STARKVILLE — A customer orders a package from Amazon on a Monday. Last year, that order may not have arrived until the following Thursday.
But with the corporation’s Last Mile facility at the NorthStar Industrial Park coming online in October, the goal has been to get those delivery times shorter and shorter, Amazon Area Operations Manager Michael Bailey told the Starkville Rotary Club on Monday at Hilton Garden Inn.
“We’re the last place it goes before it comes to your door,” Bailey said. “Generally speaking, we only hold product for less than 12 hours.”
Bailey is a Columbus native and Mississippi State University graduate who has been working for Amazon for the past three years, and returned to the area to oversee the opening of the new 50,000 square-foot Last Mile facility.
Bailey said the facility acts as a delivery station that primarily receives packages from warehouses near Jackson and in the Memphis area. Trucks arrive at about 2 and 5 a.m. daily, where boxes are unloaded, sorted onto shelves, loaded onto carts by associates and staged before vans take them out to customers that day.
Van drivers, including both direct Amazon employees and third-party drivers, then bring those boxes to customers as far as Eupora, Gordo, Meridian and Tupelo, Bailey said. The first set of vans are typically dispatched from the facility by 9:30 a.m., Bailey said.
“You probably got a package this morning,” Bailey joked.
Right now, Bailey said, the facility routes about 10,000 boxes per day to customers throughout that area, though that number can reach up to 15,000 during peak days like the holidays. It employs about 150 associates and more than 200 drivers, he said, including third-party drivers and Amazon Flex drivers.
Amazon Flex is a program, similar to Uber, allowing drivers to pick up routes of different lengths in their own vehicles. Bailey said all Amazon delivery drivers – no matter if they are in an Amazon-branded vehicle or their own – should be off the road by 10 p.m. every day.
But the Last Mile facility is capable of doing even more, Bailey said. The Starkville facility is rated to process as many as 20,000 boxes per day and has produced more than 400 job openings, he said, and he intends to have the facility running at full capacity by the end of its first year.
Recently, as part of that ramp-up, the Starkville location became a 24-hour facility, Bailey said. A “skeleton crew” remains at the facility throughout the night to reorganize and process returns from UPS as they come through. The facility does not hold any inventory, he said, with all products staying in the building for less than 24 hours.
Still, Bailey said, Amazon does more than just get its own packages to your door. The e-commerce company also delivers for third-parties, he said, from grocery stores like Walmart to local businesses.
Amazon also works with local nonprofits, Bailey said, to bring a positive impact to the communities that host its facilities. Recently, he said, the Last Mile crew got to bring some joy back to the Boys and Girls Club that helped him as he was growing up.
“You have to get approval, but we do donations and we have employees that come volunteer,” Bailey said. “… Recently, with the Boys and Girls Club, we went there and we had employees dressed up as Santa Claus and the Grinch and stuff like that. We went and passed out presents and candy to the kids.”
Amazon also works with local governments in rural areas, Bailey said, to collaborate on infrastructure projects that can help it deliver goods to its customers.
Mayor Lynn Spruill – who is also a member of the Rotary Club – appeared excited at the opportunity of looking into grants Amazon could provide to the city for infrastructure projects, though Bailey could not provide further details during the meeting. Spruill said she recently took a tour of the Starkville Amazon facility, and she was impressed by the facility and its operations.
“We are incredibly pleased to have Amazon in town,” Spruill said. “It’s just a real feather in our cap.”
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