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Coffeyville, Kansas, 90.5 miles away. I'm guessing it's going to be 2 hours and 22 minutes. Let's see what it tells us. Oh, 2 hours and 21. A couple months ago, I took a trip to Kansas. I drove on winding two-lane roads to reach a town that I'd been very curious to visit. Right turn, Coffeyville.
We went looking for people who could tell us what happened to a huge Amazon warehouse that had been there. We were at work and I had noticed, okay, we got a lot of bigwigs here today, you know. This is Juanita Kepner. She worked at the warehouse in Coffeyville for 15 years. And she remembered this day back in 2014. And it's like something's going on, you know, how you just kind of have that feeling.
And then they announced that there was all hands, mandatory all hands for everybody in the building. The building she's talking about was one of Amazon's first warehouses. Coffeyville has a population of just under 10,000 people. It's a small town with a huge warehouse that was run by a giant tech company. So everybody goes into the big break room. You know, they had all chairs set up. Everybody's sitting or standing. And they had the bigwigs talking and they said, well...
This is what's going to happen. You know, we're going to close this building. And, you know, of course, yeah, a lot of people's upset. A lot of people started crying because some of them had just, you know, had new babies, bought new homes, bought cars. Yeah, I was really hurt, you know, when they told me they were closing. You know, all I could think of was, oh, my God, driving home. I'm thinking, so what am I going to do in January when they close?
Amazon came to Coffeyville in 1999. Fifteen years later, it was gone. It's not always clear, but Amazon, which has a huge digital presence, has a big impact on physical spaces too, on local communities and the people who live there. So for this episode, we wanted to ask a question. What happens when Amazon comes to your town? And what happens when Amazon decides to leave? ♪
I'm Jason Del Rey, and this is Land of the Giants from Recode and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is a podcast that looks at the rise of Amazon. We're going to dive into the stories of two different Amazon warehouses, one in Coffeyville and one in Staten Island, New York. Amazon calls them fulfillment centers. Hundreds of thousands of Amazon employees work in these huge spaces. There are more than 100 of them in the U.S. alone.
And Amazon executives make careful strategic decisions about where in the U.S. to put the warehouses. That strategy, it has evolved over Amazon's lifetime. And with that evolution, there's been big impacts for communities, both good and bad. Let's go back to Coffeyville. Okay, now, what do you know about why Amazon came here and when they came here? Anything, a lot, everything, or what? This guy asking me questions, his name's John Schmidt.
He owns a used car dealership in Coffeyville. I've been here a long time. I've been a business guy all my life. Didn't plan on coming back here when I got through school, but it was a time when everybody was coming home from Vietnam either walking or in a bag. All my buddies were going to law school. I decided, there's going to be more lawyers than there are car dealers, and I was right on that count. Schmidt sat down to talk to me in his office. Just outside the door, a few cars sat on the showroom floor.
I wanted to talk to him because he was there at the beginning. Back in the late 90s, he was a member of a couple of local economic development boards. So I was kind of one of the go-to guys when the phone call comes in about the possibility of a client going into that building out there. The building was an empty warehouse. It used to be a distribution center for Golden Books.
That's the company that makes those little kids books with the golden binding. At the time, Amazon was basically selling only books. So this made sense. John Schmidt says Amazon's Coffeeville story starts with geography. Where's this? It's way the fuck in the middle. Belly button or wherever they'd stick the hose in if you had to have a colonoscopy tomorrow. This is where it is, okay?
Okay, so what I think Schmidt is saying is Coffeeville is smack in the middle of the U.S., and being in the middle of the country was a good thing for Amazon, at least back then. In the late 90s, Amazon only had two warehouses, and both of them were on the coasts.
Jeff Bezos decided his company needed to drastically expand its warehouse space. And this new location would make it easier for Amazon to reach all different parts of the country. And there were other considerations. One of them was sales tax. Amazon wanted to avoid collecting sales tax because that gave the company an advantage over brick-and-mortar stores. And one way to do it?
put warehouses in states without a lot of Amazon customers. And finally, there was the goal of finding cheap labor. They don't know shit from Shinola about really high-speed warehousing, but this is a big space and by God it's cheap and we think we can hire these hillbillies to work there.
