Christmastime Is a Big Deal at Big QVC Warehouse

ROCKY MOUNT, N.C. — The largest employer in Edgecombe County is also probably the busiest employer, especially during the Christmas season.

It's a distribution center for QVC, one of the top televised shopping services in the nation.

There are 7 million boxes in the building and 2,000 employees. The building encloses in 1.5 million square feet, the size of 30 football fields. Inside are 17 miles of conveyors, aisles a thousand feet long and storage racks 40 feet high.

It takes a lot of people doing a lot of walking to get products out of storage and on their way to shoppers.

“If we were to count it, I'd say maybe between 20 to 30 miles a day,” said Ron Lyons, who works in inventory control.

The distribution center ships about a $1billion worth of inventory a year. This year's busiest day was Nov. 30, when 183,000 packages went out the doors.

This month, this distribution center will ship more than 2.5 million packages. Last month, it was 3.5 million.

“Just this week, we had one day where we shipped 45,000 next-day air packages through UPS,” said Bill Stanulis, general manager of the center.

Decarlos Cleveland, an outbound shift manager, knows something about hustle and moving from the time he said he spent as a defensive end for the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1984 and 1985.

“It's all about motivation, getting the packages out the door, making sure we have happy customers,” Cleveland said.