海角大神

Days after traditional retailers, including Macy鈥檚 and Sears, announced dismal sales figures and massive store closings, Amazon is grabbing headlines for the exact opposite reason: It鈥檚 growing like crazy.

Over the next year-and-a-half, the e-commerce 鈥� and movie-producing, cloud-service-providing, and artificial-intelligence-building 鈥� company says it will add 100,000 full-time workers to its 180,000-strong US workforce. This is spectacular growth, considering that it to create upwards of 150,000 US jobs. It鈥檚 also an encouraging trend at a time when automation is taking away many low-skilled jobs.

Amazon says that jobs will span experience, education, and skill levels, ranging from positions for engineers and software developers, to entry-level positions, mostly at fulfillment centers that have already been announced in recent months and are under construction in states including Texas, California, Florida, and New Jersey.

鈥淟ogistics is extraordinarily important to large retailers, because you鈥檝e got to have that product on the shelf. If you don鈥檛 have that product on the shelf, the customer goes somewhere else, and if the customer goes somewhere else, they may never come back鈥� says Bill Thorne, the National Retail Federation鈥檚 senior vice president for communications and public affairs.

Increasingly, the e-commerce company has been building warehouses around the country to keep pace with growing online orders and with its promise to deliver packages at supersonic speed.聽For $99 a year, members of Amazon Prime get free two-day shipping and some free television and movies. 聽And if two days isn鈥檛 fast enough, Prime Now, a program available in some cities to Prime members, offers one-hour delivery of some items.聽

Amazon's guarantee of rushed delivery has shaped consumer expectations and e-commerce industry shipping standards, notes Mr. Thorne.聽鈥淭hey鈥檝e helped to evolve this consumer thinking and now they have to figure out ways to maintain their position,鈥� Thorne says. 鈥淭he only way they think they can do it is to get those fulfillment centers closer to consumers so they can meet that demand.鈥�

To meet consumer demand for fast delivery at lower cost 鈥� and to stave off competition that in e-commerce includes only Walmart, which owns only about 3 percent of the online retail sales compared to Amazon鈥檚 74 percent 鈥� the online retailer is investing heavily in building out fulfillment and delivery operations.

The Seattle-based retailer built most of the 聽in the last six years, according to an analysis by J.P. Morgan Chase鈥檚 airfreight and surface transportation analyst Brian Ossenbeck, which was available to Barron鈥檚. Last year alone, the retailer was expected to open 30 warehouses, according to Mr. Ossenbeck.

In retail, that is stellar growth. As Jeff Bezos, Amazon鈥檚 founder and chief executive muses in the company鈥檚 2015 earnings report to investors: 鈥淭wenty years ago, I was driving boxes to the post office in my Chevy Blazer and dreaming of a forklift.鈥� Now, after years of heavily investing all earnings back into the company to the dismay of some of its investors, Amazon in 2015 finally became consistently profitable. In large part this is due to its successful cloud-storage business, Amazon Web Services,聽for corporate customers. In the third quarter of 2016, to $252 million, or 52 cents per share, as Reuters reports, making it the company鈥檚 sixth consecutive profitable quarter.

The company鈥檚 future aspirations go beyond e-commerce, though, to areas with some additional job-producing potential. Amazon also is building physical retail stores 鈥� such as its new grocery store, , opening in Seattle this year 鈥� testing package-delivery by drone, and potentially gearing up to , according to The Wall Street Journal.聽