Where Internet Orders Mean Real Jobs, and New Life for Communities - The New York Times - 0 views
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As shopping has shifted from conventional stores to online marketplaces, many retail workers have been left in the cold, but Ms. Gaugler is coming out ahead.
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Sellers like Zulily, Amazon and Walmart are competing to get goods to the buyer’s doorstep as quickly as possible, giving rise to a constellation of vast warehouses that have fueled a boom for workers without college degrees and breathed new life into pockets of the country that had fallen economically behind.
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Warehouses have produced hundreds of thousands of jobs since the recovery began in 2010, adding workers at four times the rate of overall job growth.
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Americans have grown more comfortable ordering everything on the internet, including bulky wares like canoes and refrigerators. Warehouses, as a result, have become gargantuan, doubling in size since 2010, according to CBRE, a real estate services firm.
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“We are at the very beginning of a rather large transformation, and the humble warehouse is the leading edge of this,” said Michael Mandel, chief economic strategist at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington. “These fulfillment center jobs are not being created in the tech hubs that were growing before. We’ve broadened the winner’s circle.”
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A significant chunk of that growth has occurred outside large metropolitan areas, in counties that had relatively little of the picking-and-packing work until recently.
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And while robots have started to intervene in the process, it still takes a lot of bodies to move hundreds of thousands of boxes in and out of these buildings every day. Warehouses serving the largest e-commerce sites typically employ upwards of 2,000 people.
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The hubs of this network are far-flung. In Bullitt County, Ky., south of Louisville, warehouse employment surged to 6,000 in 2017 from 1,200 in 2010, according to the Labor Department. In Kenosha, Wis., once a manufacturing hub whose auto plants turned out Nash Ramblers and Plymouth Horizons, warehouse jobs grew to 6,200 from 250 in the same period.
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Those places have the advantage of being surrounded by highways and rail lines that lead to some of the nation’s largest cities. They also have an abundance of cheap land and labor, two assets that have become increasingly vital to companies selling online.