I’m sure you’ll have no trouble remembering what things were like during the early to mid-pandemic. Many of us were stuck at home and decided to spend our time doing a lot of online shopping, which the folks at Amazon.com really appreciated.
In fact, Amazon liked it so much that it got busy and added many new buildings and facilities to accommodate a giant e-commerce push that they said would last forever.
That’s not the case, and Amazon has made the decision to backtrack a bit by closing some of its existing fulfillment centers and delaying the opening of new ones.
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Amazon has canceled or closed 44 facilities and is delaying the opening of another 25 sites, most of them “delivery stations”
Because the pandemic expansion left too much room for Amazon, and the American online shopping public reduced overall spending due to the state of the economy, Amazon had no choice but to reduce its “footprint”.
How big is Amazon’s footprint?
Well, according to CNBC.com:
Amazon embarked on a building frenzy between 2020 and 2022 as it rushed to keep up with a wave of online orders as the Covid pandemic kept millions at home. The company’s footprint nearly doubled from approximately 272 million square feet at the end of 2019 to more than 525 million square feet at the end of 2021.
Here’s what it all means for Illinois and getting what you ordered delivered to your doorstep
At this point, we are not really affected by the closure of Amazon fulfillment centers here in the Rockford area.
Here in Illinois, three facilities (Crystal Lake, Hoffman Estates and Huntley) have been affected so far:
- The Hoffman Estates Distribution Center has been canceled and is now subleased
- The delivery station is canceled in Crystal Lake
- The incoming Amazon CrossDeck has been delayed a year from 2023
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