So Schmidt doesn't actually think his neighbors in Coffeyville are hillbillies. And from what he remembers, people were very happy about Amazon coming to town. Brass bands and ribbon cutting. I had a whole bunch of people in from Seattle and stuff. It's a new deal. It's a big deal. The Amazon warehouse brought more than 500 jobs to the area. And people came to work there from across the region. I started in December 13, 1999.
Juanita Kepner was one of them. She started working at the warehouse soon after it opened, and she still remembers her starting salary. $9 an hour. So $9 really sounded good, but then after your probation period, you got a raise. So then it went up to like $10, and it just kept increasing and increasing, especially for around here. You know, you can go somewhere and make $9, $10 an hour, go for it. Also, she remembers exactly how long her drive was.
34 minutes to get to work. Yep. And then when it was ice and snow, I would leave at 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning. I'd go, and people from Cofferville didn't show up that lived right there. The only time I actually ever missed was when my sister passed away and when I was in the hospital. I was dedicated. In those 15 years, Kepner held all sorts of jobs across the warehouse—
Started working in gift wrap because they needed people to get the, you know, Christmas gifts out. Then she moved to another department where packages are sorted. And that's the department where the product comes down and told, you know, you induct them to the conveyor and they go to the chutes to be packed out. And for a while, she had what may be the most Amazon job title at the company. I did problem solving for, you know, like if a product come down a chute and it doesn't go there, then you research it to...
Find out exactly where it's going and get it to the right chute so it can be packed and shipped. They actually have a role called problem solver, is that right? They had problem solvers and that's what, you know, I eventually ended up doing down there. Then I become a trainer. So Kepner learned to operate what she calls all sides of the building. She was adamant that she wanted to learn new roles. And that's what her bosses let her do. So she moved up and up. I thought it was great. I'd put them at the top of everywhere I've actually worked.
Which is maybe a little surprising if you've heard some of the horror stories about people working inside Amazon warehouses. So I asked her about some of those, like the one about employees not even having enough time to use the bathroom when they need to. If you got to go, you got to go.
Now, in Coffeyville one time, yeah, there was a guy that did pee in a bottle, but yeah, he got reprimanded for that one. But no, they don't stop you from doing that, you know. There have also been stories about people passing out from the heat in Amazon warehouses. Some workers even had to be taken to the hospital.
Kepner says in Coffeyville, there was an issue with air conditioning, as in there was no air conditioning whatsoever for some period of time. Yeah, you know, people got so sick and so overheated, you know, they had to go home. We actually had called an ambulance for a few of them, you know, but yeah, I said, you can't have people falling out. You know, that could be a lawsuit right there. So they did put the air units back in.
And that was a blessing. I mean, you could tell the difference. Of course, Kepner doesn't speak for every Amazon warehouse worker. But for her, clearly the good outweighed the bad. When they opened, I mean, it created jobs for so many people. There was always like anywhere from 600 to 800 employees. And then during peak, it was anywhere from 1,500 to 2,000. I mean, it really helped the community and helped a lot of people with jobs. Can I do the French toast, actually? Sure.
And I'll do a side of bacon. Thank you. I just want biscuits and gravy. We met another former Amazon employee at a restaurant in Coffeyville called Egbert's. His name is Andy White. He's got auburn hair and a goatee. And he looks like the kind of dude you don't want to mess with. If Juanita Kepner was the model employee, Andy White was the guy you definitely wanted on your side.
My nickname was the king of the jungle. It was on the bottom of my signatures, on my email signature. At Amazon? Yeah. Where'd that come from? Because the dock was a jungle one, and I ran the dock. Running the dock meant supervising everyone who was loading trucks. It was a rush to make sure that everybody got their stuff, you know what I mean? Because I'm an Amazon customer too, and I was then too. So it's kind of that rush of,
making sure everything got there, and I loved it. So Andy White came to Egbert's to meet me with his wife, Holly, and the story of how they met, it's a good one. It starts during the busy holiday season inside the warehouse. Holly's sent to a new department called Outbound. That's where the king of the jungle is in charge. I had packed and shipping, but I had never...
taking the boxes and put them on pallets or put them in a truck. No idea. Not a whole lot of training. That lack of training, it showed. And unfortunately for Holly, Andy White was the one who noticed. I had the leaning tower of boxes and I didn't know what else to do with them. And he comes over there, up and above it, and takes one arm and just swipes through this pallet of boxes. And the outline of what I'm seeing, they're mortified.
