- November 25, 2024
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Online retail giant Amazon will bring its latest technology to Fort Myers when it builds a new 650,000-square-foot robotics fulfillment center near The Forum, a master-planned community in Fort Myers.
The facility will be built at 10631 State Road 82, on 189 acres — 143 of which the company just purchased for $66.5 million.
The company’s new warehouse and distribution center will be its third location in Lee County, but first robotics fulfillment center. Amazon says it will bring more than 1,000 full and part time jobs with the project.
Construction is expected to begin next year and be completed in mid-2027.
Amazon’s robotics fulfillment center will incorporate technology to store, pick and pack items for deliveries.
The company has been using warehouse robots for about 12 years now, first buying a Massachusetts company named Kiva Systems in 2012. Since then it has developed and incorporated more than 750,000 robots across its distribution operations.
Amazon did not provide details of on how the technology will work in Fort Myers, but documents available on its operations website explain what its processes are and how its systems work.
The company’s next-generation fulfillment centers use robotics and AI technology together.
The goal, Amazon says, “is simple: pair employees with the right technology to make their workday safer, easier, and more productive, while delivering packages to customers faster than ever.”
Here, according to the company, is how it works:
“The system coordinates the efforts of thousands of mobile robots and a suite of robotic arms to bring items to employees at ergonomic workstations, where they can do all their work with more comfort and safety in their power zone, between mid-thigh and mid-chest.”
Amazon says it hopes to reduce costs during peak delivery season by 25% at the first facility fully integrating the newest technology, which is in Shreveport, Louisiana.
The company says the technology also improves productivity by creating a safer environment for employees. That's because new systems being put in place improve ergonomics and reduce the amount of heavy lifting employees need to do.
The company, in a statement that may seem counterintuitive to some, also says that the next generation fulfillment centers and sites that employ the advanced robotics will need 30% more employees working in reliability, maintenance and engineering roles.
It doesn’t discuss, however, what the technology will mean for the workforce outside those specialties.
What it does says is that salaries at the Fort Myers center will average $22 per hour.
Amazon currently operates about 30 fulfilment centers in Florida.
The new fulfilment center near The Forum is in a part of Fort Myers that is rapidly developing.
At a June 26 Fort Myers Board of Adjustment hearing, a lawyer for the property owner of much of the land Amazon wound up buying said, “what’s in front of you today, at 750,000 square feet, is a very small fraction of what” is coming.
“I think it's important, and our management staff wanted to make sure that it is on the record, that this project, under those development agreements that you have, is vested for an amazing amount of development,” said Joe Madden, a prominent Fort Myers real estate attorney at that hearing.
The land the center will be built on is surrounded by a proposed apartment community and the Lexington Palms at The Forum apartments to the west; undeveloped property to the north; and the Six Mile Cypress Slough Preserve to the east.
It was previously owned by a pair of local companies — C-Hack LLC and Keystone LLC — which paid $900,000 in 2003, Lee property records show.
Those companies, according to the June presentation, won approval in February 2022 to build a 1.4 million square foot warehouse and distribution facility on 226 acres. But the approval was rescinded a few months later, in August, at the owner’s request.
Amazon’s $66.5 million land purchase was just the latest in a series of eye-popping real estate buys in Lee this past year.
In the past 30 days alone: Martin Marietta, a North Carolina building supply company, paid $620 million for nearly 2,000 acres in the county. A few days later, Chicago-based Walton Capital paid $155 million for the 818,000-square-foot Tri-County 75 industrial park at Luckett Road and Interstate 75 in Fort Myers.
And in March, EQT Exeter, a Pennsylvania real estate trust, bought the 41-acre CenterLinks Business Park in Fort Myers for $92.5 million.
Justin Thibaut, president and CEO of LSI Cos., which brokered the deal, says in a statement that the Amazon "project to emerge here will further accelerate the rapid economic growth” in Fort Myers.
