Watco Delivers Amazon Boxes

There might be a chance that the Amazon box showing up on your doorstep has been touched by a variety of Watco team members. Our team members in the Pacific Northwest oversee the transportation of the boxes, from delivering the paperboard to make the boxes to shipping the completed boxes to the Amazon Fulfillment Center in Nampa, Idaho.

The Eastern Idaho Railroad delivers the rolls of paperboard to the plant that produces the boxes in Burley, Idaho. Once the boxes are completed, they are trucked to the Watco terminal in Burley which is only a couple of miles away from the facility.

Burley Terminal Manager Brian Addis said, “They bring in trucks with pallets of boxes five days a week and then we send out trucks seven days a week. We maintain a month’s worth of inventory and during the busy holiday season, the amount going through the warehouse doubles the volume we would normally handle each month.”

The five-man team works in two different 10-hour shifts, one working Monday through Thursday and the other Tuesday through Friday. They begin preloading the trucks on Thursday and Friday to accommodate for the weekend outbound shipments. A local trucking company, Handy Trucking, takes the trailers and stages them for drivers to pick up on the weekends.

Although the boxes are non-perishable, the customer requires that they are sent out in first in, first out order which is tracked by a computer system. When the team unloads the boxes, they sort them in the correct order and place them in staging lanes to be loaded onto the trucks.

The size of the pallets the boxes are loaded on require the warehouse doors to be 10-feet tall, but modifications had been made at the facility to enlarge the door size from 8 feet when the warehouse was used to store rolled stock for the manufacturer as they were undergoing an expansion to accommodate for the Amazon business.

Addis stated, “We developed a relationship with the customer when we handled the roll stock and that helped with the transition to handling the boxes we are doing now.”

In addition to the boxes, the warehouse also stores powered milk, grain, and barley in bags and totes. A company out of Israel uses the facility to store the bag liners for the 50-pound bags of the dry milk. The team is also moving potatoes out of the facility by rail.