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Where’s My Package?

Benjamin Y. Fong

Feb 04, 2026

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Photo via Amazon

Much as Walmart’s omnipresence in rural America has long been both a messenger and a means of its dominance, Amazon’s growing urban footprint marks and makes its own expansionist ambitions. But the business models and the geographies are very different. If “flooding the zone” is a key tactic of big-box takeover in rural communities, what’s the spatial strategy for a company like Amazon in a place like New York City? The battle over a massive, proposed headquarters in Queens was an exception to prove a rule. Instead of brute strength, Amazon’s takeover requires precision, the right thing in the right place at the right time. Rather than magic, the convenience customers prize is the product of meticulous consolidation, proliferation, and control. Truck routes and “last-mile” distribution centers transform city streets and speed up delivery times, while sometimes-sinister innovations extend from warehouse floors to public pavements and public relations: Scanners used to route packages also track workers’ “time off task”, and electric cargo bikes that shore up an image of greater “sustainability” mask the company’s larger environmental impacts (while choking up bike lane infrastructure). If Family Dollar is a flood — or an invasion — then Amazon might be a constricting web.

Occasional peeks inside Amazon’s massive warehouses notwithstanding, the company’s secrets of logistical domination are just as tightly controlled. But understanding the breadth, depth, and complexity of Amazon’s network in New York City is of utmost importance for city planners, antitrust regulators, and labor organizers alike. Benjamin Y. Fong , building on his expertise as a chronicler of contemporary labor and logistics and a keen observer of Amazon’s activities across the country, undertook a citizen social science experiment with UO, seeking to dig deep into the company’s maneuvers in New York. Here, Fong uses the information hidden in plain sight — on the package labels themselves — to track the movements of this quintessentially contemporary behemoth. – OS

The second you hit “Place Your Order,” a mobile unit with a 1,000-pound inventory stack on top of it is already headed towards a human worker, called an “order picker.” When the unit arrives at the “pick station,” a light shines down from the ceiling on one particular “mesh-band pod” in that stack, and in that pod is your order. The worker plucks it from that pod and puts it in a tote on a conveyor belt, and then it is packed up, labeled, and headed outbound. This entire process, from order to outbound, takes maybe 15 to 20 minutes.

This is the remarkable work of an Amazon Robotics Sortable (ARS) fulfillment center. Sortable fulfillment centers are the backbone of Amazon’s distribution network and understandably their most iconic facilities. During a tour of a sortable fulfillment center, I went briefly up to the mezzanine on one side of the building and had a hard time making out where the building ended on the other side, conveyor belts stretching out to the horizon. It’s an experience of the industrial sublime, like being overwhelmed at the power of the ocean but without the calming effect that nature often provides.

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Photos via Amazon

The scale of this structure matches Amazon’s corporate stature. It is simultaneously the second largest retailer in the country by revenue, the largest private parcel carrier by package volume, and the largest cloud computing company by revenue. On its current trajectory, Amazon is set to earn $1 trillion in revenue in 2029. There have been enormous companies before, but none that have evolved so quickly and in so many different directions.

Amazon’s massive fulfillment centers are only one type of node in the company’s larger distribution network. From fulfillment centers, packages will typically go to sortation centers (where they are sorted by zip code) and then delivery stations (where they are put in vans bound for your doorstep). In its totality, this in-house logistics network is the company’s “competitive moat”: no one else has anything approximating it. It’s all possible because Amazon...