Amazon’s new Gypsum facility delivers more than just packages to Eagle County
The new 51,000-square-foot facility plans to employ around 130 workers inside the warehouse and around 80 drivers on the road.
Ben Roof/Special to the Daily
If you’re looking for a flexible job to make some extra cash, Amazon is looking for you.
That was the message from company officials on Wednesday during a walkthrough of Amazon’s new 51,000-square-foot delivery station in Gypsum that is just across the way from the Eagle County airport. The facility has been open since late August and has been on a hiring spree ever since as it builds capacity to serve customers within a 90-minute radius.
Packages leaving the facility are currently being delivered as far as Avon and Glenwood Springs, with plans to broaden the radius as far east as Vail and as far west as Rifle and north into Routt County.
Town of Gypsum elected officials, staff and other assorted local officials were on hand for Wednesday’s tour, including state Sen. Dylan Roberts, who represents Eagle County at the state Capitol, and Chris Romer, the CEO and president of the Vail Valley Partnership.
This Gypsum location is unique, operating as both a fulfillment center and a delivery station, split roughly 50/50, making it only one of about 10 such sites in the entire Amazon network. It’s also the first facility of its kind for delivery and fulfillment to come online at the same time.
The facility won’t just deliver packages to doors quicker — it will also deliver a significant economic boost to Gypsum and the surrounding region.
The facility plans to employ around 130 workers inside the warehouse and around 80 drivers on the road. Forty of those warehouse workers will work in fulfillment, while about 90 to 100 will work on the delivery side. Amazon is offering a variety of flexible shifts to accommodate different lifestyles and schedules, including two-hour, four-hour, and six-hour options. Approximately 90% of the schedules are for flexible, part-time positions.
Career advancement for local students
Those flexible shifts work especially well for local students, who can also get help with their tuition when they work for Amazon.
Ian Conyers, Amazon’s head of community affairs who is also a former state senator in Michigan, presented the Colorado Mountain College Foundation with a $25,000 donation during Wednesday’s event.
“It’s a part of our $100,000 commitment to education and really working with the schools and those that are directly community-based,” Conyers said.
Amazon’s national Career Choice program partners with colleges on tuition assistance for students for up to $5,000 per year.
“So, while you’re working here, you can be studying for your associates, bachelors, upskilling, and we prepay it,” Conyers said. “You don’t need to have worked here for a certain amount of time. You can just directly go and take your college courses. If you’re an employee here, then you can access Career Choice. It’s a national program, and we pick different colleges and partners across the country to be able to provide that service to associates.”
Lisa Isom, the regional development officer for Colorado Mountain College, said those funds will stretch far for CMC students.
“You can get a bachelor’s degree at CMC for $12,000 total,” Isom said. “In addition to the tuition assistance plan here, I mean, if you’re working at Amazon and going to school at CMC, your bachelor’s degree will be covered. Just having employees come out of this facility and go to school at CMC would be life-changing. But if we can also get them scholarships now, too, it’s the difference between affording to go to school and affording to go to school and live in the valley.”
Isom said one of CMC’s missions is to make sure students can afford to stay in the valley and work.
“Our students are poor on time,” she said. “So, if they can find a job that’s this flexible, that’s life-changing.”
Gypsum Mayor Steve Carver said the new facility will also provide good-paying jobs for those working in the lower valley, offering an alternative to navigating “the war zone” of Interstate 70 to jobs in the upper valley.
“There’s no reason if people are wanting to work that they cannot get a job here at Amazon because they are a good employer,” Carver said. “We’ve heard from people that are working here now and everybody is totally happy. They’ve got a lot of shifts available, different hours, different days. And they encourage people, if they want to work a second job, to come talk to them. And I’m sure that they can work something out that would work with other people’s schedules. And that’d be excellent for the families.”
“We’re just open to whatever kind of business would provide more jobs for our community here,” said Tom Edwards, a member of the Gypsum Town Council. “And this is a perfect thing. I mean, I expected to come in here and see some automation or something. And it’s like, ‘Wow, this is all jobs. This is really cool.'”
A game changer for deliveries?
For locals and part-time residents who’ve long struggled with limited delivery options, long wait lines in post offices to retrieve packages, and slow shipping times, the new Amazon facility is a welcome change.
The promise of same-day and next-morning deliveries is particularly appealing to those who live in more remote areas or rely on online shopping for essential items.
“I’m really excited and interested to see what it does to post office volume, because that’s been one of the chief complaints from Vail all the way to Gypsum is, ‘Oh, my gosh, these post offices are just really difficult from a service standpoint, not a great experience,'” said Gypsum Town Manager Jeremy Rietmann. “But if you could take some of the burden off those.”
Rietmann said same-day delivery — a luxury of big-city living — may feel like a novelty to residents in rural Colorado, but he expects excitement to build as more people get their packages quicker.
“When you randomly, in the middle of the night, are like, ‘Oh, shoot, I’m out of toothpaste or something, and I could have it here tomorrow,’ which is incredibly lazy, but also awesome,” Rietmann said. “I think it’s just going to change the experience for people.”
He also said he expects local business owners won’t have to travel down the interstate to get specific, hard-to-find items.
“A conversation I was having with one of my council members, he runs a business that works on light electrical stuff and boilers and equipment like that,” Rietmann said. “Now, instead of like a quick trip down to Grand Junction to get the really obscure part, I expect eventually he will start ordering some of that stuff here because the way their algorithm works.”
That algorithm for the fulfillment center is constantly shifting, said Andy Leber, the senior station manager who moved to Gypsum from New Orleans.
“We’re getting into winter season now, so we’ll probably have more things like gloves, jackets, hot hands, things like that available,” Leber said. “But it does consistently rotate to ensure we’re offering a competitive selection to everyone. Again, it’s not massive. It’s not one of these million square-foot fulfillment centers, so we really have to be very diligent about what products we actually store here.”
Leber said orders that come into the facility early in the day can land on doorsteps between 5-8 p.m. that day, while those that come in later in the day will likely show up the next morning between 7 and 11 a.m.
The new facility won’t entirely eliminate some Amazon packages using the U.S. Postal Service for last-mile delivery — either because the packages are shipped by third-party vendors or because of capacity issues. But Leber said the hope is to deliver as “many as we possibly are able to serve within the delivery zone.”
Delivering in difficult conditions
To deliver those packages, the facility also has two state-of-the-art vehicles called IBEXes that are among only 50 Amazon currently has in use. Twenty-five of the vehicles are deployed in rural Alaska.
Part Ford F-150, part delivery van with rugged tires and four-wheel drive, the IBEX has a large sliding hatch on the right side for drivers to pull packages out of when they arrive at a location.
“I would say some of the challenges that we’ve seen so far you know is just being able to figure out our routing algorithms to deliver in some of the more rural, tough to get to areas,” he said. “Cities, you got apartment complexes, you got residential areas. It’s a lot simpler. It’s straightforward. Out here, we have, for example, the town of Vail has a very interesting way to deliver. So some of those challenges are going to come.”
But Leber, in his 10 years with the company, said Amazon loves nothing more than figuring out solutions to challenges.
