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Amazon To Build $1.5 Billion Air Cargo Hub In Kentucky, Creating Around 2,000 New Jobs (techcrunch.com)
Amazon is planning to build a $1.5 billion air cargo hub in a spot that crossed the Cincinnati and Kentucky border, according to the Wall Street Journal. When the project is completed, it will eventually result in around 2,000 total new jobs. TechCrunch reports: The new hub is designed to help provide a home for its increasingly large fleet of at least 40 cargo planes, a group of vehicles it perviously revealed it was leasing under the name of Amazon Prime Air, complete with Amazon exterior paint jobs. The planes are designed to help Amazon handle its increasing transportation needs, which are growing as its share of global retail business increases, and straining the capacities and capabilities of its shipping partners, which include FedEx and UPS. Amazon has long maintained that it's not looking to compete with other logistics providers, but it recently became an ocean cargo shipping company, with the ability to act as a "freight forwarder," services that FedEx and UPS also offer. Amazon still hopes to eventually offer services both to itself and to outside companies and retailers, which would put it in direct competition with its current partners, according to the WSJ's sources.
"will occupy a spot that crosses the Cincinnati and Kentucky border"
Odd, one's city and the other's a state. And the border between them is a river - hard to build an airport across a river.
Turns out that's wrong - they're building a facility at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Airport. Since the article is just paraphrased from an original by the WSJ (paywalled), I suspect the original said something like "near Cincinnati, across the border in Kentucky", and the person paraphrasing is an idiot (Darrell Etherington).
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
It's better than that.
Jobs are a function of what can be bought and technical progress. That is to say: for a person to purchase good or service, a variety of economic activities must occur (business management, transportation, infrastructure, manufacture, retail). These activities are the product of human labor; the technology employed by that labor determines how much is produced per labor unit and, by reciprocal, how much labor is consumed per unit.
Labor incurs wage. Wages and profits in aggregate are the complete price of a good or service--the minimum viable price is the wage-labor cost.
Being that wages are paid from revenue, revenue is obtained from spending, and spending is made out of wages, money is only a mediator for the (uneven) exchange of human labor. Because of this, the amount of money spendable in a given time frame is finite: between two points in time (say, the entire year 2015), only a fixed amount of money can and will be spent. (Unspent money goes to savings to be spent later; inflation erodes its purchasing power, while trade and technical progress further erode the labor-hours it represents but increase its purchasing power.)
Since the spendable money in a time frame is finite and wages are paid from revenue, the number of jobs available in any given time frame under given conditions (trade, technical progress, population) is finite. QED.
You don't "create jobs"; you employ people. When you employ people, you may be consuming the growth in a market (trade, technical progress, and population growth allowing more purchasing, more jobs, etc.), or you may be out-competing a competitor as said competitor's ability to employ people falls (those jobs eventually go away, yours replace them; this may happen backwards because businesses have savings, too).
It's even possible to do it backwards. If you implement protectionist policies and increase the cost of goods, fewer goods are bought, and less infrastructure is needed. The number of purchaseable goods of the sort reduces as factory worker wages increase, reducing the number of factory worker jobs created by "bringing jobs back" as well as the number of jobs in supporting infrastructure. Paying low enough wages can increase total jobs, although even paying minimum wage increases the cost of goods produced and the number of working hours every person at every income level must expend to afford the previously-imported good, making every person at every income level poorer. Paying higher wages increases that wage-hour cost even further.
The punch line here is that the labor market adjusts in a few short years, and the number of jobs sought moves toward about 5% (U3) unemployment, so you can't even affect total unemployment long-term.
We need to focus on creating wealth and stabilizing the economy, not "creating jobs". You create wealth by trade and technical progress; you stabilize the economy by making sure those things don't happen all-at-once so as to reduce the volatility in employment, as well as by having good welfare policies.
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Surely it would be cheaper for Amazon to just mail the item themselves.
And when it comes to third party sellers shipping Prime items, all bets are off on how the thing will get to my home.
I do agree this is not a last resort thing for Amazon. They have many regional warehouses and if you are going to fly planes around you may as well fill them with restocking items as well as orders.
I also really hope they do the blimp and drone thing over big cities... I have this vision of ordering a package delivery drone and it flies itself down with just the controller in a box... used? No, pretested for airworthiness.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office