Amazon warehouses have difficulty recruiting people, so there is no one to deliver sellers’ goods?

In its newly opened massive warehouse of over 1 million square feet in New Stanton, Amazon is struggling to recruit workers to receive and ship goods. After all, the current U.S. labor market is highly competitive and labor is clearly tight.

"It's a huge challenge because we've been losing workers in southwestern Pennsylvania," said James Futrell, a community market research official .

Data shows that the local unemployment rate has dropped to around 3% in July this year. To make matters worse, the Pittsburgh area's labor force has lost about 46,000 workers in the past four years, and labor market observers believe that there is little hope for recovery.

An official with SunCap Property Group, a warehouse developer in Charlotte, North Carolina , said last year that Amazon's new warehouse would provide about 600 jobs, but Amazon has not confirmed that number.

Amazon said it had no trouble finding workers in Pennsylvania, where it has about 5,000 employees, including at a fulfillment center in Findlay Township and a new delivery station in North Versailles.

The New Stanton warehouse is located near the intersection of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, Interstate 70 and Route 119, making it convenient to parts of Allegheny, Fayette and Washington counties in addition to Westmoreland.

Currently, Amazon's main competitors for local workers are United Parcel Service (UPS) in New Stanton; a FedEx freight warehouse at Westmoreland Distribution Park in East Huntington; and United Natural Foods, which straddles the border of New Stanton and Hempfield.

UPS said they remain competitive in a challenging hiring market even as Amazon opens operations next to its new Stanton facility, thanks in large part to their industry-leading pay and benefits, tuition assistance and advancement opportunities.

A UPS spokesman said UPS's new Stanton facility employs about 1,500 people, ranging from part-time package handlers to full-time employees and managers, and he said Amazon's presence would not take workers away from other types of small businesses.

The head of Amazon's local warehouse said that although the company is facing a relatively severe recruitment environment, it already has corresponding solutions. For example, the full automation application rate of the new warehouse will be higher than the industry average, which will greatly reduce the use of manpower. Therefore, sellers do not need to worry about their goods being stored in the warehouse and unable to be shipped out.

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