Amazon is investing in new fulfilment centres in the USA and in the UK, taking on several thousand new staff and speeding up deliveries by expanding its Prime Now service in the USA offering one-hour delivery from local stores as well as from Amazon itself.
In the USA, the e-commerce giant is hiring more than 6,000 people in full-time positions at 19 of its more than 50 fulfilment centres across the country to meet growing customer demand. The new employees will be responsible for picking, packing and shipping customer orders.
“We’re proud to be creating more than 6,000 full-time positions where employees will interact with state-of-the-art technology as part of their day-to-day roles,” Mike Roth, Amazon’s vice president of North America operations, said. “Amazon not only offers great pay and benefits, we also encourage our employees to continue to grow in their careers.”
In addition, the e-commerce giant is also opening new warehouses. In Texas, Amazon plans to open a fourth fulfilment centre and is currently hiring more than 1,500 people to work at the facility in Dallas, including hundreds of full-time jobs. Amazon employees at the 46,452 sqm fulfilment centre will process smaller items, such as books, electronics and consumer goods.
Since launching its first fulfilment centre in Texas, Amazon has created over 3,500 full-time jobs and invested more than $400 million in the state as it continues to grow its operations to meet customer demand. Amazon’s other Texas fulfilment centres are located in Coppell, Haslet, and Schertz.
Another Amazon fulfilment centre will be opened in Carteret, New Jersey, also creating hundreds of full-time jobs. The 92,903 sqm facility is expected to bring Amazon’s total footprint in New Jersey to more than 232,258 sqm. The company employs thousands of full-time employees at its existing New Jersey fulfilment centre in Robbinsville and continues to hire new staff to meet growing customer demand.
In the UK, Amazon plans to create 500 new permanent jobs with the upcoming opening of a new 28,800 sqm fulfilment centre in Dunstable, southern England. The centre is due to start handling customer orders this autumn.
“Over the last two years, we have added well in excess of 2,000 new employees to our UK workforce and we are delighted to be able to create a further 500 permanent jobs at our new Dunstable centre,” John Tagawa, Director of UK Operations at Amazon, said. “We look forward to our Dunstable centre playing an integral role in providing a first class shopping experience for customers across the UK, Europe and the world.”
Amazon has invested well over £1 billion in its UK operations to date and has eight fulfilment centres, located in Doncaster, Dunfermline, Gourock, Hemel Hempstead, Marston Gate, Peterborough, Rugeley and Swansea Bay. Together, more than 7,000 permanent employees work at these centres.
In addition, the company will open a new logistics centre at Sunderland in north-east England, working with nine regional delivery companies which will deliver goods across the region. This will be the 13th Amazon Logistics delivery station in the UK.
Separately, Amazon has announced that it completed the move of its UK corporate headquarters to London which will be located in one of the company’s three new offices in the capital. More than 2,000 employees, the majority of whom were previously based in Slough, thus moved to the three locations across the capital. Amazon expects to hire hundreds of new employees across the three London sites in 2015 alone, having already recruited more than 1,000 corporate employees in new positions in the last three years.
“London is now officially our new home,” Christopher North, Managing Director at Amazon UK, said. “The move to the capital was vitally important to our continued growth in the UK and to finding the very best talent who will join our existing team that works day in, day out to provide an exceptional service for our customers all over the country, Europe and the world.”
Meanwhile, Amazon has upgraded its Prime Now service in the USA now offering one-hour deliveries from local stores in addition to its own products. In the initial phase, it has launched local store deliveries through Prime Now in select neighbourhoods in Manhattan and will expand across Manhattan in the coming weeks.
“Our Prime Now hub in Manhattan is home to tens of thousands of products that are being delivered to customers in an hour or less. Now, we are expanding the service to include delivery from local stores,” said Dave Clark, Amazon’s senior vice president of worldwide operations. “We are launching delivery from local stores through Prime Now in Manhattan and will add local stores in other cities where we offer Prime Now soon.”
To purchase from local stores, customers can use the Prime Now app, available on iOS and Android devices. Through the service, two-hour delivery from local stores is free and one-hour delivery, available in select zip codes, is $7.99. Prime Now is currently available in Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Brooklyn, Dallas, Manhattan and Miami.
