Cyber Monday: Busiest online shopping day is here

PHOENIX (KSAZ) - Cyber Monday is the busiest day of the year at Amazon. As soon as you place your order online it's picked off the shelf and starts heading to your door.

The size and scale of this operation can seem overwhelming, but it all starts with a small scanner. An order comes in, and the scanner tells the Amazon associate exactly where to find it.

"It's programmed in there to be different items, not similar items together, so when you go there and scan the wrong items it will beep and tell you it is not it," said Roger Thompson.

Thompson has worked for Amazon through 6 Cyber Mondays.

"It gets busier and bigger every year," he said.

After an item is located it gets packaged and an automated system sticks on the shipping labels.

"To say that our buildings our bustling today is really an understatement," said Ashley Robinson.

Robinson showed us some of the deals Amazon is offering, many discounted as much as 50%. The Amazon building near 51st Avenue and Buckeye have about 2,500 full-time employees. Amazon hired thousands more to help during the holidays.

"We prepare for this all year wrong, even though we are serving customers in the Phoenix area we could be serving customers on the other side of the planet," she said.

Once the packages are ready to be shipped the next step is sorting. It's a fast moving process that sorts boxes automatically based on where they're going.

Finally, they head to the Fulfillment Center where they are loaded onto trucks and start heading to people's homes. Last year on Cyber Monday Amazon shipped 500 packages per second.