Station brings faster delivery time, jobs
Logan County and City of Sterling officials, along with area business representatives, got a behind-the-scenes look on Monday at Amazon’s new delivery hub west of Sterling on County Road 33.
Logan County and City of Sterling officials, along with area business representatives, pose for a photo with employees at Amazon’s Sterling delivery station during a tour of the station Monday, Oct. 20. (Callie Jones/Journal-Advocate)
“We are very happy and proud to be here. We are really happy that this project worked out,” said Sam Bailey, Amazon’s Senior Economic Development Policy Manager for Colorado, giving special thanks to Logan County Economic Development Corporation Executive Director Trae Miller, Logan County and Sterling for welcoming them and helping them get the station open so quickly. “Our whole focus here in investing in the community was to bring great service to our customers, make an investment, create jobs and that’s what we’ve done here.”
Bailey said the decision to open delivery station WC09 in Logan County, an $11 million capital investment, came as a result of customer demand showing that a facility was needed in northeast Colorado. According to Daniel Curtis, Sterling site manager, the United States Post Office has a good infrastructure but the amount of Amazon Prime volume going through it was taxing their system.
“This allows us to maintain our volume, reduce the delivery timelines for our customers and serve quite a substantial geography,” Bailey explained.
“The fact that Amazon came in, it changed it to a two-day window. Sometimes with USPS it could take four or five days to get that Amazon package, us over here we have a two-day guarantee,” Curtis added..
The Sterling site, which is small by Amazon standards but has the ability to scale out as demands grow, services 150 square miles, stretching west to Weldon and Wiggins, north to Potter and Sidney, Neb., east to Julesburg and the Colorado state line and south to Akron. Yuma customers still get their Amazon orders through the post office.
Amazon’s delivery system consists of three shipping stages: first mile, which is the fulfillment centers where packages are started; middle mile, which is the sort stations where the packages are sent and staged to go to their designated area; and the last mile, which is the delivery stations like Sterling’s site.
Employees at Amazon’s Sterling delivery station put packages onto carts to be given to drivers for delivery. (Callie Jones/Journal-Advocate)
Residents of northeast Colorado who order off of Amazon will usually have their orders started at a fulfillment center in Thornton, Aurora, or Colorado Springs, though occasionally the order may have to get packaged from Albuquerque, N.M., or Salt Lake City, Utah. Items are generally pulled anywhere from 20 minutes to two hours after the order is placed. Those packages are then sent on to the sort center in Commerce City and designated for transportation to the Sterling site.
Bailey pointed out that fulfillment centers not only support large vendors, but in Colorado over 8,000 small companies leverage Amazon to get their products to their customers as quickly as possible.
“It’s not just big companies that benefit from this, we work with a lot of small companies that use Amazon. They may either use our website to market their product and sell it and then they’ll ship it themselves or they use fulfillment buy-ins where they send us their inventory and we disperse it across our fulfillment center network so that any customer in the U.S., when they hit buy now, can hopefully have that small business’ item in two days or less,” he said.
Inside the Sterling site, packages go through the Trailer Dock and Release process and then they receive a sticker designating where they are to be delivered. Employees then stage the sorted packages, placing them on carts to be picked up by drivers. Sorting starts at 6:30 a.m. and can go all the way until 10:30 a.m. if needed, but usually ends around 9:30 to 10 a.m. and the first leg of drivers arrive around 10:45 a.m. to begin deliveries. There are 16 drivers per leg right now, but it will soon be going up to 24 per leg due to demand.
Already the Sterling station has exceeded expectations regarding volume. The first month after opening in March was considered a “ramp up period” and according to Curtis they exceeded their ramp.
“That’s just saying that the volume demand is there and we are able on our side to process that volume. That’s actually a really good thing for the health of the station. This station health wise has been ahead of the curve of where most places are at this point,” he said.
They started off with about 500 packages and 15 routes, now in a typical day they have about 4,300 packages and around 90 to 95 routes, which vary in length, some are three hours while others might be four-and-a-half hours. Most days deliveries are finished by 2 or 3 p.m. but Curtis said there have been some days when they are there until 7 p.m.
For Prime Big Deal Days, the station broke the 5,000 mark and got all the way to 120 routes, which Curtis said will be typical for some of their peak days. The station is slated to get up to 6,300 packages for its peak.
Curtis is a 20-year veteran firefighter from Albuquerque, N.M. Amazon just happened to be hiring when he retired and he has been with them for five years now and loves it. Because of his experience, he was asked to come to Sterling to help launch the new station. The rest of the team is new to Amazon and were hired when the station launched back in March. Of the six managers currently on staff, four are locals from Sterling.
Right now, the Sterling station has about 40 employees total and they are looking to add even more. With the peak holiday season coming up, they plan to hire 16 more people in the next three weeks, which will be enough to account for anyone who decides during the training that they don’t want to take the job after all. The positions are flexible and are good for someone not just trying to earn some extra income but also serve as a jumping off point for those who might want a career with Amazon.
“All the managers that get hired for here are going to be from this station locally, we’re not going to bring in other managers unless we absolutely have to. And once you get into the management side, there are so much openings, there are so many different ways you can go, you can stay here for a long period of time or you can venture off and go somewhere else,” Curtis said.
As site manager, one of the things Curtis has strived for is to create a positive culture.
“I sat my team down and said ‘hey, we’re going to work out those kinks, there’s going to be issues along the way but we’ve got to control what we can control and the one thing we can control is building a positive culture’. So, that was what we prided ourselves on here,” he said.
What he’s done has obviously worked as the Sterling site has consistently, since it has opened, been in the top five of the entire network when it comes to ratings for its culture. No station has ever made it into the top five that quickly.
“We are very proud of that. We want everybody that walks through this door to feel welcome, we want to make sure no matter what your background is it does not matter, we want to make sure that you’re welcome here and we have prided ourselves on that,” Curtis said.
He credits his team for working well together with very little drama. They have not had one HR complaint since the station opened. Safety is also very important and they’ve only reported one safety incident in the six months they’ve been open.
If customers have any concerns with a package or delivery Curtis said they are welcome to come to the Sterling delivery station, located at 13079 County Road 33. If you are interested in applying for a job, go to https://hiring.amazon.com/job-opportunities/delivery-station-jobs.