Delivering growth
Amazon move into Danbury reflects increasing presence in state
In a long-shot bid nearly three years ago to have Amazon make Danbury the hub of its East Coast headquarters expansion, Mayor Mark Boughton posed next to a stack of Amazon boxes in a Facebook video that went viral, asking an Alexa device to ID the company’s best option.
As the familiar voice intoned “Danbury, Connecticut,” the camera panned to the device — but it was that ever-growing stack of boxes at Boughton’s elbow that eventually would bring Amazon calling.
On Thursday, Boughton announced the company will take over a former Scholastic warehouse just off Interstate 84 to add a “last-mile” distribution center that will employ between 300 and 500 people, depending on seasonal shipping needs. The company has existing fulfillment and distribution centers in North Haven, Wallingford and Windsor, with work continuing this month on a fourth in Stratford, a few minutes from I-95.
Where Clifford the Big Red Dog was smiling Friday from nearly a dozen Scholastic box trucks parked neatly at the publisher’s former Old Sherman Turnpike warehouse, it will be Amazon trucks rumbling in and out before long, splashed with the company’s arrow-smile logo.
Amazon’s push comes as the nation grapples with the larger question of where many jobs will ultimately reside, as employers assess the costs and benefits of working arrangements necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic, which could in time benefit outposts like Danbury and Connecticut.
“People are rethinking whether or not they want to be in New York City, and that’s honestly where we’ll be poaching businesses and jobs from,” Boughton said Thursday. “People are figuring out that they can work from their home pretty efficiently ... and I think companies are starting to figure that out.”
Algorithm jocks, ‘yard marshals’
Amazon has become the big yellow dog tugging on America’s jobs leash, hiring in mass even as it continues amassing artificial intelligence tools that in time could displace many of those workers.
For now, Amazon needs people on site. The company has hired 175,000 new workers since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, and anticipates it will have spent more than $4.5 billion since March on varying protective measures for workers, effectively erasing 40 percent of its profits from last year.
But Amazon is making it up in a hurry as consumers stay away from stores, with its annual Amazon Prime Day — what has become a summer equivalent of Black Friday — looming on the July calendar.
“For spikes in demand for known events, like the holiday season and Prime Day, we ... generally spend months ramping up,” said Brian Olsavsky, in a conference call at the April peak of the coronavirus crisis. “We’ve learned that it’s easier to get ready for a holiday or a Prime Day than it is to be ready for something like this, when everything hits at once — high demand and also a need to restock automatically and prepare for it.”
Olsavsky added that Amazon expects to keep the new hires it has been bringing on during the pandemic.
In just five years, Amazon has built a workforce of more than 4,000 employees at its existing distribution centers in Connecticut, not including Whole Foods Market’s workforce it inherited in a 2017 acquisition of the grocery chain.
The company currently lists 75 job openings in the state, from a “yard marshal” to coordinate truck arrivals and departures at one of its smaller way stations in Trumbull, to software architects being recruited by the Amazon Web Services division, which develops new algorithms and platforms supporting Amazon websites and operations, and those of client companies.
It is an expansion no other corporate employer has come close to matching
in the past decade. If many of the Amazon jobs are low pay — the median full-time Amazon worker made $36,600 last year — like many states Connecticut is not being too picky about opportunities for some of the 40,000-plus residents thrown off jobs by the pandemic that were paying them between $35,000 and $50,000. The Connecticut Department of Labor lists another 180,000 people who have yet to recover jobs at which they were making below that range.
On Thursday, Gov. Ned Lamont said that if a “V-shape” economic bounce is not in store for Connecticut this year, he would accept one tapering gradually upward.
“I hope it’s ... at least a ‘U’ up,” Lamont said. “I don’t want a ‘W’ — back up and then down again. That’s what we worry about, when you see these (COVID-19) flare-ups.”
Back in Danbury, Boughton took a moment to reflect on Amazon’s road to Old Sherman Turnpike — and said the city is in advance talks with another big-name brand for a major new facility in the city. Boughton had little more to say on it for now, except the hint that employees will be punching in at work, rather than jumping online at the home office.
“It’s equal of a name — and it’s a bigger plant,” Boughton said.