Holiday rush in full swing at Amazon fulfillment center in Pflugerville

PFLUGERVILLE (KXAN) — With Christmas just three days away, you may be shopping online for last-minute gifts.

If you place an order in the Austin-area, a package may arrive on your doorstep within a few hours.

Those items are most likely arriving from the Pflugerville Amazon fulfillment center. It’s a massive warehouse, stocked with over 600,000 items.

Site leader Shalini Sharma says things are busy as can be this time of year for her 400 employees.

"Our volume goes up by two times,” she said. “We do a lot of planning, to make sure the associates we hire to process these volumes are safe.”

Conveyor belts — filled with all sorts of items — stretch across the warehouse. On average, the fulfillment center ships around 40,000 packages per day.

However, the holiday rush brings about an average of 50,000 to 55,000 packages per day.

Sharma says their speedy shipping speed can be credited to warehouse robots, who roll out large and heavy carts of packages.

"Our delivery windows are so small,” she said. “Our customers get a lot of options to choose their delivery windows."

Amazon is also assisting the Central Texas Food Bank with making more efficient deliveries.

"Demand is at an all-time high, we’re actually seeing an increase in reliance on our services that rivals the peak of the pandemic,” Food Bank president and CEO Sari Vatske said.

Since 2021, Amazon drivers have delivered more than one million meals to food insecure families and others across Travis and Williamson Counties

"Partners like Amazon are a beacon of hope for Austin, for the families we serve,” Vatske said. “This shows that it takes a village to help serve our community."

This program utilizes Amazon Flex delivery to connect meals and supplies to other local organizations.

Including the Rosewood-Zaragosa Neighborhood Center, where drivers deliver 120 boxes of food on a daily basis.

"It allows them to have food on their doorstep, every month and week on that same day,” Rosewood-Zaragosa Neighborhood Center program manager Monique Flukers said. “They know they’re going to be able to provide food for your family, so that's huge."