It’s Official…Amazon Fulfillment Center coming to Kernersville

Source: By Richard Craver at Winston Salem Journal
 

 
Amazon confirmed Wednesday it will begin operating a 1 million-square-foot fulfillment center in Kernersville in 2020 with about 1,000 full-time and full-time- equivalent employees.

Amazon signed July 26 a lease for up to 40 years with Atlanta real-estate developer HPC Seefried for an industrial site off Old Greensboro Road inside the Guilford County limits.

Neither group had commented publicly on the facility until Wednesday, although landscaping and construction has been going on since August. The shell of the building appears to be near completion.

“We’re at the point where the fulfillment center in Kernersville has reached certain levels of progress to where we can comment on our plans,” said Rachael Lighty, regional manager of external communications for Amazon Operations.

However, Lighty did not reveal the expected opening date in 2020, saying the company purposefully withholds such information until it is within weeks of launching operations.

Lighty said Amazon would roll out a hiring and marketing blitz at that time. Information about working at an Amazon fulfillment center is at www.amazondelivers.jobs.

John H. Boyd, a national site-selection expert based in New Jersey, has projected the Kernersville fulfillment center could represent a $150 million capital investment.

Lighty did not have information on a second planned Amazon facility within Piedmont Corporate Park in Guilford.

An Amazon affiliate signed a lease April 16 with Samet Corp. affiliate LARS RE LLC, according to a Guilford Register of Deeds filing. The lease is scheduled to go into effect Aug. 30.

The property address is listed at 7941 National Service Road, on the southern right-of-way of the road and the western right-of-way of Piedmont Triad Parkway. The lot appears to contain 16.64 acres, according to the lease. The property has a Colfax address, but is in the High Point city limits.

North Carolina workforce

The Kernersville facility will be similar to the one Amazon opened in Kannapolis in July in that both will primarily handle bulky items that are 18 inches and larger. Those items can include items as varied as diaper boxes, kayaks and furniture.

Those fulfillment facilities are identified by Amazon as non-sorting centers. They are labor-intensive, but Lighty said the Kernersville facility will contain high levels of technology.

The vast majority of the Kernersville employees — more than 800 — will be involved in the picking, prepping, sorting and shipping operations. The rest will be facility managers and administrative staff.

Boyd said modern fulfillment centers “not only employ lower-skilled workers, like forklift operators, but also information-technology professionals doing inventory and other software-related functions.”

Lighty said the work shifts will operate on a four-day-on, three-day-off schedule at 10 hours a day. Although the facility will operate around the clock, two hours for maintenance is built into the daily schedule.

“There will be about 200 employees on site at any given time, seven days a week,” Lighty said.

By comparison, Amazon is building two robotics fulfillment centers in Charlotte and Garner, each with about 1,500 full-time jobs.

The $200 million Charlotte facility will open by this year’s holiday shopping season and will contain 855,000 square feet, while the Garner facility is scheduled to open in 2020 at 640,000 square feet.

When the Charlotte, Garner and Kernersville facilities are open, Amazon will have more than doubled its North Carolina workforce from 3,000 to 7,000.

Amazon has what it calls “sortation” centers in Concord and Durham that involve sorting products and packages for preparation for delivery, typically by ZIP code.

There are PrimeNow shipping hubs in Charlotte and Raleigh that stock a limited line of high-demand products for delivery within two hours.

In November, Amazon raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour for all U.S. employees, a decision that long-term could help set the bar for regional warehouse and distribution center pay, according to economists.

Part of Growth Strategy

Boyd said Amazon’s opening of two Triad facilities is not surprising.

“Amazon recognized, under its new growth strategy, that it is shy of distribution centers in North Carolina,” Boyd said.

Lighty said its Triad plans are tied to the online retailer’s planned push to emphasize free one-day shipping for Prime members. The retailer told analysts in April it is “working on evolving” its popular Prime program.

The fulfillment center is near the FedEx Ground operations in Kernersville, as well as within 10 miles of the FedEx sorting hub at Piedmont Triad International Airport.

Amazon has not made a public request for local or state economic incentives, Kernersville town manager Curtis Swisher said.

Amazon has asked for at least $13 million for the project near Charlotte-Douglas International Airport.

Several employment studies have shown that working at an Amazon fulfillment center is not for everyone.

For example, Amazon makes it clear that the job can be taxing, particularly during the peak holiday shipping season. Workers can walk seven to 12 miles during a shift. Most employees must be able to lift up to 49 pounds.

Last beltway segment in new road plan, but other projects get delayed

Source: By Wesley Young at Winston Salem Journal
 

 
A new draft of the state’s road-construction bible includes the final segment of the Winston-Salem Northern Beltway, but many important road projects previously planned now face delays.

The document, called the 2020-29 draft State Transportation Improvement Program, or STIP, will be put into final form this summer when it is approved by the N.C. Transportation Board.

Significantly, the draft STIP moves the final segment of the beltway, between Interstate 40 and U.S. 158 on the southwest side of Winston-Salem, from the “unfunded” category to a category projects starting construction in 2029.

“You lose some, you gain some,” said Pat Ivey, the division engineer for the N.C. Department of Transportation in Forsyth County, describing how an ongoing process of evaluating road projects can shuffle the mix from one plan to the next.

The state is currently operating under a road plan covering the period 2018-27, but the plans are revised every two years in a process that puts each potential road project through a data-driven analysis of need on the state, regional and local levels.

