Amazon holds grand opening for Virginia Beach delivery station

Amazon’s usually known for being on time, but the global e-tail giant waited until this week to hold a grand opening celebration for its 200,000-plus square-foot Virginia Beach delivery station, which has been up and running since September 2024.

The facility, located at 2201 Harpers Road, is Amazon’s 17th delivery station in Virginia and the Fortune Global 500 company’s sixth site in Hampton Roads. State and city officials celebrated the opening with a ribbon-cutting ceremony and tour of the new station. Amazon has said it invested about $350 million in Virginia Beach to build the delivery station and a 650,000-square-foot fulfillment center slated to open later this year.

“We’re delighted to welcome Amazon’s newest delivery station to Virginia Beach,” said Virginia Beach Mayor Bobby Dyer in a statement. ” This investment represents not just jobs and economic growth, but also Amazon’s confidence in our city.”

Cory Clark, site lead of Amazon’s Virginia Beach delivery station, said in a statement that the facility has created more than 600 direct and indirect jobs for the community since it opened about eight months ago, ahead of the 2024 holiday season.

“Amazon’s delivery station is a win for Virginia Beach’s economy,” said Virginia Beach City Manager Patrick A. Duhaney. “The 600 jobs with competitive wages and benefits are a welcome addition to the Virginia Beach community as a whole. This investment strengthens our city’s position as a prime location for business development and economic growth.”

Gov. Glenn Youngkin first announced that Amazon.com would launch a fulfillment center and delivery station in Virginia Beach in September 2023, and said that both facilities combined would create an estimated 1,000 full-time jobs.

Amazon spokesperson Sam Fisher said the five-floor, highly automated fulfillment center at 1795 Dam Neck Road is on track to open later this year. The company has said it will feature 55 loading docks

When a customer hits ‘buy it now’ on Amazon, that order is processed at a fulfillment center where the items are actually stored. “The item will be picked off a shelf, packaged up and sent off to a middle-mile facility, or what we call a sortation center,” Fisher explained. “From there those items will be sent to a delivery station, like the one we just opened.”

Those items will typically arrive at the station in the middle of the night — around 1 a.m. in the case of the Virginia Beach site. Customer purchases are then unloaded from semi-trailers and sorted into bags to be loaded onto delivery vans.

Fisher said delivery drivers are still being actively hired, and the Virginia Beach delivery station itself will be hiring more people in the days and weeks ahead.

The new station delivers to all of Virginia Beach, downtown Norfolk and east to Virginia Beach, the eastern half of Chesapeake to the ocean, and south to North Carolina.

One unique feature about the Virginia Beach delivery station, according to Fisher, is that it was the first Amazon facility in Virginia to host electric delivery vans.

Since 2010, Amazon has invested more than $135 billion in Virginia, including infrastructure and compensation to employees, and has created more than 42,000 full and part-time jobs. The company says these investments support an additional 195,400 indirect jobs across the state, in fields like construction and professional services.