Inside Amazon's giant beehive

We agreed to this visit even before we knew that Amazon was going to offer this to the general public. But since September, it's been a reality. Four times a week, on Tuesday and Thursday mornings and afternoons, a number of volunteer employees have been trained to take it upon themselves to show the public around their workplace. In the meantime, we were treated to a private tour, with the distribution centre manager, Pierre-Louis Debroise, as our guide. The tour through the huge warehouse took over two hours.

Near the village of Augny in France, the centre rises out of the surrounding countryside. It is a former air base that has been bought by the American giant. Because space is at a premium. That's what we discovered as soon as we arrived, with a huge car park full of cars. The site employs more than 4,000 people, the equivalent of the staff employed at the Luxembourg site. ETZ2, which takes its name from the code of the nearest airport, sees dozens of people leaving the facility. It's almost 2pm, and the shift change is underway. Those on the morning shift make way for the afternoon shift. Then comes the evening shift. It's 7 days a week, a real hive of activity that never stops.

Once we've gone through the formalities and donned a yellow waistcoat, we're off to the lair of the distribution centre. A giant warehouse divided into four floors (we'll only see two) with a floor area of 50,000 m² (the equivalent of about eight football fields), criss-crossed by kilometres of conveyor belts, on the floor or the ceiling, in a constant din of noise. The site is modern and one of the Group's showcases in Europe. "ETZ2 was built in 2021," explains its director, who was there when it opened. The engineer by training has been working for Amazon for eight years, a feat he himself admits, because the American group has a reputation for being very demanding with its employees: "Amazon acquired this plot of land, which had to be quite large – it's a former air base. And the other prerequisite was that it was close enough to a motorway for the delivery lorries."