Amazon fulfillment center opens in Robbinsville
By Scott Morgan
In the early days of the World Wide Web, the little online-only bookstore that Jeff Bezos started in his garage was as brilliant, as stupid and as audacious an idea as any other in the new digital frontier. Plenty of people poo-pooed internet commerce back then, believing it to be another fad that people would soon discard, and enterprises like Amazon would eventually become a quaint relic of best-forgotten era.
Some of those people could now get a job with Amazon in Robbinsville, working alongside 1,400 or so others who’ll make their living fulfilling thousands upon thousands (upon thousands) of orders a month for everything the online-only megastore now sells.
Amazon’s latest fulfillment center—the company’s term for its increasing chain of order processing and distribution facilities worldwide—opened in the township in June, after two years of expectations and hard work. It is one of two such centers in New Jersey (the other being in Avanel), each measuring just shy of 1 million square feet, that are part of a $130 million investment by Amazon in the Garden State.
Robbinsville’s center, located in the Matrix business park, also is one of 108 active centers worldwide that occupy almost 75 million square feet. Six of those centers are outside North America.
The buildup for Amazon began a few years ago and is showing little sign of letting up, as the company keeps swinging at its most pressing competition, retailers Walmart and Target. In 2011, there were 69 Amazon fulfillment centers. By the following year, there were 80.
Plans for the Robbinsville facility were announced in 2012 and so far, projections for size, scale and timing have all run according to schedule.
“Amazon has been an absolute pleasure to work with,” Robbinsville mayor Dave Fried said. “We look forward to a long-lasting partnership.”
Amazon originally had set the opening of the Robbinsville center for spring, and is now expecting to hire through the summer.
“We understand Amazon could have chosen anywhere in New Jersey to build its new fulfillment center, and we are fortunate to have the infrastructure and resources to meet their needs and consummate one of the most sought-after business partnerships in recent memory,’’ Fried said.
While it’s too early to tell how long-lasting Amazon’s relationships with the towns it builds fulfillment centers in will be, Amazon has generally stuck around. The company has, however, shuttered five centers in the United States to date—three in 2009 as part of normal business activity, according to Patty Smith, an Amazon spokeswoman who, at the time, told press outlets that the company regularly evaluates its fulfillment centers in an effort to balance the right goods for the right customers.
In 2011, Amazon also nixed plans to open a fulfillment center in South Carolina that would have been roughly on the scale of the Robbinsville center, after that state would not offer the company tax incentives, according to the State newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina. But for Robbinsville, that is not an issue.
Fried has estimated that Amazon over the next 20 years will pay the township $13.5 million in tax payments, with $5.6 million going to the school district. The school district alone got $210,000 in taxes in 2012, after ground first broke. Amazon leases the warehouse space from KTR, which bought the property from Matrix.
The most obvious reason the township is excited, of course, is jobs. The roughly 1,400 positions Amazon could fill here is quite a boon to local workers, and competition for jobs (as it typically is wherever Amazon opens a fulfillment center) is stiff. The earliest positions that were filled, judging by the first posted for the center, were managerial and supervisory, but the bulk of the jobs will be hourly positions for picking, packing and shipping orders, according to Rebecca Passo-Mikulski, a spokeswoman for Amazon.
And while Amazon has been fairly mum about the details, Passo-Mikulski wrote in an email that Amazon “is actively hiring for more than a thousand full-time positions with benefits starting on day one” in Robbinsville. These benefits include health insurance, 401(k) with 50 percent match, bonuses, company stock awards and a network of support to ensure employees succeed.
“Amazon also offers full-time employees innovative programs like Career Choice, where the company will pre-pay up to 95 percent of tuition for courses related to in-demand fields, regardless of whether the skills are relevant to a career at Amazon,” she wrote.
The company will not give specifics about wages, but according to GlassDoor.com, the average salary for an Amazon warehouse worker is typically $10-$14 per hour in the U.S.
The initial estimate of 1,400 jobs may end up being a low-ball, especially as the holidays roll in. Though Amazon did not respond to questions regarding seasonal help, Mercer County Executive Brian Hughes said that Amazon expects to need 700 people per shift at its peak times. At three shifts a day, that’s 2,100 people.
