Warehouses

In Suzhou, China, online toy shop owner Cameron Walker relies on Amazon to ship nearly a million packages for his business every year. The 42-year-old’s toy business, which designs and manufactures toys and craft materials in China and then sells into English-speaking markets including the UK, US, and Canada, has been running on Amazon’s third-party fulfillment service, Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA), since 2016. (Walker asked WIRED not to disclose the name of his business because successful businesses on the site are often…

Amazon, one of the United State’s largest employers and a mainstay of Americans’ shopping habits, has long resisted unionization efforts such as union drives in 2000 and 2014. In recent years, though, the calls for unionization have grown louder and more public — and an upstart union was even able to win an election at one of the company’s facilities in New York. The recent string of elections started in Bessemer, Alabama, when the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union attempted to organize Amazon’s BHM1…

California’s Inland Empire, a sprawling region just east of Los Angeles that was once known for orange groves and grape vineyards, is now ground zero of America’s warehouse boom. The rise of online shopping has triggered a dramatic change in the landscape here and across the country — every $1 billion in online sales drums up demand for 1.25 million square feet of warehouse space. Now, there’s an estimated 1 billion square feet of warehouses in the Inland Empire alone, according to a new analysis by the Robert…

In recent years, Amazon has spent billions of dollars on new warehouses that cut into profits, explaining to investors that it had no choice but to meet ever-rising consumer demand.It turns out, Amazon may have built too much, too soon, analysts say.The world's largest online retailer on Thursday reported $2 billion (roughly Rs. 15,300 crore) in incremental costs from having excess fulfillment and transportation capacity, a dramatic shift from just two years ago when Amazon had to turn away merchants' goods because it had…