By Wesley Brown
Amazon is accelerating its previous plans to expand its same-day delivery service to more than 4,000 smaller cities, towns, and rural communities by the end of the year, the company announced on June 24.
After delivering to Prime members at record-breaking speeds in 2023 and 2024, the Silicon Valley e-commerce giant said it is investing more than $4 billion to triple the size of its delivery network by 2026, with a focus on rural America.
“Everybody loves fast delivery. So, whether you live in Monmouth, Iowa, or in downtown Los Angeles, now you’re going to have the same fantastic Amazon customer experience: the ability to get the wide variety of items you need to keep your household running every day, delivered the same or next day,” said Doug Herrington, CEO of Worldwide Amazon Stores.
In late April, Amazon first announced plans to expand its rural delivery network by adding more than 200 last-mile delivery stations by the end of 2026. The multibillion-dollar capital investment will create more than 100,000 new jobs and generate opportunities through a wide range of full-time, part-time, and flexible positions at the company’s fulfillment centers and delivery hubs, according to the company.
Once this expansion is finished, the world’s largest online retailer will be able to deliver more than a billion additional packages each year to customers in more than 13,000 zip codes covering 1.2 million square miles—an area the size of Alaska, California, and Texas combined—according to Amazon.
Over the past few years, Amazon has been transforming its rural delivery stations into hybrid hubs that serve multiple functions. This includes storing inventory on-site to enable same-day delivery and preparing packages for final delivery to customers. This approach maximizes the company’s rural network, positioning products closer to customers’ doorsteps and reducing transportation distances, it said.
In addition, the Seattle-based e-commerce giant, which reported more than $638 billion in sales in 2024, said it is using advanced machine learning algorithms to predict which items meet the needs of local Prime members. This includes stocking a mix of the most popular and frequently purchased items to match local preferences, such as wild bird food in Dubuque, Iowa, travel backpacks in Findlay, Ohio, and after-sun body butter in Sharptown, Maryland.
Amazon said the response from customers in the more than 1,000 smaller cities and rural communities where the company has already piloted the free same-day or next-day delivery service has been very positive. As a result of the faster delivery speeds, customers in these areas are shopping online more frequently and purchasing household essentials at higher rates, the company said.
Amazon’s expansion of its rural infrastructure and delivery network aligns with its overhaul of the extensive global supply chain and transportation system. This includes opening more fulfillment centers across the United States and reevaluating partnerships with shipping and delivery providers such as the U.S. Postal Service, UPS, FedEx, and others.
For instance, the West Coast online vendor revealed its next-generation fulfillment centers in Shreveport, Louisiana, where the 2,500-worker facility spans five floors and more than 3 million square feet. It is powered by artificial intelligence and incorporates 10 times more robotics than previous centers.
At the center of the facility is Sequoia, a state-of-the-art, multi-level, and containerized inventory system that can hold more than 30 million items. On the delivery side, Amazon announced in early May that FedEx will deliver large packages to the company’s residential customers under a multi-year agreement.
The two parties also signed a partnership deal in late February that offers Amazon “cost favorability” compared to Atlanta-based UPS, which announced during its fourth-quarter earnings call last month that it plans to cut half of its Amazon business by the second half of this year.
Amazon is now one of the largest parcel-delivery services in the United States, surpassing both FedEx and UPS by volume. In 2023, Amazon Logistics processed 5.9 billion delivery orders in the United States, equivalent to 16.16 million delivery orders per day or more than 673,500 per hour.
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