”But Amazon is not the only company that has experienced growth due to e-commerce.Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, recently opened its sixth e-commerce campus near Orlando, Florida. A separate group, the packers, puts everything in pastel-hued boxes for shipment. But it’s an employee’s responsibility to make sure the shelves, which are tall and narrow, remain balanced.And XPO Logistics, which ships mostly appliances and other heavy goods, has hired 3,000 warehouse workers in the past year to keep up with growing e-commerce, bringing its total to 26,000. If the weight isn’t consistent with what’s supposed to be in the box, the package is set aside for a problem solver, who opens the box to see whether the order was filled correctly.

It’s part of Boxed’s effort to preserve some aspects of the conventional shopping experience. When a high speed injection molding machine customer has ordered diapers, a packer might write a congratulatory note. And the company is also planning to open a million square foot warehouse in the Midwest exclusively to handle returns.The iBOT retrieves small items — health and beauty products and snack foods — and brings them to the employee, who places them in bins. An automated container, the iBOT, zips up and down and back and forth among the Perfect Pick’s shelves, where products are stored. And that requires human judgment: Software suggests to workers where each item should be placed.But not so many workers.At Amazon’s much larger warehouse in Baltimore, there are more workers, but also a lot more robots.At Amazon’s Baltimore warehouse, employees called “Stowers” are needed to stock the shelves that are carried by robots. At Boxed, the bins glide from the Perfect Pick to other employees, who select additional items to complete an order.Among the first stops on the conveyor is a four-story-high robotic contraption known as “Perfect Pick. They lift shelves of goods and roll them to the company’s pickers, who select items that customers have ordered before the robots return the shelves to storage.Even so, there are still jobs at both warehouses for people to do. Through the 140,000-square-foot building, two miles of conveyor belts quietly whisk plastic bins containing customers’ orders.

Fitting multiple items of different shapes and textures into a box is something people still do much better than robots.Barbara Ward, 56, is a packer at Boxed, and like all her colleagues, she writes a thank-you note for each order she packages. Spread thinly along the conveyor belts, roughly three dozen workers operate on the floor.All these trends have been helped by automation’s ability to hold down costs, such as Walmart’s use of drones to help track its warehouse inventory. Like the others, it includes a million square foot warehouse. Ravi Jariwala, a spokesman, says Walmart has created a new job classification — “personal shopper” — to do what customers once did themselves: Pick and package orders.

Those warehouses have created tens of thousands of jobs and boosted wages in some communities, which many local employers call “the Amazon effect. Everywhere you look you see machines and rows of neatly organized pallets of goods.There are also “problem solvers” who position themselves near a scale on a conveyor belt that weighs each package as it whizzes by.. It’s adding a million square feet of the warehouse about every four to six weeks, says Ashfaque Chowdhury, president of XPO’s supply chain in the Americas and Asia. One machine stamps mailing labels on boxes.Chowdhury says items that many people wouldn’t have felt comfortable buying on the internet not long ago — from refrigerators to treadmills to furniture — are becoming routine online purchases.” It enables one employee filling orders to choose from 700 items.Walmart is also expanding its online grocery pickup service to 2,000 stores, double the 1,000 where it is now available. It allows Walmart’s customers to order groceries online but requires more workers, not fewer.Still, a tour of Boxed’s gleaming new warehouse in Union makes it easy to see why people worry that automation costs jobs