For metro Detroit consumers seeking delivery of school supplies, bottled water or pet food within a few hours, the process is simpler than one might imagine.

Amazon's same-day delivery facility in Hazel Park includes:

Amazon.com Inc. has been ramping up its same-day delivery service in recent years and brought it to Southeast Michigan last year with about 75,000 square feet in the Tri-County Commerce Park in Hazel Park owned by New York City-based Ashley Capital.

The facility — significantly smaller than a traditional Amazon fulfillment center, such as what is being built in nearly 4 million square feet at the former State Fairgrounds property in Detroit — has one key goal in mind.

"We're built for speed," Joe Younes, site lead for the Hazel Park facility, known in Amazon lingo as "SMI1," told Crain's during a tour of the location.

When an Amazon customer in the region is in immediate need of a new tube of lipstick, a computer monitor or cleaning supplies, the process moves quickly.

On Wednesday morning, Caleb Snyder of Ann Arbor was working as a picker in the Hazel Park facility, grabbing ordered products off of one of thousands of moving robots in the building. Snyder then puts the products through a slot where Sandy Aldaccahe of Hazel Park is serving as the packer, putting the products into Amazon delivery bags and sealing the package.

Those bags then travel a short distance via conveyor belt, where they're sorted into bins and assigned to contractors, known as Amazon Flex drivers, who make the deliveries using their own vehicles.

All told, the process of picking, packing, sorting and getting a package into a vehicle can take less than 2 minutes, according to Younes.

The process in Hazel Park — which ships 35,000 unique items, all available for same-day delivery — is vastly different than at a larger fulfillment center, Younes said, which stocks millions of items at any one time.

"The difference between us and a fulfillment center is when they pick, it's in a whole other area of the building. And then there's 26 miles of conveyance taking it all the way to the pack department," he said. "So you're talking about travel times that are extremely long. We're picking and then within seconds it's being packed. That's the speed difference that we have."

Kenneth Kramer of Walled Lake is one of those contracted delivery drivers. On Wednesday, he was helping bring back bins in the Hazel Park parking lot, and often picks up a delivery route in the western Oakland County suburbs, getting him closer to home.

The Seattle-based e-commerce giant's delivery radius for same-day items from the Hazel Park facility stretches as far west as Howell in Livingston County, said Younes, adding that the company ships same-day delivery items to about 600,000 customers around the country in 90 metro areas.

Amazon offers same-day delivery free of charge for its Prime customers on qualifying orders of $25 or more, or for $2.99 per order for those under that size. For those customers who are not Prime subscribers, same-day delivery  is available for $12.99 per order.

Amazon is not the only retailer in metro Detroit to offer same-day delivery. Others include Ace Hardware, Walmart, Target, Costco and grocery stores. Some require a membership fee.

Demand for such services surged during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to various reports.

A survey last year found that 36 percent of shoppers have ordered same-day delivery from Amazon or other e-commerce retailers, up from 24 percent the year prior, according to Digital Commerce 360.

Statista projects the market to roughly triple in the coming years, hitting $15.6 billion by 2024.

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