Amazon Is Coming to Town

Inside the e-commerce giant’s arrival in Gaylord

By Craig Manning | April 20, 2024

One of the world's biggest companies is setting up shop in northern Michigan.

In January, details emerged about Amazon's plans to build a new distribution center in Gaylord. Since then, the e-commerce giant and its contractors have been hard at work on the new 42,500-square-foot facility, which will occupy eight acres of land in the Gaylord Industrial Park and should be open for business by the end of summer.

What will this arrival of a big household name business mean for Gaylord and northern Michigan as a whole? And could the region see other Amazon facilities—or court other similarly big companies—in the future? Northern Express takes a look.

Amazon’s Arrival

State Representative Ken Borton (R-Gaylord) was the one who announced that Amazon would be coming to his hometown. On January 11, Borton’s office sent out a press release sharing the news and touting its potential economic and community benefits for Gaylord.

“When Amazon comes to town, it means a lot of new jobs and a lot of new money going into our local economy,” Borton said. “We’re talking about a huge facility employing lots of people. But it isn’t just the jobs. The folks working there will have to buy homes. Then they’ll send their kids to our schools. They’ll shop at our grocery stores and dine at local restaurants. The more you think about how much projects like this add to our community, the more excited you get.”

Lisa McComb, executive director of the Otsego County Economic Alliance, says Amazon had “been scouting property in Traverse City and Gaylord” for quite some time before the January announcement.

“When they were made aware of this opportunity [to purchase property in the Gaylord Industrial Park], they just moved forward very quickly,” she says. “And then we were all under a nondisclosure agreement until they actually closed on [the property], so none of us who knew what was potentially happening could say anything.”

The City of Gaylord and the Otsego County Economic Alliance established the Gaylord Industrial Park in the early 2000s, partially as a means of attracting big businesses to Otsego County. McComb points to the location of the park—and of Gaylord in general—as an ideal spot for shipping, logistics, and e-commerce companies. Because the industrial park is located one mile west of I-75, two miles south of M-32, and right next door to Gaylord Regional Airport, it’s a convenient spot for moving goods.

“We just have a lot of infrastructure in place here, and that’s really conducive to investment for something like a fulfillment center or distribution center,” McComb says. “In the same industrial park where Amazon is building, we have a big FedEx plant. There’s another FedEx facility operating out of another industrial complex in Gaylord. And then we also have UPS and several other companies that use this as a regional corridor for distribution.”

Economic Impacts

What exactly will Amazon coming to town mean for Gaylord in the long term?

Once built, McComb says the new facility is expected to support 200 jobs for Amazon, including “a mixture of both full-time and part-time” positions. Already, the facility has brought some work to northern Michigan: McComb notes that Traverse City’s Team Elmer’s was tapped to perform “all the excavation and tree clearing and removal” of the eight-acre site where the new building will be.

Construction is moving quickly on the new Amazon facility, according to McComb, who expects it to be operational within a matter of months. “The exterior is up, the lights are in, the connections to the city water and sewer systems are in,” she says. “So, they’re progressing at a fast pace, and they’ve told me that they anticipate being functional by mid-summer.”

McComb says Amazon’s investment in Gaylord—along with a few other recent big business developments in the area—are a good sign that Otsego County is on the upswing.

“We in Otsego County are very fortunate, in that, in the first quarter of 2024 alone, we’ve had two large businesses open,” McComb says. “Menards is going to bring 250 jobs to the area; they’ve got about 180 in position right now. And then Hobby Lobby has come in with around 25 new jobs. Then you add the 200 jobs at this Amazon facility, and we also have [other businesses] already developing that I can’t talk about yet. All these things are going to grow our community and provide competitive jobs.”

McComb continues, “We’re just experiencing a large amount of private investment into Otsego County right now. That’s going to make a huge impact on our economy, because it’s going to increase the workforce that we have here. We have 11,000 people working here already, we draw 8,000 commuters, and those numbers are only going to increase.”

If there’s a downside, McComb admits, it’s that the growth is “going to increase the critical need we have for housing and childcare.”

Borton recently shared on his Facebook page that Amazon will start hiring for jobs at the new Gaylord facility “later this summer,” adding that job seekers interested in being “notified when they start accepting applications” can sign up for job alerts at hiring.amazon.com.

What Comes Next?

There could be more Amazon jobs coming to the region in the near future: While this facility is a distribution center, McComb tells Northern Express that “there are plans in the future to have an Amazon fulfillment center somewhere in northern Michigan.”

For reference, in the world of e-commerce, distribution centers and fulfillment centers play different roles in the pipeline that moves goods from suppliers to the end consumers. According to a blog post from Traverse City’s own eFulfillment Service, a distribution center is typically “a hub in the supply chain where products are received from suppliers and then distributed to retail stores or other fulfillment centers.” A fulfillment center, meanwhile, is the cog further down the supply chain that is responsible for actually processing orders and shipping them out to end consumers, as well as handling returns.

Last fall, the Traverse City Ticker, a Northern Express sister publication, broke the news that a new e-commerce facility was coming to Blair Township in Traverse City. Construction plans submitted to Grand Traverse County Construction Code and viewed by The Ticker showed a new facility planned on US-31, west of Menards.

Though Amazon was not officially named on documents, which bore the name “Project Northstar” and referred only to an incoming “tenant,” the details of the project—including the listed developer, architect, and civil engineering firm, plus schematics for a “last-mile” delivery center with a fleet of delivery vans—were all identical to other Amazon facilities in the Midwest. In recent years, Amazon has built numerous facilities throughout Michigan, including a massive 850,000-square-foot, $150 million fulfillment center in Kent County.

Last-mile delivery services are often provided by a third party—think FedEx, UPS, the United States Postal Service (USPS), or the other entities that typically bring an Amazon package to your doorstep. Amazon has even taken to contracting with local post offices to provide last-mile services, which is why you’ll sometimes see USPS mail trucks out delivering Amazon packages on Sundays.

Increasingly, though, Amazon is building its own local hubs to provide those last-mile services in house, all with the aim of getting orders to customers more quickly. A last-mile facility in Blair Township would, in theory, serve this purpose for the Grand Traverse area.

While Amazon has yet to confirm that the Blair Township facility will be one of its local last-mile hubs, signs continue to point to the e-commerce giant establishing more of a Traverse City presence. Several recently-posted Amazon job listings on job boards like Talent.com and The Ladders—including for delivery drivers, warehouse associates, shoppers, and fulfillment staff—identify Traverse City as their location.

Photo courtesy of Rep. Ken Borton