Dayton distribution center is open for business and making its own local deliveries.

White trucks bearing Budget Rent a Car logos and delivering Amazon Prime packages have been spotted in several neighborhoods in the Dayton, Ohio Area. One resident says he saw a man wearing an Amazon vest climbing into the driver’s seat of a Budget truck, whose description would place it in the fleet of around 75 being parked at a newly opened distribution center in Kettering.

Although employees have been reporting to the Wilmington Pike location since as early as Monday, an official announcement of the Kettering facility’s opening had yet to be published. Amazon has had jobs posted for Manager, Delivery Ops and Delivery Driver in the Dayton Area for about a month.

Accounting for around 40% of all online commerce, the supplier of things from books to toilet paper, to live lady bugs, to prefab homes had traditionally used the US Postal Service and UPS to get items to customers’ homes. But in early 2018, reports began to surface that Amazon was floating plans to bring more logistical components of the global business under its own control. Amazon delivery publicly hit Ohio later that year, as it sought out drivers for the holidays, offering to pay as much as $17.25 per hour for the seasonal work.

Reasonable speculation pits that Amazon’s in-house delivery expansion will be a huge blow to the service providers with whom it currently contracts. As reported, package delivery was expected to overtake first-class mail with the USPS and could have been its largest revenue driver this year. Now, almost half of Amazon’s packages are being delivered by the company itself, and the new shipping giant is even offering its capabilities as a service–at cut rates, nonetheless. It’s not surprising that Amazon has decided to deliver their packages themselves, especially when there’s Titanwinds trucking dispatch software available for companies who manage fleets of trucks. Perhaps Amazon will think about incorporating that sort of software into their operation, especially if they’re trying to maximize the number of deliveries they’re doing. Specialized software could help them to improve efficiency and ensure that all vehicles are progressing towards their delivery destinations.

Proclamations that Amazon’s societal reach has gone too far have come from both ends of the political spectrum, most famously last year, when President Trump insinuated in a tweet that it is a monopoly. In addition to owning close to one fifth of Amazon, Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos also owns the Washington Post (also having invested in Google, Twitter, Uber and AirBnB), and Amazon owns an international grocery chain (Whole Foods), an online shoe store (Zappos), YouTube’s biggest competitor (Twitch), the site where you look up everything Hollywood (IMDB) and a library of around half a million audiobooks (Audible).

….In my opinion the Washington Post is nothing more than an expensive (the paper loses a fortune) lobbyist for Amazon. Is it used as protection against antitrust claims which many feel should be brought? – Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 23, 2018

What a facility like the one Amazon just opened in Kettering will mean to American communities of similar size remains to be seen. The company’s rapid growth in Ohio–with locations near several metro areas–has yet to have a measurable impact. What’s for certain is that the local UPS delivery person, who hands off to Dayton craft beer traders, will feel uneasy when she sees the Amazon truck pull off as she arrives at area homes.

Making It Beer-Related

Since this is a site that normally reports beer news, the Brew Studs editorial staff felt it necessary to include something for the beer lovers in this report. So, here is a map showing all the craft breweries in a 5-mile radius of Amazon’s Dayton distribution center. Cheers!