WEST CHESTER, OH — Your Amazon order is likely on the way if it arrived in the Cincinnati Metropolitan area overnight. Amazon opened its new delivery station in West Chester in the fall, which will cover the greater Cincinnati area and help meet the growing delivery demands, especially during the holidays.
"We receive trucks here overnight. From that point, we unload them here and sort them on the conveyance system," said Doug Ryan, site leader at the West Chester location.
He said the trucks come from various locations, and some are from flights that arrive at Amazon's new airhub at Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport. The overnight shipments amount to thousands of packages for what Amazon calls their "last mile" delivery. That means the final stop along the logistics line before each package arrives at its final destination.
Packages are sorted by route and delivery vehicle, placed into carts, scanned and then placed into delivery trucks. It is a timed process where workers have only a few minutes to load up each group of vehicles before they are rolling off the property. The process happens multiple times a day until all the packages are delivered.
"We have an excellent planning and strategy team that allows us to really zero in on how much we process to keep us on that strict timeline," he added.
"None of these packages were here yesterday and none of these packages are gonna be here tomorrow," Ryan said.
Meanwhile, the West Chester delivery station is one of two that Amazon will place in the Tri-state within a year. A second location is expected to open in Florence, Kentucky, on Industrial Road in 2022. The local delivery stations mean hundreds of local jobs for both workers who sort and scan packages, and for delivery drivers.
Also, having the facility up and running in time for holiday shipping helps Amazon with its new "same-day delivery" for Prime customers in the Cincinnati area. Ryan said delivering so many packages this time of year gives them a new perspective.
"We really kind of think of this as like we are the North Pole," he said.
Drivers will make Christmas deliveries until December 24.
