oldest research centers. And I asked her - what could we expect from this next big shift?

KAREN MYERS: It's definitely going to take over a lot of jobs.

KIM: At the same time, she says, we're running up against the limits of technology, too. Take the picker at the Amazon fulfillment center. Myers says those skills are proving to be uniquely human.

MYERS: Our fingers are incredibly dexterous²¹. And the current generation of robotic manipulators, they're getting much, much better, but they're just not quite there yet.

KIM: There's also the robot's brain. You remember that board game the Amazon picker was looking for? It was on its side crammed into the shelf. The picker could barely see the box, but she could tell it was a board game. Robots can't do that. Technologists say instead of humans or robots, more and more we will work side by side. Amazon says robots and humans enable the Tracy warehouse to fulfill customer orders faster. That means more customers and more human workers - at least for now. For NPR News, I'm Queena Kim.

KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:

And Amazon, we should say, is one of NPR's financial supporters.

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1 warehouse   

n.仓库；vt.存入仓库

参考例句：

• We freighted the goods to the warehouse by truck.我们用卡车把货物运到仓库。
• The manager wants to clear off the old stocks in the warehouse.经理想把仓库里积压的存货处理掉。

2 outskirts   

n.郊外，郊区

参考例句：

• Our car broke down on the outskirts of the city.我们的汽车在市郊出了故障。
• They mostly live on the outskirts of a town.他们大多住在近郊。

3 byline   

n.署名；v.署名

参考例句：

• His byline was absent as well.他的署名也不见了。
• We wish to thank the author of this article which carries no byline.我们要感谢这篇文章的那位没有署名的作者。

4 warehouses   

仓库，货栈( warehouse的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• The whisky was taken to bonded warehouses at Port Dundee. 威士忌酒已送到邓迪港的保稅仓库。
• Row upon row of newly built warehouses line the waterfront. 江岸新建的仓库鳞次栉比。

5 backwards   

adv.往回地，向原处，倒，相反，前后倒置地

参考例句：

• He turned on the light and began to pace backwards and forwards.他打开电灯并开始走来走去。
• All the girls fell over backwards to get the party ready.姑娘们迫不及待地为聚会做准备。

6 workforce   

n.劳动大军，劳动力

参考例句：

• A large part of the workforce is employed in agriculture.劳动人口中一大部分受雇于农业。
• A quarter of the local workforce is unemployed.本地劳动力中有四分之一失业。

7 commutes   

上下班路程( commute的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• She commutes from Oxford to London every day. 她每天上下班往返于牛津与伦敦之间。
• Barbara lives in Oxford and commutes. 芭芭拉住在牛津，通勤往来。

8 automating   

（使）自动化( automate的现在分词 )

参考例句：

• Have you ever thought about automating any part of your business? 你有没有想过把你公司的某个部门自动化？
• We are in process of automating the production department. 我们正在对生产部门实行自动化。

9 fulfill   

vt.履行，实现，完成；满足，使满意

参考例句：

• If you make a promise you should fulfill it.如果你许诺了，你就要履行你的诺言。
• This company should be able to fulfill our requirements.这家公司应该能够满足我们的要求。

10 conveyance   

n.(不动产等的)转让，让与；转让证书；传送；运送；表达；（正）运输工具

参考例句：

• Bicycles have become the most popular conveyance for Chinese people.自行车已成为中国人最流行的代步工具。
• Its another,older,usage is a synonym for conveyance.它的另一个更古老的习惯用法是作为财产转让的同义词使用。

11 automated   

a.自动化的

参考例句：

• The entire manufacturing process has been automated. 整个生产过程已自动化。
• Automated Highway System (AHS) is recently regarded as one subsystem of Intelligent Transport System (ITS). 近年来自动公路系统(Automated Highway System,AHS)，作为智能运输系统的子系统之一越来越受到重视。

12 glide   

n./v.溜，滑行；(时间)消逝

参考例句：

• We stood in silence watching the snake glide effortlessly.我们噤若寒蝉地站着，眼看那条蛇逍遥自在地游来游去。
• So graceful was the ballerina that she just seemed to glide.那芭蕾舞女演员翩跹起舞，宛如滑翔。

13 labyrinth   

n.迷宫；难解的事物；迷路

参考例句：

• He wandered through the labyrinth of the alleyways.他在迷宫似的小巷中闲逛。
• The human mind is a labyrinth.人的心灵是一座迷宫。

14 crammed   

adj.塞满的，挤满的；大口地吃；快速贪婪地吃v.把…塞满；填入；临时抱佛脚( cram的过去式)

参考例句：

• He crammed eight people into his car. 他往他的车里硬塞进八个人。
• All the shelves were crammed with books. 所有的架子上都堆满了书。

15 random   

adj.随机的；任意的；n.偶然的(或随便的)行动

参考例句：

• The list is arranged in a random order.名单排列不分先后。
• On random inspection the meat was found to be bad.经抽查，发现肉变质了。

16 assortment   

n.分类，各色俱备之物，聚集

参考例句：

• This shop has a good assortment of goods to choose from.该店各色货物俱全，任君选择。
• She was wearing an odd assortment of clothes.她穿着奇装异服。

17 cartridges   

子弹( cartridge的名词复数 )； （打印机的）墨盒； 录音带盒； （唱机的）唱头

参考例句：

• computer consumables such as disks and printer cartridges 如磁盘、打印机墨盒之类的电脑耗材
• My new video game player came with three game cartridges included. 我的新电子游戏机附有三盘游戏带。

18 glides   

n.滑行( glide的名词复数 )；滑音；音渡；过渡音v.滑动( glide的第三人称单数 )；掠过；（鸟或飞机 ） 滑翔

参考例句：

• The new dance consists of a series of glides. 这种新舞蹈中有一连串的滑步。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The stately swan glides gracefully on the pond. 天鹅在池面上优美地游动。 来自《简明英汉词典》

19 underneath   

adj.在...下面，在...底下；adv.在下面

参考例句：

• Working underneath the car is always a messy job.在汽车底下工作是件脏活。
• She wore a coat with a dress underneath.她穿着一件大衣，里面套着一条连衣裙。

20 silicon   

n.硅(旧名矽)

参考例句：

• This company pioneered the use of silicon chip.这家公司开创了使用硅片的方法。
• A chip is a piece of silicon about the size of a postage stamp.芯片就是一枚邮票大小的硅片。

21 dexterous   

adj.灵敏的；灵巧的

参考例句：

• As people grow older they generally become less dexterous.随着年龄的增长，人通常会变得不再那么手巧。
• The manager was dexterous in handling his staff.那位经理善于运用他属下的职员。