New Durham facility helps Amazon Prime members get one-day delivery
Earlier this year, Amazon said it would spend $800 million during the second quarter to reduce its standard shipping time for Prime customers from two days to one.
At a nondescript building off Holloway Street in East Durham, the effort to make those deliveries faster is well under way.
With both Amazon-branded and plain Mercedes Sprinter vans darting out of the parking lot every few minutes Tuesday, Amazon gave reporters a tour of its first delivery station in Durham. Across an expansive warehouse, workers wearing neon vests darted back and forth down long rows of shelving and conveyor belts, passing along brown Amazon boxes.
At an open bay at the far end of the warehouse, a revolving group of four to five vans waited for the boxes to make it their way before speeding away.
The facility, which has been operating since the end of last year, handles “last-mile logistics” for the e-commerce giant and ships “tens of thousands of packages every day,” according to James Shively, a regional director of operations for Amazon.
Shively said this was the first “delivery station” in the region, though it has several other operations around the Triangle.
“The primary focus of our delivery station is to take boxes that have customer product in it and to put it on vans and ensure it is delivered to customers,” Shively, whose region stretches from South Carolina to Northern Virginia, said in an interview.
“Investments into delivery stations like you see here today are one part of us enabling that one-day delivery.”
The facility is expected to support 385 permanent full- and part-time jobs, he added.
As it is in several other regions across the country, Amazon is pouring millions of dollars into infrastructure here. Last year, the company began work on a 2.6-million-square-foot distribution center on Jones Sausage Road in Garner, which will one day employ up to 1,500 people, The News & Observer previously reported. (In comparison, the Durham delivery station is around 90,000 square feet.)
This facility, and possible future ones, will work in tandem with those larger fulfillment centers in the region.
“Our larger upstream facilities, like our fulfillment centers, basically provide all the boxes that come into our facility, which we then sort and put onto vans and go onto roads,” Shively said. “As a new facility comes online we will take product from their facilities and sort it and put it onto vans so then it goes to customers.”
But another key to making deliveries faster is getting other people to actually deliver the packages. Amazon is partnering with several local small businesses that can run a fleet of vans for deliveries, Shively said. Amazon also uses the U.S. Postal Service to deliver items that aren’t Prime deliveries.
Jasper Lee’s company JEMG Supply Chain is one of those small businesses working with Amazon.
Lee, a 30-year military veteran who retired in 2013, started the company in 2018 with four vans and eight employees, but as the delivery station has ramped up, so has his company. JEMG now has 33 vans and more than 65 employees.
“What we do is deliver packages,” he said. “That is our main goal.”
He said that Amazon has been very helpful with assisting the growth of his business, including a $10,000 incentive for veterans to partially cover startup costs.
“If you need a fleet of vans they help with resourcing vans; if you need employees they assist with hiring ... whatever you need,” Lee said.
He added that Amazon has also helped with the technology needs of quick-paced delivery, like “having an accurate location,” as well as help “with monitoring the drivers” and “tracking vans.”
Shively said Amazon is also using contract drivers — who can set their own hours, like an Uber driver — to deliver packages. Those contractors can make $18 to $25 per hour, he said.
Across the company, Amazon has instituted a $15 minimum wage for employees, making it one of the largest employers in the country to hike its minimum wage.
Zachery Eanes: 919-419-6684, @zeanes
This story was originally published July 2, 2019 at 6:11 PM with the headline "New Durham facility helps Amazon Prime members get one-day delivery."