No, not exactly a first date. Andy and Holly say there were actually a lot of tight friendships born inside that warehouse.
By the time I was done with 10 years, I walked out with a whole lot of family. You know, because I still stay in contact with, I don't know, hundreds of them. What do you think it is either about the work or the people that the job attracts that you walked out of there with so much family? The fact that we were all in the ship together. You're stuck in the ship, you know. You're going to sink or swim and it's all together.
We'll get to the story of why Amazon closed the Coffee Fill warehouse and hear what happens to Andy and Holly White and Juanita Kepner. But first, I needed to see this warehouse for myself. We're going to go inside after the break.
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On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Watch Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll, and Raul Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet, and demand equity. Download the Global Citizen app to watch live. Learn more at globalcitizen.org.
So we are on a two lane in each direction highway. Basically green everywhere. That looks like a giant building and we're gonna make a right here onto Industrial Park Road. On one hand I guess I'm a little surprised that four years out this place is still vacant. On the other hand driving around here it's like
Man, who would want a million square feet in the middle of nowhere? So, really interested to see what this looks like. I've never been in one that's empty. And it is super dark and empty. Hey, Trisha. Wow. Trisha Purden appeared across the room. She was going to be our tour guide at the warehouse.
So it probably can fit two football fields inside just building A. It's just shy of 200,000 square foot. Purden's the executive director of something called the Montgomery County Action Council. It's the economic development group for Coffeyville and a few of the surrounding towns. I think there's 50 dock doors between this building and the other part of the building, or building C, and then 75 dock doors in the back doors.
Trisha Purden has a hard job to fill this empty warehouse. And it is massive. We were standing in Building A, but there's also a Building B and a Building C. And at some point, Amazon even added a Building D. So Amazon came in and they fixed up this building, which is pretty nice for someone who's just leasing a building. So Amazon just leased this building. It never owned it. Remember that detail. It'll become important later on.
So this, I'm walking straight down the middle of this hallway, which would have actually been a conveyor belt. Multi-layered conveyor belts. So it ran the whole length of this hallway and took everything that was being stored that came into Amazon to be sold in these two buildings here and then down this conveyor to the building A where it was shipped out. So when you hear stories of how in sort of the old fulfillment centers people could walk 10, 12 miles in a day and you look at
this gargantuan space, I understand it now. I mean just showing this building when we have potential customers or tenants I'd wear my Fitbit and just walking from one side to the end of building D I almost hit my 10,000 steps count just walking the building Hold on, let me find a light for you guys. Okay. Cobblers, sorry.
Even with the cobwebs, Tricia Purden tries to bring potential tenants to this warehouse as often as she can because Coffeyville needs a new company to take over this space. And this job of trying to fill an empty warehouse, it actually began for Purden just as soon as Amazon moved out. The first time I came in, it was bright and shiny and there were these bright yellow conveyors all over the place being torn apart and it was
It was sad. You just kind of see what probably was one of the most technologically advanced companies in the region and just seeing it disassembled and broken apart. And it just kind of broke my heart. And now those conveyors are laying out in a field in Coffeyville because they're being sold for scrap metal. And just every time you drive by that, it hurts just a little bit.
Purden was assistant to the city manager of Coffeyville back in 2014, when they first got the news that Amazon was leaving. It's kind of a funny story, actually. I was nine months pregnant when we got the call that said they were considering leaving. So myself and the city manager put together as much data as we possibly could. He convened a task force of county-wide leaders and taskforce.
the state to figure out what we should do, what kind of package we should put together. And I immediately went into labor. But I was full term, so it was fine. Purden says local and state officials tried to convince Amazon to stay by offering a package of incentives, but it didn't work. And so Purden got the job of trying to find Amazon's replacement. I was really optimistic about
in 2015 that this is not going to be hard. This building is perfect. As you can see, if you look around, you're seeing that it's been empty since 2015 and it looks like it's been empty since 2015. The new owners are trying to clean it up, but you can see their ceiling tiles missing now in the office areas and, um, there's spider webs in the doorways and, um,
It just feels abandoned. It just feels sad and empty. And we've noticed empty buildings die faster than buildings that are full. I can see what Purden's talking about. As we were walking around, I could close my eyes and imagine the chaos of a thriving Amazon warehouse. And then I could open my eyes and see the uphill battle that Purden and Coffeyville are facing.
