When Amazon opened its fulfillment center in Fayetteville last June, people were ecstatic, said Robert Van Geons, president and CEO of the Fayetteville Cumberland County Economic Development Corporation.

The 1.3-million-square-foot facility in Fayetteville’s Military Business Park employs more than 1,000 people. Employment at the fulfillment center and an Amazon delivery station that opened a few years ago has helped boost the area’s average wage and lower its unemployment rate.

“We have trailed the state in terms of average wage, and also in our unemployment rate,” Van Geons said. “For us, these jobs pay, on average, an improved wage. For a lot of folks, they were able to make a step up in pay by taking a job at Amazon.”

As of January, Amazon has created 27,000 full- and part-time jobs and has 13 fulfillment and sortation centers and 14 delivery stations in communities across the state. Wilmington is set to become one of the next North Carolina communities to see investment from the e-commerce giant with an announcement event expected later this month.

Amazon officials have confirmed a fulfillment center and a delivery station are in the works on the border between New Hanover and Pender counties. Crews quietly broke ground on the fulfillment center last fall, on the former BASF vitamin plant site, and plans are currently under review for the delivery station.

Mouhcine Guettabi, Wilmington’s regional economist and an associate professor of economics at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, said Amazon’s decision to expand into Wilmington says something about the area’s growth trajectory.

“The fact that they considered the area, to me, indicates that obviously, we’re on big player’s radars because obviously, they have the ability to pick any community in the country,” he said. “Investments, to me, are votes of confidence that firms make about an area’s growth, an area’s current situation and its strategic location.”

Amazon’s selection of the community could also signal to other companies that the Wilmington area is ripe for investment. The facilities will help diversify the types of jobs and wages available in the Wilmington area by providing employment opportunities for workers who have limited skills and training.

The facilities have the potential to pull workers from across Southeastern North Carolina and could create increased demand for housing in the area, Guettabi said, but he doesn’t believe the new jobs will necessarily change the ongoing conversation around the area’s need for additional housing.

“I think that this shows that economic growth, economic development is going to continue,” he said. “If anything, it signals that we can’t put the brakes on housing supply.”

Guettabi said he expects to see “spillover effects” from the facility through increased worker spending and the businesses and workers that will service the facility’s needs.

The company provided the Business Journal a study that compared counties with Amazon investments to similar counties without investment. For every 10 jobs Amazon created in a county, nine additional jobs were created. According to the study, a typical mid-sized county that received Amazon’s investment had, on average, 4,400 more new jobs than a similar county without the company’s investment.

The study also found that an area’s median household income increased by up to 2.2% after Amazon’s investment, or up to $1,350 per household per year. Van Geons said Fayetteville and Cumberland County residents have felt that economic boost.

“We want everyone to have a great economic future here. If you’re making $10 an hour and $12 an hour and then you’re hired at $19 and $20, that’s an 80% raise,” he said. “It may not be where we want everyone to be, but it’s a dramatic step up, and that’s what it’s provided for a lot of our folks.”

The fulfillment center’s construction has also helped spur development in the corridor surrounding the business park, Van Geons said, with retail, a hotel and multifamily and mixed-use projects popping up nearby.

“It really has been a catalyst for an area that we had always sought to be a development corridor for many years,” he said.

When Amazon opened a more than 2-million-square-foot distribution center in Garner in 2020, it was a big deal for the whole region, said Ashley Sherrill Cagle, assistant executive director of Wake County Economic Development and the vice president of the Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce.

The facility, which employs around 4,000, sits on the former site of a Conagra Foods plant that made Slim Jims, Sherrill Cagle said. In 2009, a gas leak at the plant caused an explosion that killed three workers. The plant closed down two years later when operations were moved to Ohio, and its 106-acre site was later donated to the town of Garner.

When Amazon announced its plans to bring an RDU1 or robotics sortable facility to the site, it was met with excitement and brought a new purpose to the area.

“There had been this terrible accident, and that’s what people remembered, and you’re replacing it with a company that everybody knows with a very technology-forward operation and a major employment center,” Sherrill Cagle said.

“There was impact right away, a lot of excitement for the town, especially, but for the county and the region. It definitely was something that everybody was very proud of, so … in a way, it kind of did some healing.”

The facility has helped diversify employment opportunities in Wake County by offering stable positions to workers with low to no skills, Sherrill Cagle said. Amazon’s Career Choice Program, which helps employees develop new skills, was especially appealing to business leaders in Wake County, she said.

Because the facility is situated along Interstate 40, it’s in a prime location for those commuting in to work at Amazon.

“We anticipated, when it was Amazon, that that would be mean a pulling of people from different parts of the MSA or from the region to work at this facility, but it also meant that it was realistic for someone to make that journey to work,” she said. “There was an ability to sort of absorb some of those impacts because of where it was located.”

Just to the south, in Johnston County, an Amazon inbound cross dock facility opened last spring in Smithfield. Johnston County Economic Development director Chris Johnson said the company has invested $150 million in the facility and hired nearly 1,000 people.

Johnson believes some workers who had been commuting out of Johnston County to the Garner distribution center are now working at the Smithfield facility.

“Our labor shed is 115,000, but yet 65% leave every day to go work in Wake,” Johnson said. “My comment to any (company) …  looking at Johnston County, I say, ‘Well, our labor is here, it’s just paying a good enough salary for them to stay here.’”

Kannapolis, northeast of Charlotte, is home to two Amazon facilities. The first, a fulfillment center the size of 28 football fields, opened in 2019, while the second, a same-day delivery facility, opened in late December, said Annette Privette Keller, director of communications for the city of Kannapolis.

“It was a huge announcement for us,” she said about the first fulfillment center. “We have been working very hard to revitalize our city and bring economic centers such as that to the city. And, of course, having Amazon locate here and their reputation, that was a big deal for them to choose Kannapolis.”

Amazon has served as a business anchor for the area and has helped attract other companies, Privette Keller said, and the city has also seen new apartment and townhome developments near the facilities to house workers.

“It really has helped the city of Kannapolis with its momentum and vision for revitalization,” she said, “and it has been a good thing for our city.”