Amazon blankets Valley with new facilities. Where does the Fresno warehouse stand?

Amazon is everywhere.

It’s beginning to feel that way in the Central Valley, at least. The online shopping giant is blanketing the area with distribution facilities and fulfillment centers – and the promise of thousands of jobs, faster shipping times and better customer service.

This week, Stockton announced that the Amazon will build a 600,000 square-foot facility in the city. It will be the sixth such facility in the 170 or so miles between Fresno and Sacramento.

Fresno broke ground on its own facility – a 20-acre, 855,000 square-foot warehouse – in June.

Amazon this week had no additional information on the progress of the Fresno facility, though it expects to open an 800,000-square-foot facility in Sacramento this fall and is building a second fulfillment center in Tracy. There is already a facility in Patterson.

In all, Amazon will operate more than 4 million square feet of space in the Central Valley. For comparison, Fresno’s Save Mart Center covers a miniscule 200,000 square feet. Fresno’s largest distribution center – for the retailer The Gap – is around 1.5 million square feet between its two large buildings north of Fresno Yosemite International Airport.

The Amazon facilities will help improve benefits for the company’s Prime users. That includes same-day delivery, which the company announced was available to Fresno-area Prime members, for free, last year.

It will also bring economic growth to the area and is part of larger trend for e-commerce companies like Amazon, which are looking to build in areas that “are close to major metropolitan areas and major roadways,” according to a story from CNBC.

Amazon expects to hire 100,000 people across the United States in a massive expansion the company announced early this year. Fifteen hundred of those will be in Fresno, once the facility opens. Eventually that number will reach 2,500 employees.

So far, there are no Fresno positions listed on Amazon’s website, www.amazon.jobs/en, though that should change as the facility get closer to completion.

This story was originally published August 23, 2017 at 12:03 PM with the headline "Amazon blankets Valley with new facilities. Where does the Fresno warehouse stand?."