The Chesterfield site is offering two tours a day, Monday to Friday. Under an expanded program being offered at 23 Amazon facilities in the United States and Canada, the number of tours is increasing tenfold. The company is now offering more public tours of its massive fulfillment center in Chesterfield, one of 175 fulfillment centers the Seattle-based company operates to store, package and ship the vast quantities of products that customers order from the company every day.įor the past five years, Amazon has held four tours a month at the Chesterfield fulfillment center, and about 11,400 people have visited the site. Last November, Amazon announced plans to open HQ2, or second headquarters office, in Northern Virginia, an investment expected to create about 25,000 jobs over 20 years.Īs its presence grows in Virginia and the Richmond region, the online retail giant is opening its doors to let more people see what happens behind the scenes in its order fulfillment operations. The company said it now employs more than 8,500 people in Virginia, including at its facilities in the Richmond region and in Virginia Beach and Springfield. In 2017, Amazon leased a 328,000-square-foot building on Lakeridge Parkway in the Enterchange at Northlake business park in Hanover County to serve as a package sorting facility employing about 300 people. Since then, the company has added other operations in the Richmond region and around Virginia. ![]() To urbanists, contemplating the potential of the area surrounding Interstate 75 in Ocala, Florida, outside of Orlando might not be as attractive as upzoning and building transit in San Francisco, but it is these types of new communities that are going to be the future of a large segment of the working class.The Chesterfield facility has 2,200 employees, a number that can swell by as much as 1,000 seasonal workers during the peak of the holiday shopping season.Īmazon opened the center in the Meadowville Technology Park and another one in Dinwiddie County in late 2012, investing more than $135 million. ![]() But the point is that we need to be thinking about what sorts of communities are being created by the growth of US e-commerce infrastructure, and what they'll need to thrive. These new factory towns will presumably have new issues that need addressing, such as adequate amounts of housing, schools and healthcare facilities. ![]() If there's a push to increase density by building affordable apartments or townhomes for workers, there's less likely to be wealthy homeowners mobilising to stop it, since those sorts of homeowners probably will live closer to the city core.Īs wages rise and more jobs are created at warehouses and distribution hubs, you'll get a secondary increase in economic activity as amenities like retail and dining are built close by to appeal to the workforce. People can live close to work with shorter commutes - plus the possibility of employer-provided shuttle buses - when their jobs are in a cheaper, less-crowded part of a metro area. People can argue about what constitutes a reasonable working class lifestyle, but that would seem to offer the prospect for a much better existence than service workers had a decade ago, particularly considering lower housing costs on the outskirts of metro areas. If these sorts of jobs get to an average wage of $20 an hour then a household with 1.5 full-time workers in it would make $60,000 a year with benefits. It starts with making the jobs as high-paying and safe as possible, whether that can be done by running labor markets hot, or perhaps with unionisation or the threat of it. And doesn't it make sense, then, to think about how we can make these communities better for the people who will live and work there? Thinking about the growth of fulfillment and distribution centers in general, maybe these highway warehouse communities with jobs that pay increasingly respectable wages are what the future of the working class looks like. ![]() Now consider Amazon's announcement this week that it's making another big hiring push at its fulfillment centers with jobs paying an average starting wage of $18 an hour - up 20% since 2018.
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