Amazon.com Inc. says it has been able to speed up some deliveries to Prime customers in Greater Washington this holiday season largely thanks to a revamped warehouse that the company is calling a “mini-fulfillment center," the e-commerce giant told the Washington Business Journal.
The company said that its facility at 6885 Commercial Drive in Springfield has allowed it to move some 3 million more products from next-day to same-day delivery category in the D.C. area. In some cases, packages arrive within five hours of being ordered, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) said. During Christmas week, the same-day delivery will be available on Christmas Eve, but not on Christmas day.
While this facility has been open since March, the company only started touting its faster processing times in November. The warehouse was “ramping up” output over the year, an Amazon spokesperson said.
The company announced it was rolling out these so-called “mini” versions of its mega logistics centers in Philadelphia, Phoenix, Orlando and Dallas in March just before the pandemic upended the U.S economy. The 110,000-square-foot Springfield warehouse is about 10% of the size of a typical fulfillment center, an Amazon spokesperson said. It also operates differently than most of its warehouses.
“Rather than follow the traditional package route — shipping an item from a fulfillment center to a sort center and then to a delivery station for pickup — this new facility enables all three functions under one roof,” the spokesperson said. “This means that delivery drivers pick orders up directly from the new site and then deliver them to customers.”
The company said this center has created hundreds of full-time and part-time jobs. Amazon said in October it would hire some 100,000 seasonal workers in the United States this holiday season, with roughly 3,300 of the jobs in Virginia and 7,200 in Maryland.
Amazon's presence around Greater Washington is more than HQ2. We mapped its current and planned delivery stations — and the rest of its network — back in October.
The job tallies don't break down further to those in Greater Washington, but we have reported that Amazon has roughly 1 million square feet of logistics warehouses in the region. While most of that is in Northern Virginia, with two more coming to Gainesville and Manassas in 2021, the vast increase in Amazon's local delivery footprint will come on the Maryland side, with something close to 1.1 million square feet planned at locations in Hyattsville, Gaithersburg, Beltsville, Waldorf and Glenn Dale.
Amazon's growth in the region may have looked different had plans to build a fulfillment center at Westphalia in Upper Marlboro — a five-story building with an 818,423-square-foot footprint and nearly 4 million gross square feet — had not suffered such intense backlash from the neighboring community. The company ultimately withdrew those plans and went forward with a number of smaller warehouses in Maryland.
The Covid-19 health crisis has pushed shoppers away from physical shopping and into the arms of e-commerce retailers such as Amazon. The company, which is building a second headquarters in Arlington, pulled in about $261 billion in sales for the first nine months of 2020 — nearly $67 billion more than the same period of 2019. The current holiday season is already proving to be record-breaking for Amazon.