In just 15 years, the warehouse went from a point of incredible pride to a drag on the community. But Amazon was looking out for Amazon. When it first came to Coffeyville, it was just an online bookstore that needed cheap space and cheap labor somewhere in the middle of the country. When it left 15 years later, though, it had much different needs.
Ultimately, what it came down to is the CEO of Amazon set a plan in place for them moving forward that they wanted all of their major distribution centers to be within an hour market of a metropolitan area. And although we were only an hour away from Tulsa at that time, 2014, it wasn't set as a priority area to grow into. And so they moved to Kansas City. And that pretty much matches what Amazon said at the time.
A company spokeswoman described it this way. We regularly evaluate our network to ensure we're placing fulfillment centers as close to our customers as possible. That signaled a change for Amazon. Remember, in its early days, Amazon wanted warehouses in places with fewer customers to avoid sales tax.
By 2014, though, Amazon was collecting sales tax in most states and Amazon Prime was becoming huge. Amazon's warehouse strategy needed to change so that one or two day delivery that many of us love, it's a lot harder to do if the warehouse isn't near a large population of customers. And Coffeeville, it's small. But Purden says Amazon's departure had a big effect on the community.
It would have been those indirect things. All of those employees eating lunch, eating dinner, going to our grocery stores. I know that the beauty salons said their customers got cut in half. We were not full at our restaurants on Friday nights anymore. Those were the big losses that were immediately apparent. That's what hurt the most.
Our sales tax went down. That's how we pay for our streets. That's how the school district pays off their bonds with their school expansion they did when Amazon was here. Those all took a hit. This feeling of being hurt, it came up a lot during my visit to Coffeyville. I got to use a saw and saw stuff, saws all it all down, which was great for me. I got to do all the stuff I didn't get to do as an employee because of safety or whatever, you know. This is Andy White again, king of the jungle.
As soon as Amazon closed, he got a job working for a local company. And that company had been hired to remove all the equipment from the warehouse, like those huge conveyor belts that ran building to building. As Andy's telling me this story, there's a bit of mischief in his eyes. Supposed to even lean on the conveyors. I got to cut them down. Got to saw them down in half and chop them up. Yeah, every once in a while I get stomped on one, too. Just take out a little frustration from...
from, you know, the feeling, because the feeling sets in after a while that they stabbed everybody in the back in a small town, you know. And that's, I mean, we may have all knew it was coming, but you still get that kind of feeling. Four years later, Andy White and his wife Holly have moved on. They both have new jobs. But that sense of family from the warehouse, that still lives on. There was a page that
that we all put together. Holly White pulled out her phone, and she showed me a Facebook group with almost 800 members. There were photos from their time together inside the warehouse. And there was this one post. It says, does your new job family understand you like your Amazon family did? Wow. Does your new job family understand you like your Amazon family did?
If you've never spent time in a place like Coffeyville, you might struggle to understand the emotional ties these people had to a big, bland warehouse. But it was about way more than that, the pain of losing jobs. There was the blow to community pride and a fear that small towns always end up losing in the end. So by most accounts, Amazon left Coffeyville because it wanted to be closer to customers and to transportation hubs as it promised faster delivery.
Amazon also told me, though, it had problems with staffing. There just weren't enough people to hire for the busiest times of the year. But it turns out, closing the warehouse may have been about something else, too. Something really local. John Schmidt, the car dealer who was part of the Economic Advisory Board, he told us that a problem came up with the landlords. Remember, Amazon didn't own the warehouse. They were only leasing it.
And when their lease was almost up, Schmidt says the owners tried to raise the rent. Okay, well, if you can imagine yourself in the position of a renter and they want to double your rent, what are you going to do? Well, I'm damn sure not going to go ahead and do improvements to leasehold like I was planning to do because the delta, as they say in the trade, won't compute. The ROI won't work. And so, boom, there you have it.
