Nov. 28, 2022

When Tim Choate left the Marine Corps in 2010, he was going to school in Southern California and working odd jobs in a recession-era economy when a newspaper ad changed his career path.

“They were hiring for the first Amazon facility in California, so I just signed on,” said Choate, who started “at the very bottom end of the totem pole.”

His job was to stow items into shelves so they could be picked and placed in orders.

When Amazon launched its second site in California, he was promoted to an entry-level manager.

Multiple moves later, he’s now the general manager of the newly opened Sioux Falls Amazon fulfillment center, located at Foundation Park in northwest Sioux Falls.

Tim Choate, center, is the general manager of the new Sioux Falls Amazon fulfillment center.

He moved from Utah in September, and he and his wife, Heather, just bought their first house here.

“We went out to the Black Hills, and … we loved South Dakota and then saw an opportunity to come out here, and I jumped at it,” he said. “I really enjoy the community. It’s a smaller-town feel, which is great, but it’s got everything you need, and it’s really close-knit.”

He and assistant site lead Vincent Gardner are an established team. Gardner began his career going to college to work in supply chain when an internship helped him realize the industry wasn’t for him.

Vincent Gardner, left, is the assistant site lead in Sioux Falls.

While in Texas, he applied for a job at Amazon and was hired in 2016 to help launch the company’s first robotic facility in Seattle.

“Growing up, I always wanted to be a robotics engineer,” he said. “But I fell in love with business, as a whole, my entire college life … and when I got here, I got to literally have a supply chain mindset and do it every day.”

The job essentially allowed him to combine both passions and grow his career. From Seattle, he moved to Salt Lake City to open another Amazon robotics site and met Choate, who was managing a different area of the operation.

“When Tim came to me, I’d just gotten married, and he said he was hesitant (to ask) but said, ‘How would you like to help me launch Sioux Falls?’”

He moved in September, and his wife, Alexis, isn’t far behind.

“I’m in love,” Gardner said. “I’m not a big-city person. I love rolling hills. I’m not a mountain person. So it’s phenomenal. I truly do like it.”

Ramping up

The Sioux Falls fulfillment center, known as FSD1, is processing only a fraction of what ultimately will roll through the 3-million-square-foot facility.

Hiring will be critical to making it all work too. There were 12 people in the first onboarding class, which now has grown to a team of 300.

“But we’re looking to get to 1,000” Choate said. “And we have our maintenance team working on conveyors, and they’re looking for folks as well – those are higher-paid, higher-skilled jobs.”

At a management level, the new fulfillment center is attracting leaders from Amazon nationwide as well as local talent, Choate said.

“We have folks coming from Arizona, Arkansas, California, all within Amazon,” he said. “Externally, we like to hire locally. We have six or seven recent USD and SDSU grads coming in that will start with us and a couple industry hires coming from outside companies, so it’s a good, diverse cast.”

Construction is still happening on the upper levels of the center, while the second floor is filled with racks of everything from coffee to cat food, a massive mix of merchandise all 18 inches or smaller.

“We’re only 17 percent (stocked),” Choate said, while adding that a month ago it was 3 percent.

“It’s a steady build until we’re fully operational. Ideally, we’re up and running by the end of January.”

The goal is to address underserviced areas through the fulfillment center from Minnesota, Iowa and the Dakotas all the way west to Montana.

“I blew my mind when I got here and it didn’t have next-day shipping, and we’re 100 percent here to solve that,” Choate said. “They chose Sioux Falls to support that.”

There’s also more robotic assistance on the way to support the operation. While robots already transport racks around the warehouse, new ones — including Amazon’s recently announced Sparrow — are expected to arrive in Sioux Falls early next year.

The robotic arm Sparrow “is the first robotic system in our warehouses that can detect, select and handle individual products in our inventory,” Amazon said in announcing it recently.

Here’s how it looks in action:

The Sioux Falls fulfillment center is one of 400 worldwide.

“Our max capacity should be in the neighborhood of 3 million units a week, and that’s all sizes from a pen to an Instant Pot, so tens of millions of different types of items will station here and be given out to our delivery,” Choate said.

Life at the delivery center is “managed chaos,” he added, especially during the holiday season.

“We’ll have extra folks come in and run a bunch of fun activities for our associates. We like them to have a good time. So we’ll have free food, banners, games we play like ‘a minute to win it,’ and we’re really looking forward to our holiday meal.”

The mad rush until Christmas “is one of the greatest things ever,” Gardner added. “You have the preseason, which is our entire year, and then it is playoff time, and it is exhilarating.”

From grocery manager to last-mile delivery leader

One year ago, Nic Hoch was running the Hy-Vee store at 10th Street and Kiwanis Avenue.

Today, he leads the place that serve as the final link between Amazon deliveries and their destinations: the so-called last-mile delivery center in northeast Sioux Falls.

“It’s kind of a dream job for me,” said Hoch, who leads a team of 15 full-time managers and more than 200 part-time associates.

“Literally, my job every day is to come in and make the day the best I can for my associates and other managers. How can I pave the road to make it as smooth for them as possible? There’s so much support on virtual … that you might have to do yourself in other industry, so much support at Amazon.”

This is the last stop for packages leaving the larger fulfillment centers and ready to be delivered.

While the building off 60th Street North just west of Cliff Avenue operates 24/7, the majority of the activity happens between 10 p.m. and 10:45 a.m.

“For the majority of that time, we’re literally sorting packages, and the last couple hours of that, we’re loading into Falls Delivery vans,” Hoch said.

Starting around noon, the drivers hit the road – both the third-party Falls Delivery service and the flex vehicles driven by independent contractors who also drive for other services. The center delivers an average of 25,000 packages a day within a radius of about two hours.

“This is a high-performing station. It does well and gets packages to people on time,” Hoch said. “When this first launched, every single leader came from outside Amazon, which is pretty neat. They invested the time to train people from outside.”

Some, like him, are from the retail industry. Others came from restaurant leadership.

“One of our managers was running a hotel,” Hoch said. “One of them that just went over to (the fulfillment center) was a service manager in auto, so any industry you can think of where there are elements of people leadership, Amazon taps into.”

As holiday shopping accelerates, Hoch said his team is prepared for it. Amazon Prime Day earlier this fall gave a weeklong preview of what to expect, and they’ve hired and trained for this peak season.

“We’ve had good success the last month hiring, so we’re completely prepared for what we’d consider our Super Bowl season,” he said. “This is our time to shine.”