Inside Amazon’s Trucking Ambitions
A new leasing program for Amazon-branded trucks. An in-house training program for drivers. Amazon is muscling its way into the middle-mile trucking business, just as it challenged UPS and FedEx in last-mile delivery.
In recent years, Amazon has attracted wide attention with its effort to become a force in last-mile delivery, from its now ubiquitous delivery vans bearing the company’s smiley-face arrow logo to its experiments with drones.
But the e-commerce giant is also quietly becoming a force in a less visible area: the trucking of goods between Amazon warehouse facilities, manufacturing centers and ports, a part of shipping known as middle-mile delivery. The Information has learned that by the end of 2019 Amazon was shipping more than two-thirds of the freight between company facilities in the U.S. using a new Amazon program that helps small independent trucking companies book jobs. That has allowed Amazon to wean much of its business off big third-party freight brokers, which were hauling the vast majority of its freight just two years earlier.