Netflix distribution centers: a portrait of speed and efficiency

This is the story of a little red envelope.

It arrives by truck before dawn Tuesday at a nondescript warehouse a few miles from downtown Orlando. For the rest of the day, this envelope, and more than 100,000 like it, will be sent like electric current through a human-and-machine processing system that would amaze Henry Ford.

Thousands know these envelopes contain DVDs from Netflix, the California-based movies-by-mail company that eliminated the need to drive to a video store. Netflix pays the postage both ways, so all the customer has to do is place an order online, open the mailbox, watch the movie and put it back in the mailbox.

It seems like a simple process, but it's anything but.

Netflix's Orlando hub is the fourth-largest by volume among the company's 58 distribution centers, which together ship about 2.2 million discs on a typical day. Netflix also has a large facility south of Tacoma. The service has more than 10 million subscribers.

On Tuesday, typically the busiest day of the week, the roughly 90 employees near Orlando processed at least 127,000 discs and sent them to homes throughout Florida.

It all starts at 3 a.m., when dozens of employees in red T-shirts seated at rows of desks start tearing open thousands of the little red envelopes. For the next five hours, each employee repeats the same few steps over and over: Rip red envelope. Remove disc from white sleeve. Inspect disc for scratches and cracks. Make sure it's the correct disc. Clean disc. Return to sleeve. Place in appropriate bin.

It's a portrait of speed and efficiency that Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey said takes months of training. An average employee can go through 650 discs in an hour.

To get the envelopes to the facility that early, Netflix sends trucks to postal facilities during the night to pick up the movies that have been returned by customers and bring them back to the hub.

Making sure the disc matches the sleeve it arrives in can be particularly tricky. A board near a break area has photos of some of the hardest discs to match with suggestions for telling them apart.

For instance, the TV miniseries "Jesus of Nazareth" has two discs, but neither disc contains any writing to signify if it's disc 1 or disc 2. So Netflix employees are trained to know that on one disc, there is a picture of Jesus standing on the right, while the other has him standing on the left. Remakes, sequels and movies with similar titles can also trip employees up.

"There's no worse experience than setting down on the sofa to watch "Goodfellas" and putting your feet up and seeing that you have a copy of Peter Pan," Swasey said.

Next, the envelopes are fed twice through a sorting machine — once to register Netflix has received the DVD, which automatically e-mails the customer who sent it and asks them to rate the movie, and a second time to determine if that disc has been promised to another customer. If it has, the machine automatically places it in a bin marked with its destination.

Continuing on its journey, the bin with the envelope is brought over to "The Stuffer," a Rube Goldberg-like machine Netflix created to speed up the process of stuffing and sealing the red envelopes.

Until about a year ago, Netflix employees did this by hand, which meant only about 650 envelopes could be stuffed an hour. At a rate of 3,200 an hour, the machines open the envelope, stuff the sleeve inside, remove the adhesive strip, seal the envelope and place another seal on it.

The final stop is another trip to the mail sorter, where the sealed envelope gets scanned, to determine where it's going, has the address printed on it and then gets sorted by ZIP code into a bin attached to the machine.

Starting at about 4 p.m., white trucks drive the bins to mail-processing and -distribution centers. All the postal service has to do is load them on its trucks to send that little red envelope on its way to someone else's mailbox.