3 new Amazon sites here
Fulfillment centers, delivery station will create 1,500 S.A. jobs
Amazon is boosting its presence in South Texas with plans to open three new facilities in San Antonio and create more than 1,500 full-time jobs.
San Antonio’s size and proximity to Austin, Houston and other large cities appealed to the e-commerce behemoth.
“We’re excited to be continuing our growth in San Antonio, which is such a growing market in and of itself,” Amazon spokesman Daniel Martin said. “We’re really seeing increased demand from customers, and we’re proud to be able to build out capacity to help meet that demand.”
When building a new facility, the company considers customer demand, an area’s workforce and whether there is “strong support from local and state leaders to help us expand,” he said.
Employees at a 1 millionsquare-foot fulfillment center at 10360 U.S. 90 on the West Side will select, package and ship large items such as furniture and rugs.
That facility and a 350,000square-foot delivery station at 8210 Aviation Landing on the Southeast Side are expected to open in 2021.
After being prepared at ful
fillment and sorting centers, packages are taken to delivery stations and loaded on vans for transportation to customers’ doorsteps.
At another facility — a 750,000square-foot fulfillment center at 6806 Cal Turner Drive on the East Side — workers will handle smaller purchases such as books and electronics, alongside robots that will help lift and store items.
That warehouse, which alone will employ more than 1,000 workers, is slated to open in 2022.
Wages for Amazon positions start at a minimum of $15 per hour, Martin said. Benefits include medical, vision and dental insurance and a matching 401(k) contribution.
Through its Career Choice program, the company also subsidizes tuition and fees for degrees in high-demand fields such as health care and computer science.
The new hubs will significantly expand the company’s footprint in the region. Amazon currently operates three delivery stations and a sorting center in San Antonio, along with fulfillment centers in Schertz and San Marcos.
“We’re thrilled to be able to continue our growth throughout the San Antonio area,” Alicia Boler Davis, Amazon’s vice president of global customer fulfillment, said in an announcement Tuesday.
The company didn’t disclose how much it’s spending on the expansion. However, District 2 Councilwoman Jada AndrewsSullivan said in a statement cheering its planned Cal Turner Drive facility that it will cost $200 million.
Amazon isn’t seeking financial incentives for the investment, said Jamie Bloodsworth, a spokeswoman for the San Antonio Economic Development Foundation.
Gov. Greg Abbott, Mayor Ron Nirenberg and local economic development officials praised Amazon’s growth plans in San Antonio, noting the number of new jobs.
“We are thrilled to work closely with Amazon to support their growing presence in our region,” said Jenna Saucedo-Herrera, president and CEO of the San Antonio Economic Development Foundation. “Together, these three new facilities in San Antonio will occupy more than 2 million square feet and employ thousands of San Antonians who will work to deliver the great prime
service many have come to rely on.”
Amazon said it has created more than 43,000 jobs and invested more than $16.9 billion across Texas since 2010 and added more than $18.8 billion in gross domestic product to the state’s economy.
It operates 17 fulfillment and sorting centers, three technology hubs and 10 delivery stations in Texas, with more facilities under construction.
The company is adding facilities in areas with large populations and an ample workforce, said Venky Shankar, director of research at the Center for Retailing Studies at Texas A&M University.
Texas has four major urban centers — the San Antonio, Austin, Houston and Dallas metro areas — and there’s plenty of migration into the state, Shankar said.
Amazon’s sales have skyrocketed during the pandemic, which has accelerated the shift to online shopping. But during the initial surge in COVID-19 cases, online shoppers encountered out-ofstock items, delayed deliveries and higher prices.
“It’s all about creating more reliability and better service levels. The object of the game is to have what the customer wants, deliver
(when) they expect it and do it well,” said Paula Rosenblum, managing partner at RSR Research, a Miami-based retail market intelligence firm. “I think they had problems with that.”
The company’s earnings jumped to $6.3 billion in the third quarter, up from $2.1 billion during the same period last year.
Amazon also went on a hiring spree, adding hundreds of thousands of workers this year and bringing its ranks to over 1.1 million.
Last summer, employees at several of Amazon’s local facilities and some of the company’s other U.S. warehouses raised concerns about working conditions.
In June, several workers told the San Antonio Express-News it frequently was impossible to practice on-the-job social distancing because of how their work spaces were configured.
They also said the company provided scant information about coronavirus-infected coworkers, such as the shifts they worked or their location in the facility.
At the time, an Amazon spokesperson said the company “evaluates where the employee was in the building, for how long, how much time has passed since they were onsite, and who they
interacted with, among other items, in determining how to appropriately handle the situation.”
In October, Amazon said more than 19,000 of its employees had tested positive positive for COVID-19, a rare disclosure from a large company during the pandemic.
In a recent post, the company said it had doled out more than $2.5 billion in bonuses and incentives for employees worldwide.
As Amazon’s market power grows and it expands into new areas such as health care, it is increasingly coming under fire for what competitors, regulators and politicians say are unfair practices.
The Justice Department initiated a probe last year into the competitive practices of Amazon and other major tech firms, and the European Commission charged Amazon last month with breaking antitrust laws.
The company, for its part, has said it does not use its heft to stifle competition.
This year, the Wall Street Journal has published a series of reports that exposed Amazon tactics such as using data from businesses that sell products on its website to create competing items.