It's possible that all the reasons you've heard for why Amazon left Coffeeville are true. For a company the size of Amazon, choices like this are rarely black and white. But what's really striking about this local spat with the warehouse owners is that it could turn out to be a cautionary tale. Amazon has warehouses all over the country, and that means how Amazon decides where to put its facilities can be influenced by everything from a global strategy to a local pissing match over rent. So Amazon comes.
But sometimes, Amazon also goes. So we're in my lovely 2008 Honda Accord, which was my grandfather's at some point. And we are in the northwest corner of Staten Island, my hometown. Now everything Amazon does is about speed, speed, speed, speed.
And serving Prime members. Where did Prime members mostly live or densest populations? Big cities. And so Amazon's made this huge push as another Prime truck rolls by. Huge push into getting as close as possible to big urban populations so they can do the same day delivery, next day delivery, two hour delivery, two day delivery at a minimum.
So we've come a long way from Coffeyville, Kansas, to a parking lot inside a giant industrial park in Staten Island, New York. The crown jewel here is a new Amazon warehouse. From this location, Amazon trucks are just minutes away from a bridge that leads to the New Jersey Turnpike and to Newark Airport. And there are more than 20 million people living in the New York metropolitan area.
Back in college, I actually interned for the guy who would eventually help bring Amazon here. We were there one time. We broke out pizza fast, and it was excellent. His name's Jimmy Otto, and he's the Staten Island borough president. He's also pure Staten Island. Sicilian plane, what do you do? We had a really thin crust, which I've become a really big fan of.
Recently, I went to visit Otto in his office, which is covered in Mets jerseys, Mets baseballs, even signed Mets photographs. Borough president essentially is the county executive. Five boroughs in the city of New York. We're the smallest borough. I was wondering what we could learn about Amazon's decision to move to this small borough. It's about as not Coffeyville as you can get. And I wanted to know how it feels when Amazon first arrives in a community.
Otto says the story of Amazon coming here starts with a mandate he gave the developers of that industrial park. We make it clear to them early on that we see the west shore of Staten Island as the jobs coast. So they're going to find a partner in us. And our aim is jobs. How are you going to use this property, create jobs?
Jobs. This is what Jimmy Otto said to me over and over again. He was all about the jobs an Amazon warehouse could bring to the island. Potentially more than 2,000 of them. And I think I say this, and I think history backs it up. This is the biggest jobs bonanza for Staten Island in a long time. I mean, we're happy. So far, we're really happy. A quick explanation. The Amazon warehouse is in the northwest corner of Staten Island.
It's one of the least developed parts of the borough. A couple of years ago, there were rumors that Amazon was planning to open a warehouse in the area, and Staten Island was one of the options. They're going to open the fulfillment center. It was either going to be in New Jersey or it was going to be in Staten Island, and it was either my folks who were going to have these jobs or some New Jersey residents. Long story short, Staten Island won. In September of 2017, the decision was announced, and Staten Island would get that warehouse.
It would be Amazon's first full-size fulfillment center in New York. A year later, it opened. Now, Amazon had one of its biggest warehouses just miles away from millions of customers. If you followed the fight over Amazon's plans to put a new headquarters in New York, you might be surprised by the welcome Amazon got on Staten Island. But again, for politicians like Jimmy Otto, it was all about the promise of jobs.
Still, I wondered a bit about that promise. A few months ago, an Amazon spokesperson at the warehouse told me that around 50% of the jobs were held by residents of Staten Island. Later, that same person told me it was more than 60%. And Otto says he was told a different story. I've heard higher than 70. I've never heard lower than 70. So I asked him if Amazon gave him any guarantees about what percentage of jobs would go to Staten Islanders.
I really don't have, as a borough president, a leverage to say if it goes below this number, you know, you have to close shop. Right. So, you know, we we we try to ensure a good number as best as we can by getting the word out and really making a concerted effort to get Staten Islanders interested. Amazon has a 15 year lease on Staten Island. If you remember, that's the same amount of time Amazon was in Coffeyville.
