Amazon Spurring Building of New Delivery Hubs

The online retail giant Amazon is planning in the coming months to build at least one thousand of what it calls “small delivery hubs” across the country.

Those hubs may comprise newly-built structures, or will be put into existing and upgraded warehouse space.

Plans call for the hubs, which on average will measure around 200,000 square feet, to be built in both urban and suburban locations.

The idea behind the hubs, which, according to reports, could eventually number more than 1,500, is to shorten the distance and time between the products purchased on Amazon’s website and the customer doing the purchasing.

The new hubs are one more sign of Amazon’s explosive growth this year, which has seen a more than 43% increase in sales this spring for a total of $55 billion, up from $38 billion during the same time period last year.

Amazon says the hubs are also needed in order to honor the company’s typical two-day and even less delivery schedule.

Although it has been speculated that the new delivery hubs may be built in repurposed department store spaces, reports indicate that those stores would probably not work due to a lack of loading capacity.  

Despite that limitation, analysts believe more and more former large retail spaces that have been boarded up in recent years will be converted in the years to come to distribution and warehouse space for various companies.
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Where exactly the new Amazon hubs will be built has not yet been announced by the company.

By Garry Boulard

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