Satellite photography from the past 20 years shows warehouses have transformed the American landscape in states like California, Texas, Ohio, and Washington.
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California's Inland Empire was among the first US regions to acutely feel the warehouse boom. Its proximity to two coastal ports and its large labor force made the former heart of California's citrus empire ripe for warehousing.
In San Bernardino, California, big-box distribution centers replaced orchards, bringing jobs to a city that needed them — but also introducing road congestion and pollution from idling trucks. As the city recovered from the housing crash, a decommissioned Air Force base was developed into a cargo airport, and Amazon and others moved in.
Sumner, Washington, just 30 miles from Amazon's headquarters, was hardly a logistics powerhouse at the turn of the millennium. Warehouse operators — including Amazon — quickly realized its easy access to highways made it ideal.
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Fort Worth, Texas, has a long history as a warehousing hub for the wholesale market, thanks to its location at the intersection of three major interstate highways.
The expansion of a cargo airport in North Fort Worth made it an appealing location for e-commerce warehouses looking to export and import goods from overseas.
Warehouses are appearing in new places
As we demand faster delivery, warehouses are also springing up in city centers and affluent neighborhoods.
Nationwide, warehouse rent prices have more than doubled since 2010, while vacancy rates have plunged to historic lows. Supply can't keep up with demand.
Amazon has changed warehousing perhaps more than any other company.
Amazon's warehouse footprint ballooned over the past decade, with the pandemic kicking things into overdrive.
The analyst Marc Wulfraat estimates that Amazon built 356 new warehouses in the US in 2021 — nearly one warehouse a day.
Even after slowing construction in 2022, it's on pace to build 211 new warehouses this year.
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Amazon employs roughly 700,000 people in its warehouses, more than any other company in the US. To keep its warehouses staffed, Amazon was hiring on average 2,800 people a day, or over half a million people, in the second half of 2021.
It churns through workers at an incredible rate. A leaked memo from 2021, first reported by Recode, showed Amazon warehouses had annual turnover of 159% in 2020. That same memo predicted Amazon would exhaust the warehousing labor pool in certain cities by 2024.
Amazon Prime's free two-day shipping was once a luxury. Now it's table stakes; to compete in e-commerce, you need to deliver in two days to almost anywhere in the US.
Companies far smaller than Amazon are forced to build or buy their way toward matching that speed.
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Which means even more warehouses, and even more warehouse workers.
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