Amazon in NYC

A first, but hopefully not last, analysis of Amazon package label data, thanks to Urban Omnibus

I’m tremendously grateful to the staff of the Architectural League of New York and their publication, Urban Omnibus, for helping me put together an article that just came out today on Amazon’s operation in New York City. As I announced in December, they and other friends in NYC helped collect package labels of Amazon packages, 137 in all in about a month, and I wrote an article about what’s visible in the package label data. (*Note: I’ve continued collecting package data from anywhere in the country, so please help me expand this project by sending me some labels here.)

We worked with an amazing designer, Ashley Louie, who created some really beautiful representations of Amazon’s package flow, this (a representation of the package flows for all 137 packages that we got labels for) being my favorite:

With such a small sample, it’s obviously impossible to attempt to divine package volume through Amazon’s system, but it is possible a) to use such package label data to track and confirm the existence of different nodes in Amazon’s outbound network and b) to track consistent package arcs in the data.

As an example of each of these: a) The most fascinating label I looked at in this data had the code “ZEWR” on it. It was fascinating because I spend a depressing amount of time looking at Amazon’s facility codes, and I had never seen ZEWR before! After a little digging, I discovered that it is probably a third-party Sortation Center, a concept I hadn’t encountered before, and which I’d never have known about without seeing this label. b) As you can kind of make out from the graphic above, the EWR5 Sortation Center in Avenel, NJ exclusively dumps packages into USPS, and again this helped me discover something I didn’t know before, which is that there is an evolving Sortation Center differentiation within Amazon’s system, and that some SC’s only prep packages for USPS delivery.

Again, if you want to help me expand this work, consider snapping a pic of that recent package that arrived at your doorstep or in your foyer, and uploading it here. And you can read the full Urban Omnibus write-up here.