Amazon Air to Hire 300 People
Amazon is no longer working with FedEx. It's making a shift from free two-day shipping to next day for Prime members and doing more of its own heavy lifting.
Amazon Air said Thursday that it will open its regional hub in October and will hire 300 people to operate the facility it has completed at Alliance Airport in Fort Worth. The air hub is part of the new infrastructure Amazon is building to accomplish the speedier deliveries it has promised to its Prime members and to become its own delivery system. Amazon is making a shift from free two-day shipping to next day for Prime members, and overall, it's doing more of its own heavy lifting.
FedEx opted not to renew its ground-shipping contract with Amazon in August when it was set to expire. Earlier, the Memphis-based company didn't renew Amazon's FedEx Express contract that shipped packages by air. FedEx has said that the e-commerce giant only made up about 1.3% of its total revenue. UPS has said it's sticking with Amazon for now, and it represents a bigger chunk of its business. Amazon is also shifting business away from the U.S. Postal Service. In its strategy to become self-reliant, Amazon established a program to pay its employees up to $10,000 to quit and start their own delivery companies, presumably ones that would work with Amazon. Amazon's Fort Worth facility "will allow us to offer even more selection and faster delivery to our customers," said Sarah Rhoads, vice president of Amazon Global Air.
Amazon said it was planning for the shift to free one-day deliveries in April, and it started rolling it out by product categories and ZIP codes in June. Amazon spent $800 million this year to transform a network that was set up for two-day fulfillment. Included in that total is the cost to build the Fort Worth Air Hub, which Amazon declined to break out...
