Amazon has plans to add thousands of companies to jobs in six cities, including 2,000 in a building on New York’s Fifth Avenue that was once the flagship Lord & Taylor store.
The company will add 3,500 jobs in New York, Phoenix, San Diego, Denver, Detroit and Dallas, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
The new tenants indicate that the online retail giant is planning a return for personal office work, also because other tech companies, such as Facebook and Twitter, are announcing long-term strategies remotely due to the coronavirus pandemic. Amazon advised employees to start working from home in March, ahead of several other major employers.
“The ability to connect with people, the ability for teams to work together on an ad hoc basis – you can do it purely, but it’s not so spontaneous,” Amazon Vice President of Workforce Development Ardine Williams told the Journal . “We look forward to returning to the office.”
The company plans to add more than 900,000 square feet of office space in the six locations, including 630,000 in New York alone, according to the newspaper. The expansion is set to take effect over the next two years, but several positions will now be filled, the company said.
Williams said all positions being added, including product management techniques and jobs, are new. They will also take up positions in various departments within Amazon, including Advertising, Amazon Fresh and Amazon Web Services.
The expansion is not tied to any local or state financial incentives, according to the Journal, which added that some of the incentives from Amazon’s deal with workgroup company WeWork to buy the Lord & Taylor building will be transferred.
Amid the economic devastation caused by the coronavirus pandemic on other brick-and-mortar retailers, Amazon added more than 175,000 warehouse workers and recorded a full-time $ 88.9 billion in sales for the second fiscal quarter.
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