Inside Sidney’s Amazon Warehouse

BY KEN WINCHESTER

If you live in Greater Victoria, your Amazon order passes through this sprawling 115,000-square-foot fulfilment centre in Sidney.

1,400-square-metre

An e-commerce boom turbocharged by the pandemic has turned Sidney into a shipping capital.

Wrapped in a 140-metre long and 10-metre tall mural depicting the mountains and waters of the Salish Sea, it’s hard to miss the massive Amazon delivery station codenamed DVV2 on McDonald Park Road near YYJ. If you live in Greater Victoria and have ordered a package from Amazon, it has passed through this “last mile” facility — one of 31 in Canada — that plays an essential role in Amazon’s supply chain.

All Amazon orders begin at fulfilment centres — gigantic warehouses that store thousands of goods. Once packaged, orders travel by truck and/or plane to sort centres, where employees route orders en masse to delivery stations based on postal code. At delivery stations, teams sort and load packages onto delivery trucks bound for peoples’ homes.

Depending on the time of year, 90 to 120 people work at the 115,000-square-foot Sidney facility. The delivery station also employs 160 to 300 drivers, and every day 80 to 110 of them deliver thousands of packages.

Amazon also operates an exchange point in Nanaimo — a small facility called XVV2, designed to increase the company’s delivery reach in rural Island communities. Here, pre-sorted packages arrive from the Sidney delivery station in big trucks. Employees load the packages onto smaller trucks for house-to-house deliveries. Essentially, it’s an extension of the Sidney delivery station.

When the exchange point opened in 2022, it was the first of its kind in North America.

“There’s another one in Toronto that recently opened, but we spearheaded this new model,” says Geoff Suter, operations manager at the Sidney facility.

Together, the Sidney and Nanaimo facilities send out 25,000 to 40,000 packages every day.