With the Christmas holiday just around the corner one of the busiest places you’ll find in West Virginia is the Macy’s Distribution Center in Martinsburg.
The company just opened its massive building and started shipping out merchandise in July. Macy’s spokesman Jim Sluzewski says five-months later the employees are prepared for a very busy holiday season.
“We have to be ready for it,” he said. “So we have been preparing for it for many weeks now to get the merchandise in place, get all the systems working.”
Sluzewski says the real rush will begin Black Friday.
“That’s when the volume really starts ramping up at a very high level,” he said.
Seasonal online orders are expected to increase this year by 40 percent. That’s why there was such a need to get the Martinsburg center up and running on time.
Once the center is fully operational it will employ 1,200 full-time workers and up to 700 seasonal employees. They’re shy of that number, as expected, this first Christmas in business.
“Right now we’re at over one-thousand [employees] and that’s a combination of both that are core, year round and those that are there seasonally,” Sluzewski said.
Good news for those seasonal employees. This time next year they could be full-time.
“Those who have joined us initially seasonally, [some] just stay on as a regular employees,” Sluzewski said.
It’s a bit of holiday madness inside the center — controlled chaos as the employees send out those presents up until the very last minute.