See inside Amazon’s 2-day Tri-Cities deliveries. Are groceries, same-day service next?
Amazon Inc.’s $25 million delivery station in Pasco brought two-day deliveries to Tri-City customers when it opened eight weeks ago.
The investment in faster service is good news for impatient shoppers. It’s also potentially a harbinger of additional services from the Seattle e-commerce giant. Think same-day deliveries and even groceries.
Amazon began processing packages at the delivery station in mid-December. On Feb. 10, two months in, it dedicated it with a ribbon cutting ceremony and VIP tours.
Officials didn’t confirm additional plans for Pasco. They did, however, stress that Amazon is a data-driven company with the goal of delivering the same services to all customers regardless of where they live. That in theory includes both grocery deliveries and same-day ordering.
Customers in Seattle, Portland and other urban centers enjoy the luxury of running out of dog food in the morning and having fresh supplies on their doorsteps by the end of the day.
For now, Mid-Columbia customers can only dream of that level of service.
“Amazon follows the data,” said Erik Rocha, leader for the delivery station, speaking to visitors during the official grand opening of the 87,000-square-foot delivery facility at 5802 N. Capitol Ave., north of the King City Truck Stop.
Tri-Cities deliveries lagged
Rocha said her own experience with Amazon deliveries showed why the station was needed. Last August, she relocated to the Tri-Cities from Portland to lead the new station and its 200 employees, plus drivers.
In Portland, her personal Amazon orders arrived in a day. In Pasco, the same deliveries took four days. Rocha recalled being “horrified.”
“Our customers are here and they weren’t getting two-day delivery. Now they are,” she said. “That’s why we’re here.”
The new station is set up to handle about 30,000 packages a day and 45,000 during peak holiday and Amazon Prime shopping seasons.
By the time officials cut the ribbon, the Pasco team had delivered more than 1 million packages to customers within a 50-mile radius, with extensions to Moses Lake, Walla Walla and northeastern Oregon.
Rocha said there’s no pattern in Tri-Cities online orders.
“Anything and everything,” she said. Robotic vacuums, self-cleaning cat boxes, card games, toilet paper and far more pass through the facility.
Once customers submit orders to Amazon, the order is packaged up at centers called fulfillment centers. For Tri-Cities customers, that happens in Portland.
Semi trucks carrying customer-bound packages arrive in Pasco between 2 and 6 a.m. each morning. They’re fed onto a conveyor belt and sorted by Amazon associates into batches assigned to trucks for deliveries.
The merch spends no more than 6 hours in the Pasco station before being loaded onto gleaming white vans for delivery.
The 150 or so delivery drivers work for third party vendors. Individual drivers using their own vehicles round out the delivery fleet.
While Amazon officials didn’t reveal potential next steps to improve deliveries in the Tri-Cities, it’s clear the company not done investing in infrastructure here. Notably, it built three warehouses in Pasco but opened only two so far.
That leaves a vacant 1.1 million-square-foot fulfillment center on South Road 40 East, across the street from the package hub it activated in mid-2024.
While no plans have been released for the empty fulfillment center, it wasn’t built to sit unused.
Amazon in the Tri-Cities
Amazon first made a splash in Pasco in 2021, when it first identified Pasco as a site for two fulfillment centers, each with more than one million square feet.
The two buildings were built across from one another near Sacajawea State Park. The promise of two fulfillment centers and thousands of jobs stalled amid a larger move by Amazon to reconsider its logistics system.
Eventually, it reinvented one of the two buildings, the easternmost warehouse it still calls “Project Oyster.” It spent $10 million to refashion it into a warehouse that receives merchandise from manufacturers and sorts it for fulfillment centers.
It opened in June with 1,800 to 2,000 employees.
Amazon made an investment of a different sort in October.
That’s when it announced it would join Energy Northwest in Richland to develop new nuclear power generation in Washington state.
Specifically, it signed an agreement to pay for the initial feasibility phase for a small modular reactor project near Columbia Generating Station. The Northwest’s only commercial nuclear power plant is 10 miles north of Richland.
In exchange, Amazon retained the right to purchase power from the first four modules to support Amazon Web Services, its data center and internet service arm.
This story was originally published February 10, 2025 at 5:09 PM.