Projects in the latter half of the 10-year window are particularly vulnerable to shifts, because of changing data and priorities.

It’s worth while stepping back to look at how all the beltway segments are faring:

Some projects listed in the current plan for future construction have moved into the unfunded part of the list in the 2020-29 draft:

Ivey said some of the projects may come back onto the list as others are completed. He said the delay of many projects is due largely to two factors: rising costs when other projects move up the list and get more accurate cost estimates; and the re-evaluation of projects as part of the state’s prioritization process.

New projects coming to the list, all scheduled for construction in 2027, include:

Ivey said some important projects besides the beltway will remain on the list.

A project to widen I-40 from the Business 40/I-40 split in Guilford County to the U.S. 311 intersection in eastern Winston-Salem will be delayed but is now on the list in its entirety.

The start of construction has been pushed back from 2026 to 2029. But the good news is that all the segments of the project are on the same timetable. Ivey noted that under the current plan, only two segments of the widening project were scheduled to start in 2026. The segment from N.C. 66 to the I-40/Business 40 split in Guilford County was unfunded.

Work on all three segments is scheduled for 2029.

Medline Industries wants to open a 660,000 SF Distribution Center

Source: By Fran Daniel at Winston Salem Journal
 

 
Medline Industries, a Chicago-based manufacturer and distributor of medical supplies, wants to open a 660,000 SF warehouse distribution center in southeastern Forsyth County NC that could at maximum capacity employ 400 people.

“It will be essentially a healthcare supply-chain center,” said Dmitry Dukhan, the vice president of real estate for Medline Industries.

Medline will start out with 100 full-time workers, said Dukhan, but the hope is to get to 400 employees within seven to 10 years.
“It’s hard to predict,” he said. “Obviously, we have to earn the business trust of local customers, but we’re going to start with a regional distribution first.”
He said the company is hoping to grow and add value to the community.

Property owners Raeford Kirkman, Lynn Hayes and Inez Motsinger are asking the Forsyth County Board of Commissioners to rezone 92.7 acres from agricultural to limited industrial — special use for the project. The property is on the northeast corner of Wallburg and Sherlie Weavil roads, across from Union Cross Business Park.
The City-County Planning Board voted unanimously to recommend approval of the petition last month, and Forsyth County commissioners were briefed on the proposal Thursday.
The commissioners will hold a public hearing on the rezoning Jan. 24 and are expected to vote on the petition then.

So far, Medline has not asked for county incentives, but it could still do so.

The property owners’ petition includes a request for special intense development allocation, known as SIDA. As a result, future development must use stormwater controls based on Unified Development Ordinances requirements.

Currently, two single-family homes and accessory buildings are on the land, which is a combination of farmland and heavily wooded areas.

Aaron King, director of City-County Planning and Development Services, said that a land-use plan previously identified about 250 acres across from Union Cross Business Park as a potential spot for another industrial park.
The rezoning request for the Medline project is within that acreage space.
Proposed plans call for a new public road off Wallburg Road to provide an access for the site.

About Medline

Dating back to 1910, Medline is a privately-held, family-owned company with about 20,000 employees throughout the world and more than 550,000 products in its portfolio. The company had sales of more than $10 billion in 2017.

“The Winston-Salem distribution center will serve health-care providers from across the continuum of care in the local region, including hospitals, surgery centers, nursing homes, hospice and home-care agencies and physician offices,” said Stacy Rubenstein, a spokeswoman for Medline.

Rubenstein said that it is too early to predict the exact jobs that will be created at the center, but she said “the new jobs would range from office positions to warehouse staff and other healthcare-related jobs.”

Medline does not disclose salaries, but Rubenstein said the company offers competitive wages; a complete benefits package that includes medical, dental, vision and life insurance; and a 401(k) with company match.

If approved, construction of the building is expected to start in the third quarter of 2019 and the center would probably open in mid-2021.

Dukhan estimated the company would invest more than $40 million in the community, including land, construction and equipment.
Dukhan said hiring would start as construction nears completion.

He said that the company would hold a job fair and make information available in newspaper ads and on its website at www.medline.com.

Medline’s closest operation to Winston-Salem is a 400,000 SF regional distribution center in Lincolnton NC.
Built in 2013, the facility in Lincolnton has since maxed out, Dukhan said.

He said that Medline wants to have another regional distribution center with great access to the community so it chose the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County area.

“It’s very business friendly, has, obviously, a lot of medical businesses and a lot of opportunities to grow,” Dukhan said of this area. “It’s just a great town. It’s a great community.”

Jay Luke, vice president of Freeman Commercial Real Estate, who represented Hayes and Motzinger, the owners of 87 acres of the property proposed for rezoning, said the process to get the rezoning started in July 2018.

He said a petition before the City-County Planning Board was delayed a month “while we worked through the neighborhood meetings and discussions with neighbors in trying to listen to their concerns about the project. We made changes to the site plan to reflect those concerns.”

Kernersville preparing for Amazon Fulfillment Center

A building permit was issued Aug. 10, 2018, however, no timeline has been set for completion. The 1 million-square-foot distribution center will go on 94 acres at the Triad Business Park, the land was bought for $11.2 million on June 15, 2018. The center could employ up to 953 full-time and full-time equivalent workers. Grading Crews have been working on 94 acres at Triad Business Park.

Here is location in Kernersville