So for all the promise and hope, one question to consider is: What’s it like to work in one of these centers? Well, if you happen to be near Jeffersonville, Indiana, Middletown, Delaware, Chester, Virginia, Chattanooga, Phoenix or San Bernardino, you can tour one and see for yourself. What you can expect to see is actually quite mindboggling. A million square feet of warehouse is a seriously big space, and for Amazon these gleaming white fulfillment centers are as perfect a picture of controlled chaos as you’re going to get.
Put simply, there are acres of stuff, from blenders to books about blenders, stuffed on the first available shelves. When goods come in on the trucks, packages are opened and items put wherever they fit, period. There are no special sections for electronics or books or clothes. Just available shelf space and computer tracking equipment that tells workers where your selection of scented soaps is.
Once retrieved, the item is put in one of the multitude of yellow crates, boxed, sealed, stamped and sent on a dizzying web of slides to outgoing trucks, where two workers, generally, stack as many boxes as possible into the trucks (and it gets really Tetrisy in these trucks), en route to shippers like the Postal Service or UPS. This goes on all day, every day the facility is open.
As for what will go on outside the facility, well, that remains to be seen. Certainly one of the things the township has touted about Amazon being here is the bump to the local economy, beyond the ratable. But whether the presence of 1,400 workers at the Matrix site will benefit businesses in the township, or even nearby Allentown, Hamilton or East Windsor is unclear.
In the best case, officials hope the new jobs will mean that Amazon’s employees will eat, shop and recreate in the township. A 2010 look at Amazon’s contributions to the local economy in Tennessee by the University of Tennessee Center for Business and Economic Research estimated that for every dollar Amazon paid its full-time and seasonal workers there, 50 to 75 cents went back toward the regional economy.
Whether the effect on central New Jersey will be similar is unclear, but local merchants like Lee Paroly, owner of the Friendly’s restaurant in the Foxmoor Shopping Center, are ecstatic over the presence of 1,400 new people working a few miles up the road.
“I’m trying to get in the front door with Amazon,” Paroly said. “I would like to set up a discount program with them to encourage their employees to come dine with us. Fourteen-hundred people could mean some substantial business for the restaurant.”
It could also bolster other businesses in the beleaguered shopping center, which has struggled ever since Thriftway left the center in 2011. Paroly calls the opening of the fulfillment center good timing, especially in light of a recent meeting between Fried, Foxmoor merchants, the township Redevelopment Committee and site owner Pettinaro Management to discuss how to make Foxmoor vital again.
Lindsay Vastola, owner of the Body Project Fitness and Lifestyle studio in Foxmoor, has equally high hopes regarding Amazon.
“I think any new growth or influx of people Amazon brings will play a significant role in helping the business community of Robbinsville thrive,” Vastola said.
Like Paroly, Vastola plans to approach Amazon to work out something that will benefit her business and Amazon’s employees. Body Project is a studio that caters mostly to professional women, and a significant part of her business involves offering corporate wellness programs.
“I work with companies of all sizes in the region to develop employee wellness initiatives, offer lunch-and-learn seminars, on-site yoga sessions, and fitness challenges,” she said. “With healthcare a central issue, employers are realizing the importance of investing in preventative care, so I see great opportunities for my company to offer Amazon.”
Regionally, officials are seeing a larger picture of what Amazon’s presence can offer. Hughes said the county has been working since Amazon’s announcement to coordinate bus routes (mostly from Trenton) to the Matrix site.
To his point, a new bus service called the ZLine began in mid-July that will meet NJ Transit buses at Hamilton Marketplace, and travel to the Matrix Business Park, including the new Amazon fulfillment center. NJ Transit adjusted its schedules on the 601, 606 and 603/613 routes to align better with the ZLine and work shifts at the office park. The bus lines also will have more service earlier in the morning and on the weekends.
In June, Hughes said the county had put $10,000 into the plan so far and will be getting matching money from Amazon, Robbinsville Township, the Federal Transit Agency and the Mercer County One-Stop Career Center, which is funded through a combination of county, state and federal money.
The One-Stop actually is a hub for hiring for Amazon positions, Hughes said. Because Amazon is hiring its initial round online, the center is teaching job seekers in Trenton how to apply for and qualify for jobs.
“We want to give people access to jobs and not have them be discouraged because they don’t have a car,” Hughes said.
Ultimately, he said, Amazon’s biggest effect on the region may just be that it will employ people in need of a start or re-start, and the county wants to ensure that people can get to work there.
The new Amazon fulfillment center at the intersection of Gordon Road and Old York Road in the township is open and ready for business.,
