Amazon’s US Retail Footprint in 2024
National Inbound Cross-Docks are the big story, but there's other interesting parts of Amazon's expansion in 2024
Amazon expanded its distributional retail footprint massively during the Covid-19 pandemic, so much so that it’s difficult to divine a strategy behind their thinking in doing so other than: faster and more. They’ve now settled into more “normal” times, though their expansion continues to astound; massive changes for most companies are quite routine at Amazon. Still, with less of a panicked expansion, it’s possible to now see particular intentions behind Amazon’s growth.
To get a sense of what they did during 2024, I compared MWPVL’s Q1 2024 and Q1 2025 snapshots and tallied up numbers by facility type. Here’s what I found:
Amazon added about 35 million square feet of warehouse space to their distributional network in 2024, ~23 million of which was in the creation of their national inbound network, which I cover here. That is the big story of 2024: the creation of new, larger Inbound Cross-Docks that can be used as storage tanks for goods. These new facilities are intended to be much more like Walmart Import Distribution Centers than traditional Amazon Inbound Cross-Docks, though from the little I’ve seen on Reddit, their functions thus far have not been so different from those traditional IXDs. But in theory, they are intended to a) facilitate Supply Chain by Amazon, their play as an end-to-end logistics company, and b) aid in the regionalization effort.
This is the major development in Amazon’s footprint, but there are some other notable developments here too. First, half of the expansion in their fulfillment network was in SubSameDay Fulfillment Centers, which also serve as Amazon Fresh Hubs and Delivery Stations. These are generally smaller operations that contain a limited number of SKUs that are known to be in high demand in a particular market. Thanks to its point-of-sale data and sophisticated predictive algorithms, Amazon has a pretty good idea of how many high-demand items need to be where and when. So it keeps these items in small warehouses in urban settings, eliminating the need for much transportation and allowing for the merging of functions traditionally kept separate (i.e., fulfillment and delivery). This might be understood as a kind of micro-regionalization effort: just as regionalization at the national level allows them to cut down on the distance a package travels, and especially to cut down on any time traveled on a plane, the expansion of SubSameDay FCs/DSs keeps high-demand items stored in the exact markets where they need to be.
The other development worth noting here is in the expansion of “Rural Wagon Wheel” Delivery Stations. Amazon has traditionally grown around population centers, leaving rural deliveries to UPS or USPS. It’s not overwhelmingly clear to me why Amazon would want to build out its rural coverage, as it goes against their whole growth strategy. Maybe they’re at the point where they’re just so good at what they do that they can take on a project just because. Maybe they’ve run the numbers and think rural Delivery Stations are so cheap that it makes sense in the long run to use them instead of USPS.
But maybe they need the coverage for Amazon Shipping to really take off. If you look at the spoke networks of parcel companies like UPS or Fedex, they really have facilities everywhere because they need to be able to deliver everywhere. Amazon’s delivery spoke network has traditionally looked concentrated around urban areas, with large coverage gaps in more rural areas. If they’re really going to compete on the parcel front, which is what Amazon Shipping is about, their spoke facility coverage must be more dispersed.