Dive Brief:

• Amazon is increasingly turning to “sortation centers,” warehouses with no inventory but several hundred workers, whose purpose is to sort packages to get them to post offices and delivery hubs lickety-split.

• The massive fulfillment centers are another way to control and speed up delivery, even with late-night orders, and make Sunday delivery possible.

• Amazon now has sortation centers in Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Avenel, NJ, Hebron, KY, and San Bernardino, CA, with more coming across the country.

Dive Insight:

Amazon founder-CEO Jeff Bezos has been loud and proud about his plans for drone delivery, but the retailer has been more quiet about ways it has already sped up delivery on the ground. The size and location of these sortation facilities help scale fulfillment for a giant retailer like Amazon, and they are key to the company’s impressive delivery record.