The fourth such fulfillment center in California, Amazon’s
new 855,000 square foot location is expected to open sometime next year in
Metro Air Park, a business development near Sacramento International Airport.
Amazon will use the fulfillment center to pick, pack, and
ship smaller customer orders with items like books, toys, electronics and other
merchandise. While it’s being reported as Amazon.com’s first foray into
Sacramento, the company actually opened a small distribution hub last year last
on Ramona Avenue, just south of California State University.
Although details haven’t been finalized, many of Amazon’s
other fulfillment centers pay about $14 hourly for warehouse workers, but also
are highly valued for their benefits and perks. Amazon.com full-time employees
receive healthcare, 401(k) and company stock options, maternity and parental
leave benefits, and the possibility of tuition payments for continuing
education.
According to Roberta MacGlashan, Chair of the Sacramento
County Board of Supervisors, “Amazon coming to Sacramento represents a big step
forward as our community continues to grow. We have seen Amazon be a positive
influence elsewhere in the state, and we are pleased that Amazon has chosen to
invest in this region as well.”
To celebrate the arrival of one of Sacramento’s latest and
greatest employers, we’ve put together 15 fun facts about Amazon.com:
1. According to Forbes.com, Amazon.com is worth $292.6
billion with $107 billion in revenue last year.
2. Amazon currently ranks #237 on Forbes’ list of biggest
public companies in the world. Forbes also ranks Amazon.com as the #12 most
valuable brand on the globe, and Amazon.com is listed as the #5 top domain on
the entire worldwide web!
3. They employ 230,800 people around the globe but their headquarters
is in Seattle, Washington, where 20,000 employees work in their unique urban
campus. (20% of Amazon.com employees there live so close they can walk to
work!)
4. Amazon was founded in 1994 by iconoclast and quirky
genius Jeff Bezos. Like his contemporaries Gates and Jobs, Bezos started the
huge e-tailer from his garage as a book retailer, selling the company’s book,
Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental
Mechanisms of Thought.
5. The company that’s now a household name was almost called
"Cadabra!" Short for "Abracadabra,” that name was a frontrunner
until Bezos vetoed it because he misheard it as "cadaver!"
6. Reportedly, Bezos like the name “Amazon” because it
suggested a huge scale, like the Amazon rainforest, and it also listed very
well alphabetically.
7. Sticking with Bezos’ obsession with alphabetization, the
Amazon.com logo depicts a smile from A to Z, indicating their range of sending
the entire alphabet of books anywhere in the world.
8. Storing, cataloging, and shipping all of those books
takes a whole lot of space, and Amazon's warehouses have more square footage
than 700 Madison Square Gardens!
9. As of 2014, Amazon.com has 32.8
million books for sale, including 22.9 million paperbacks, 8.1 hardcovers, and
1.2 million eBooks, and other formats.
10. As one of the world’s biggest online stores, innovative
tech the critical focus of Amazon, though it doesn’t always work. In fact, when
Amazon’s servers went down for about 40 minutes in 2013, the company reportedly
lost $117,000 per minute, adding up to $4.72 million in lost sales.
11. Believe it or not, Amazon has been maligned (and
misunderstood) as a company that doesn’t actually turn a profit every year. In
fact, Amazon often reports losses! But stockholders still buy up the company in
droves because they understand that Amazon is constantly reinvesting in
acquiring other valuable companies, opening new fulfillment centers, expanding
their market share, and growing their invaluable web platform.
12. All Amazon employees are required to spend two days
every year working as a customer service agent, which gives them a better
understanding of customer needs, wants, and issues on the front lines, and
therefore re-centering their view on customer service.
13. But Bezos is also notoriously cheap. Unlike many of the
high-perk tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Amazon’s employee
cafeteria isn’t subsidized by the firm, light bulbs have been taken out of
vending machines to save electricity, and new hires have to return their tech
items and orientation packet if/when they leave the company! Bezos even tried
to save the company money by instructing his programmers to buy wooden doors
and lay them flat on sawhorses or 4 x4’s for cheap homemade desks!
14. There’s no denying that Bezos has an interesting
leadership style, as he encourages dissenting opinions and feather ruffling
among his staff, managers, and executives, culminating in “an adversarial
atmosphere with almost constant friction,” in his own words. In fact, Amazon’s
hiring principles read, “Leaders come forward with problems or information,
even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing.”
15. Even meetings at Amazon.com are done differently,
encouraging efficiency and production by banning Power Point presentations,
replacing them with up to 30-minute silent reading sessions, and assembling
small teams that are limited to the number of people that can be fed by only
two pizzas!
***
For more information or you wanted to apply for a career
with Amazon.com in Sacramento, go to www.amazondelivers.jobs.
No comments:
Post a Comment