Amazon is hiring 80,000 seasonal workers for its US distribution centres as it looks to improve its shipping efficiency during the crucial Christmas holiday season. The figure is a 14 per cent increase over 2013’s hiring of 70,000 workers, as Amazon has been opening more distribution centres. It now has more than 50 distribution centres in the US, up from 40 in 2013. And in July it announced it was opening eight smaller sorting centres for a total of 15 by year end. At the centres,
packages are sorted by ZIP code and then transported to US Postal Service offices.
The company says the sorting centres help Amazon offer services such as Sunday delivery, a later cutoff order time and tighter control over shipping logistics.
Thousands of the seasonal jobs are expected to become permanent positions.
The pace of hiring at a retailer can serve as an indicator of expectations for the holiday shopping season, which accounts for 20 per cent of the industry’s annual sales, according to the National Retail Federation, a trade group.
Seattle-based Amazon hopes to avoid problems that occurred late in the holiday season last year, when shippers such as UPS were caught off guard by spiking online orders, particularly from Amazon.
Overall, the National Retail Federation said it expects sales during the November and December period to increase 4.1 per cent to $US616.9 billion ($A667.46 billion), up a percentage point higher than 2013. It marks the highest increase since 2011 when the rise was 4.8 per cent.
Amazon employs more than 132,600 full time and part time employees globally.
AP
