Amazon Offers 500 New Jobs In Florida As It Opens New Fulfillment Center

Online retail giant Amazon will open a new fulfillment center in Deltona in Florida and create 500 fresh jobs.

The new center near Orlando will be Amazon’s fifth fulfillment center in Florida. The one-million-square-foot facility will specialize in shipping larger items like patio furniture, sports equipment, pet food, kayaks, fishing rods, bicycles, and larger household goods.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis hailed the investment in a statement and said: “Amazon is proving that by investing in modern supply chains, consumers are well-served, and infrastructure is best utilized.”

Amazon’s current facilities in Florida are at Miami-Dade, Orlando, Tampa and Jacksonville metro areas. The company has not announced the opening date for the new facility.

The Miami Herald report said Amazon created more than 13,500 full-time jobs in Florida since it opened fulfillment centers in the state, six years ago.

The objective of Amazon fulfillment operations is augmenting speed and efficiency in last-mile delivery. The company invests heavily in robotics, process automation. network expansion and seeks to bring inventory closer to the locations of consumers.

Amazon said more than 139,000 authors, small and medium-sized businesses in Florida had been reaching new customers through its platform. A majority of the third-party sellers are based in South Florida.

Amazon will be opening the new Florida facility two years after it unveiled an 850,000-square-foot Opa-Locka fulfillment center focused on small and mid-size items.

Fox News reported Deltona Mayor Heidi Herzberg's comments on the new center’s location noting that it will “serve Amazon well.”

The Mayor said the prime location promises great employment and economic opportunities for Deltona and its neighboring communities.

As for workers’ pay, Amazon said the new jobs would start at $15 an hour accompanied by benefits such as medical, vision, and dental insurance, and paid parental leave.

“We’re excited to continue our investment in Florida with this new fulfillment center in Deltona,” said Alicia Boler Davis, Amazon’s vice president of global customer fulfillment.

The VP said since 2013, Amazon has invested more than $5 billion in Florida in terms of fulfillment centers, cloud infrastructure, research facilities, and compensation to thousands of employees, per the press release.

Augmenting speed and efficiency

In the retail success of Amazon, its business model focused on speed and efficiency has a big role. The Retail Dive report quotes the data by Rakuten Intelligence that tracks shipments from Amazon, Walmart, Target and others.

The data monitors the click-to-ship and ship-to-door segments of these retailers. Click refers to an online order by a customer while ship refers to the package moving toward a customer and the 'door' signals the delivery at the final location. So, the click-to-door time frame is the index of speed and efficiency.

The numbers suggest Amazon's total shipping time was less than three days for most of 2019 while non-Amazon retailers took closer to five days for the year.

Amazon's focus on speed is also borne by the soaring investments ranging from airplanes to cargo vans. These along with the penchant to take inventory closer to the customers have helped Amazon cut its ship-to-door time below two days in the second half of 2019 vis a vis non-Amazon retailers, the report noted.