Your Amazon orders will arrive faster with new Idaho Falls delivery station
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IDAHO FALLS — Bonneville County commissioners, business leaders and members of the community celebrated the launch of the new Amazon delivery station at 3700 South Pioneer Drive in Idaho Falls with a ribbon-cutting and tour Monday morning.
The 107,000-square-foot building began sorting and delivering packages to customer’s homes on March 30. In an interview with local media, site lead Danny Woodruff explained the facility is expected to decrease delivery times from about a week to two or three days.
“That’s the promise for (Amazon Prime customers),” Woodruff says. “It’ll still improve the (delivery) time (for those who aren’t Prime customers). We’re excited about that.”
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Woodruff describes the Amazon delivery station as the “last line” for Amazon orders. For anyone living in the northwest, Amazon orders are sent to Salt Lake City. Those packages arrive at the Idaho Falls building around 2 or 3 a.m. daily.
From the moment it arrives, it takes about five hours to process and sort the packages before it’s sent out in a van to the customer’s doorstep. Deliveries are made seven days a week to anyone living within 90 minutes of Idaho Falls. A look at how the process works is coming in a future story.
During a tour of the building, Woodruff said the facility’s volume capacity is around 31,000 packages total. Since the launch, the daily load has been between 14,000 and 17,000.
“That’s bigger than what we were expecting,” says Woodruff. “The sites that I trained with have been open for more than a year and are doing less volume than us. The sites I’ve seen within our region typically do about 8,000 to 12,000 (packages). Being this well established so soon after our launch is something I’m super excited to be part of.”
The Amazon Delivery Station has been several years in the works. Sam Bailey, Amazon’s manager of economic development policy for the northwest region, says they determine where to open a delivery site based on the size of the workforce in a given area and the number of orders being placed.
The recent influx of people and the growth of the business sector is the reason Idaho Falls was selected as a delivery site.
“This operation now with 150 employees reflects that investment plus the customer demand. We’ve worked with a community that was interested in welcoming us here and we were interested in investing here,” Bailey says.
The site also employs about 200 drivers. Many of the vans are marked, but some unmarked rental vans are being used until more marked vehicles are available. More than 100 people currently work as flex drivers, part-time independent contractors who deliver on the days and times they choose.
The company is always looking for more drivers as the number of orders increases.
“We’re still hiring. We’ve got plenty of referral bonuses. If you know someone (who works here), ask them about it and you can get them a little bit of a bonus,” says Woodruff.
To apply or learn more, click here. You can also text “BOISENOW1” to 77088 to sign up for job alerts.
