Amazon delivery station officially opens in Duluth

Amazon customers in the Twin Ports and Northland will be seeing an immediate effect on their deliveries with the opening of their new delivery station in Duluth, Minnesota. The WMN3 is a last-stop Amazon delivery station that helps with the last mile of Amazon package delivery.

Packages arrive by trucks and are inducted, stowed, and transported around the facility to be sorted into delivery routes. After the facility sorts the packages by their routes, they are picked up by an Amazon Delivery Service Partner or Flex Driver to head to the customers’ homes.

The “last mile” refers to the Amazon packages that come from their upstream facilities down in Minneapolis and throughout the Midwest region. “This is their final stop before they’re at home with their customer,” described Jason Vangalis, Head of U.S. Expansion and Economic Development at Amazon. Amazon connects over 5,500 independent sellers from businesses across Minnesota in their global marketplace.

Currently, the facility is serving about a 60-mile radius. With the delivery station’s ability to ramp up and grow with its feet on the ground as a facility. They expect to gain additional employees and gain additional routes that will increase their capacity to 100 miles by 2026.

Welcoming employees

Mayor Roger Reinert of the city of Duluth was at the ribbon cutting and said, “It’s nice to have the official grand opening already hired over 75 people on the way to hiring over 100, and that’s just for the facility as it is today.” Amazon has created 8,500 full- and part-time jobs in Minnesota as of January 2024. As this new delivery station welcomes a unique opportunity to work through Amazon Flex, and at this facility.

The site currently has 80 employees who help with sorting and delivery, who are given shifts they can sign up for as they wish. As Jason put it for Amazon Flex, “They can sign up for shifts as they need, between two and four hours, and operate kind of at-win based on their schedule.” He continued, “There are about 20 drivers a day that we leverage for that program already, but folks can log on to our website and find any jobs available in the region.”