Sometimes the things I do required planning, sometimes they drop into my lap. This was a Guide trip to an Amazon warehouse which I can safely say I’ve never done before, and might not have done if we had continued driving too far up the motorway and round and round ring roads and car parks in error.

I have been to a logistics warehouse before – in 1998 when I failed to get a job with Boots. Things have changed somewhat since then.

Firstly Amazon invite groups and schools into their warehouse regularly which is odd in itself. It’s high tech (you are spoken to through headsets), shiny and corporate. The warehouse is full of computers and machines to cope with the consumer madness that is a large scale online shop. It’s only when you are faced with the speed and volume of orders being packaged that you stop to think. Man we buy a lot of stuff.

The whole thing was really interesting. Conveyor belts, machines blowing address labels onto boxes with compressed air, stock management processes, bicycles for departments to ride around the warehouse on, a box making machine, departments right in the middle of the warehouse floor sections only by dividers and markings on the floor.

But I wonder for the future. Great that this big business is taking it’s public relations seriously, and it’s staff by all accounts. Amazing to see technology working to make something so vast work so seamlessly. But I really don’t think we need all this stuff.