WALLINGFORD — Amazon.com is coming to Wallingford, according to a company spokesman who said Friday the Internet retailing giant is leasing space on Research Parkway, near Meriden.
Spokesman Aaron Toso said the 173,000-square-foot facility will open “in the coming months,” but declined to be more specific. The number of people the facility will employ when it opens also was not immediately available, though Toso said the facility “will ultimately employ hundreds and hundreds of people” when fully operational.
“This is going to be a sortation center,” he said. “We are always looking for ways to get our deliveries to customers as quickly as possible, and this will allow us to bring delivery trucks to the facility and keep our customers happy.”
Amazon is opening a $50 million, 1.5 million-square-foot warehouse this summer off Day Hill Road in Windsor, hiring as many as 500 people. That facility is a fulfillment center, where items are packaged for shipping. Sortation centers are the next step in the delivery process.
The Wallingford facility will receive packages from fulfillment centers, sort them by final destination then load them onto trucks for delivery.
“In a single day, a typical Amazon sortation center will sort tens of thousands of customer packages,” Toso said.
Toso said when the company is looking to open a new facility, “we aim to be as close as possible to customers.”
It was not immediately clear whether the Wallingford facility would serve only southern Connecticut or other parts of the state and the New England region.
Another factor Amazon has when looking to site a new facility is the local workforce, according to Toso.
“We expect to find great talent in abundance in this area,” he said.
Toso would not comment when asked whether the Wallingford facility would use drones to deliver packages to customers.
The company notified the Federal Aviation Administration in July 2014 that it wants to initiate a service called Amazon Prime Air that would make use of drones. In its letter to the FAA, the company said it is developing “aerial vehicles that travel over 50 miles an hour and will carry 50 pounds, which cover over 86 percent of the products sold on Amazon.”
The company did not provide a timetable for initiating this service.
Amazon’s plan comes at a time when Wallingford could use some good economic news. Town officials and residents are still reeling from the announcement in late June that drug-maker Bristol-Myers Squibb will close its 982,000-square-foot research-and-development facility by early 2018.
About 100 jobs in Bristol-Myers Squibb’s early-stage virology operations will be eliminated in Wallingford by the end of this year. The company said it will relocate up to 500 workers to another, undisclosed location in Connecticut, which the company has not yet announced.
The Amazon announcement was a surprise to both state and town officials. Jim Watson, a spokesman for Connecticut’s Department of Economic and Community Development, said Friday that nobody from the company had approached the state about providing any incentives or help in finding a place to locate its facility.
That’s in contrast to the Windsor facility, which was the subject of significant back-and-forth about local tax incentives, and which arose after negotiations between the company and the state about Amazon’s tax status.
“This is completely organic,” Watson said of the Wallingford location.
Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said in a statement that he was happy that Amazon “has again made investments in another Connecticut community.”
Courant staff reporting included
