BALTIMORE -- Another big Prime Air 767 takes off from Baltimore-Washington International Airport -- where Amazon's shipping last year eclipsed that of FedEx and UPS put together -- and wheels above the old industrial city. Below, the online giant seems to touch every niche of the economy, its ubiquity
BALTIMORE — Another big Prime Air 767 takes off from Baltimore-Washington International Airport — where Amazon’s shipping last year eclipsed that of FedEx and UPS put together — and wheels above the old industrial city. Below, the online giant seems to touch every niche of the economy, its ubiquity and range breathtaking.
In City Hall downtown and at Johns Hopkins University a few miles away, procurement officers have begun buying from local suppliers via Amazon Business — and even starred in a national marketing video for the company. Buyers said the convenience more than justifies interposing a Seattle-based corporation between their institutions and nearby businesses. Critics denounce the retail giant’s incursion into long-established relationships. It is a very Amazon dispute.
“All these things are a threat to other industries,” Basu said. “But they’re all good for Amazon. As powerful as it is, Amazon is set to be much more powerful.” “We welcome the scrutiny,” said Jay Carney, Amazon’s top Washington representative and a former White House press secretary for President Barack Obama. “We operate in huge competitive arenas in which there are thousands and thousands, if not millions, of competitors. It’s hard to argue that if you’re 4% of retail, you’re not in competition.”
She called the contest for Amazon’s second headquarters a “ridiculous parade, a beauty contest” in which communities nationwide offered up inducements while failing to make a clear-eyed assessment of costs and benefits. With its capabilities, market sway and long-term strategy, she said, Amazon now conducts itself like a “nation-state.”None of this was imaginable in 1994, when Jeff Bezos paged through a dictionary in search of a name for an online bookseller and stopped at “Amazon.
Even with all that shipping and logistics, Amazon ranks just 14th among local employers, according to The Baltimore Business Journal. Yet like an online shopper who realizes one day that half his possessions came from Amazon, a Baltimorean who looks for the company’s footprints can find them everywhere.
Public libraries are stocked with digital audiobooks from Amazon’s Audible, and browsers can check reviews on Amazon’s Goodreads. Down the road in Annapolis, Amazon Studios filmed scenes in the Jack Ryan television series. The arms of Amazon sometimes cross in unexpected ways. Although Under Armour uses AWS, the clothier has had to balance its own online sales with its Amazon.com “storefront.” The Maryland Department of Human Services downtown partners with AWS in a cloud-computing effort called MD Think, designed to streamline social services. At the same time, the department said, it provides food stamps to nearly 600 local Amazon employees, largely part-time warehouse workers.
But putting customers’ convenience first, a key to Amazon’s spectacular growth, can put a big squeeze on everyone in the company’s long supply chains — warehouse workers, independent sellers, delivery drivers, cargo pilots — not to mention smaller competitors.Shaquetta Taylor, who goes by Shaq, scanned an item — a bag of glazed pecans. Her screen directed her to “Stow Item,” and the digital clock started counting — 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 — as she found space for it in the robotic pod.
The warehouse is run by Preet Virdi, general manager and an Amazon true believer who moved from India to attend Georgia Tech 13 years ago. Virdi, 35, said his top priority was safety — a whiteboard recently listed 40 head injuries and 109 foot injuries so far in 2019 — and added that his next priority was “how we make the workplace more fun.”
Some see a path to advancement. Samaira Johnson, 26, a high school graduate with a pet iguana at home, is already a leader among the employees trained to work with warehouse robots. Asked where she saw herself in 10 years, she replied, “Running an Amazon building like this one.” “The machines determine so much,” she said. “You’re clocked from beginning to end. They grind through people.”
Workers at Amazon who run into that kind of trouble have no unions to represent them — a shift from Baltimore’s past. GM employees were represented by the United Automobile Workers. At the second warehouse, on the old Bethlehem Steel site, United Steelworkers held sway. At both plants, the pay was adequate to support a family.
In a statement, the company called its jobs “safe and innovative,” noting that the warehouses were built on “blighted property” that was vacant for years before Amazon “injected life ” back into the East Baltimore brownfields. But economists said online shopping has also erased thousands of retail jobs, and critics pointed to other costs, including traffic congestion and environmental effects, so assessing the company’s net impact is difficult. Few of the Amazon jobs in Baltimore are the highly paid tech and management positions appearing in northern Virginia, which Amazon chose for its 25,000-strong second headquarters, called HQ2.
Black said she drove to work the next morning, steering around fallen trees, wondering how the company would handle the deaths at the brief standing meeting that began each shift. But Webb, the futurist and technology writer, said she believed Amazon had made a different discovery: that the job of moving products from bin to pod and pod to box is presently more cheaply performed by humans than by robots.
More surprising than Virdi’s remarks are enthusiastic endorsements from City Hall and Johns Hopkins, whose chief purchasing officers laud Amazon in the video for helping them connect with local suppliers. “In my role as city purchasing agent, I’m trying to get the best product for the best price, efficiently, and Amazon lets me do that,” she said. “In my personal life, I do worry about Main Street shops.”
That has been a windfall for AJ Stationers, said Rusty Balazs, the sales manager, who estimated that annual sales to Johns Hopkins had climbed from $100,000 to $2 million. But AJ Stationers has shrunk from two stores and about 50 employees two decades ago to a website and a dozen employees today, he said.
Addressing such criticism, Amazon said it offered “best-value pricing for education and public-sector organizations” and helped small businesses thrive “because customers are able to discover suppliers.” Morgan Stanley warned a year ago that “the market is missing the risk Amazon Air poses” to FedEx and UPS, knocking down those companies’ stocks. Other analysts are skeptical. But FedEx, worried that its longtime partner was becoming a competitor, announced last summer that it was ending air and ground delivery for Amazon.
“I’d love to stay at Atlas; it’s a great group of pilots,” Nirel said. “The Amazon airport operations are pretty cool to see. But if FedEx or UPS offers me a job, I’m going to go. My working life would be better, and it would be better for my family.” Drive five minutes from Amazon’s new air cargo hub, and you find a humbler scene: a package delivery station surrounded by Prime tractor-trailers, unmarked white vans used by Amazon contractors and the flex drivers who load their cars with packages for what the industry calls the “last mile.” There are new SUVs, compacts with rooftop carriers and banged-up sedans. Drivers use the Amazon Flex app to sign up for “blocks” — $54 for delivering a certain number of packages between 7 a.m. and 10 a.m.
Several said the station was so jammed they had to load packages outside in the rain. Whoever at Amazon designed the 25-mile route to Sykesville, Maryland, one driver groused, “needs to be drug-tested, like seriously.” Another complained that a 28-package nighttime route listed at 2 1/2 hours took her more than four hours to complete, and “a dog came out on me on top of that because it was too dark to see.
As it adds customers in Asia and Europe, said Nigel Faulkner, chief technology officer at T. Rowe Price, the traditional approach would be to build its own data servers in new markets. When the Baltimore Ravens faced the Miami Dolphins, for example, NFL analysts could annotate the video with the time Lamar Jackson took to get a pass off , the precise distance of the throw and the odds that Marquise Brown would catch it: 32%.
Sachse said he has advised Baltimore startups gratis, including one working to streamline philanthropy and another selling subscriptions to products like razors. He often asks AWS to provide free training and other services, and they usually step up.
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