In a different era, a marriage of that length between an industry titan and a community would essentially be seen as the blink of an eye. But in Amazon years, with the pace that the company innovates, 15 years seems like an eternity. I mean, Amazon has a patent to develop warehouses in the sky, essentially blimps floating above cities. Who needs that now and if the future looks like that?
As for Jimmy Otto, I asked him how he might feel if Amazon actually leaves after only 15 years. - I wanna be in Sedona, Arizona.
Sipping cocktails looking at the vortex finished my meditation session years and years and years from now and I like to think that Amazon is still a main player in this huge hub on the west shore of Staten Island So I'm not gonna sign off on a 15 year deal 13 years might have been good for Bryce Harper, but 15 years not good for me I hope it goes on But who knows who knows what what Amazon's gonna be, you know a few years from now let alone 15 and
Well, we'll come back at some point after the honeymoon phase and see. Those sons of... Yeah, we'll talk again. Listen, you know, I try to be realistic. Let's have this conversation again and let's see where we are. Yeah. Visiting Staten Island and the empty warehouse in Coffeyville, Kansas feels a bit like a time warp. Trying to think of something funny. Yay!
Hello, Coffeeville. Coffeeville. It's a big building. Four years after Amazon left, Tricia Purden is still searching for someone to move into the warehouse. This summer, Walmart agreed to take over 35,000 square feet, only a small fraction of the facility.
But Purden hopes Walmart sees potential in this space. That is my job to be optimistic. But I think that we have a great opportunity here in Montgomery County. The building's still on a four-lane highway. That didn't change. It still has all these dock doors. It could handle anything and any type of industry possible. I still think that we just haven't found the right person yet that fits it. This is the Dollar General store in Chautauqua, Kansas.
It's about a 30-minute drive from Coffeyville. And this is where Juanita Kepner now works. She's the store manager here. Yeah, so by my doing the ordering and stuff at Amazon, you know, it's helped me here with the ordering and keeping track of inventory and making sure everything's where it's supposed to be.
When Amazon closed in Coffeyville, it did offer to help employees transfer to another Amazon facility. Kepner told me she had the option to go to Texas, for example. But she chose to stay. She wanted to remain close to her aging mother. They offered so much, you know, depending on where you wanted to go. But I was like, no, I can't go. I wish I could. I wanted to go so bad. I really did. Over the 16 years there,
You watched not only them grow their retail business bigger, but get into making their own movies, get into the AWS business. What were you thinking as you were watching this expansion of them from your vantage point? I thought it was great. And I'm thinking, all right, they're doing all this. We're going to be here forever. Yeah. And I thought maybe, you know, some of it would come to that town, you know, but...
Like I said, things happen and just had to go with the flow. Yeah, I was really hurt. Is there no other job like that anywhere around here? I have not found one. I really don't think it is. I haven't found it or heard of any. Is there any scenario where you could see yourself working for them again? What would the scenario have to be?
They would have to start me out basically what I was making when I left. No, that would be great. But I would go back. If they opened, like I said, if they opened them one back up in Coffeyville or somewhere close, I would go back. I would actually go back. Yeah. I mean, I like what I'm doing here, you know, but I would go back.
And still, Kepner's memories of that last day at the Amazon warehouse are vividly clear. Basically, once you hit that turnstile and went out the door, that was it. And I think that was really actually the day I actually cried. My last day there. But yeah, I just drove home and
On our next episode, why is Amazon building all these robots? And what does it mean for its workers?
If you're one of these workers in that environment, you're truly just going to be kind of a cog in the machine as a human being that is performing some task that right now the robots and the AI can't do. Rebecca Sananas is our show's producer. Allison McAdam is our editor. Brandon McFarlane is our engineer, and he composed our theme. Golda Arthur is the show's senior producer, and Art Chung is our showrunner.
Nishat Kerwa is the show's executive producer. I'm Jason Del Rey, and I'm back next week with a new episode. In the meantime, subscribe and listen on Apple Podcasts or on your favorite podcast app. And let us know what you think. Our email address is landofthegiants at voxmedia.com. You can also talk to us on Twitter. We're at Recode. Land of the Giants is a production of Recode and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Thank you.