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Over 180M Expected To Shop Online This Cyber Monday

BALTIMORE (WJZ) -- Cyber Monday is now 10 years old---and a billionaire.

Alex DeMetrick reports for the first time, Baltimore is a major player in online shopping's busiest day.

Orders are on the move at Amazon's newest fulfillment center in Baltimore. The size of 28 football fields, it joins others just like it, filling online orders tapped into computers and smartphones across the country. And while Cyber Monday is the busiest day...

"Cyber Monday is becoming more of a season than a day and so this year, we started offering deals earlier," said Amazon spokesperson Leslie Letts.

And working to move those deals out as fast as possible. Amazon's Baltimore center has installed the latest generation of robots to help. It saves employees like Mike Lewis from walking to storage shelves---the shelves come to home.

"You grab the item, you scan it, it lets you know where it's going," he said.

Lewis said one thing surprised him when he started working for Amazon.

"Just the size of everything. It's very big and the thing is everything is ordered so things run smoothly," Lewis said.

It's a pace other online competitors are chasing and making money, as well.

Shoppers are expected to spend over $3 billion online, which would make this Cyber Monday the biggest ever.

"We expect this to be a bigger year than last year and last year on this day, customers ordered 43 million items, which averages out to about 500 items per second," Letts said.

Making for one heck of a download.

Amazon's fulfillment center in Baltimore employs 3,500 full-time workers and a couple of thousand seasonal employees.

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