Amazon closes northwest city delivery station

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This article was published 18/08/2023 (805 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

After less than three years in operation, Amazon has closed its Plymouth Street delivery station, consolidating its last mile delivery services for the Winnipeg capital region into its slightly newer Regent Avenue West location.

The 113,000-square-foot operation was first reported in October 2020, but likely didn’t open until the second half of 2021.

A slightly newer and larger facility — about 150,000 square feet — was opened on Regent Avenue West shortly after the Plymouth Street location opened.

Ryma Boussoufa, Amazon Canada’s public relations manager, said and all employees were offered jobs at the Regent Avenue West location. She would not say how many took those jobs or what the company’s current Winnipeg workforce is, however upon casual observation it does not seem like the company’s fleet of large grey vans has diminished in numbers.

When it was first opened, an industry source told the Free Press that each location may create around 300 jobs split about half and half between inside workers and independent contractor delivery people.

Amazon’s strategy is to locate the centres in areas that would allow for delivery times of between 35 and 40 minutes and to be situated close to customers and a potential work force.

The fact that it’s closing a facility so soon after having opened it should not be considered as a slight against Winnipeg or surprising considering the physical plant churn the company has experienced over the past couple of years.

Boussoufa said, “We’re always evaluating our network to make sure it fits our business needs and to improve the experience for our employees, customers, and partners.”

That corporate rationale has likely been used a lot these days.

Last year, MWPVL International, a logistics consultant that tracks Amazon’s network, reported that the company has either closed or spiked plans to open 42 facilities totalling almost 25 million square feet in the U.S. and delayed opening another 21 locations, totalling nearly 28 million square feet.

Robert Scaletta, an industrial property specialist with Shindico Inc., said, “At one point Amazon was responsible for something like one-third of industrial projects underway in the U.S.”

But Amazon and other e-commerce companies have acknowledged that they overbuilt when the pandemic turned much of the free world into internet shoppers.

The rationalization of its distribution centre footprint around the world, as consumers went back to bricks and mortar retailers at a brisker pace than had been anticipated before the end of the pandemic, included a massive cutback in its workforce.

Since the beginning of the year, Amazon has announced about 27,000 layoffs from its global workforce.

An in-house publication says that Amazon employs 4,000 people in the three Prairie provinces. Before the closure of the Plymouth Street location, Amazon had 36 similar delivery stations across the country.

It’s not clear if that 4,000 number was before or after the company opened a $400-million, 2.6-million-square-foot distribution centre in Calgary. There had been reports that the company had plans to open an additional 4.6 million square feet of space in Alberta and British Columbia by the end of 2022.

The Seattle-based company’s other presence in Winnipeg is AWS Thinkbox, a high-tech visual effects company internally referred to by Amazon as a “corporate office”, one of only three Amazon corporate offices in Canada.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca