Cyber Monday: Behind the scenes at Schertz Amazon Fulfillment Center

It's beginning to look a lot like Cyber Monday at the Amazon fulfillment center in Schertz, a little town outside of San Antonio. 

It's one of seven fulfillment centers in Texas. The place is huge. 1.26 million square feet, about 28 football fields.  And it's home to both human employees...and robots.

"We have hundreds of robots that are assisting about 1,000 associates in fulfilling your Cyber Monday orders," said Amazon spokesperson Aaron Toso.

Amazon says Black Friday was a good day for them and it was bigger for them this year than it was last year.  But Cyber Monday is their biggest shopping day of the year. They say last year at this time they sold 54 million products. That's 629 items per second.

Amazon spokesperson Aaron Toso showed us some of their Cyber Monday deals. They've got about 75,000 of the, .like a Star Wars "Shadow Trooper" helmet for $56.99.

Aaron Knirr owns the Lago Vista company "Wine Ovation." They make rechargeable wine openers that don't look like rechargeable wine openers.  Amazon stores his inventory and handles the customer service.

"We have very unique times right now where a small manufacturer like Wine Ovation can get their product in front of millions of people like never before," Knirr said.

So how does this giant facility work?

"So what happens at an Amazon fulfillment center in the simplest way is the product comes in, we check for damage, we have to make sure we get it into the system and then we bring it up for an associate to stow it,' Toso said.

So if you order something on Amazon.com, a robot will literally go fetch it from storage and bring it to an associate who sends it to be boxed up.

You might get Elmo on your doorstep faster than you think.  Toso says places like the fulfillment center make that possible.

"We've got a lot of great local employees.  We love doing business here in Texas.  We've got talent in abundance and we're continuing to expand our delivery options both in San Antonio and in Austin.  We have same day delivery," Toso said.

The Christmas shopping season is bringing quite a few jobs to Central Texas. There's another fulfillment center in San Marcos. Amazon says they're employing about 3,500 seasonal employees through the whole Central Texas area.