Kendra Vipperman and Cara Lanier used to work together at Dollar General. But in the past few weeks they both took jobs assembling and staging packages at the new Amazon shipping facility in Redmond.
They were drawn by better pay and benefits, and the ability to choose their own shifts, they said. That’s especially helpful for Vipperman, who has four kids, including one who has special needs.
“It’s nice to have a lot of jobs available,” Vipperman told the Source on Tuesday, with a corporate public relations person from Amazon hovering during the interview. “It’s been a while.”
The tech and online shopping giant’s new Redmond delivery hub — the company’s first in Oregon east of the Cascade Mountains — has been hiring new package handlers each week since it opened in July, and it isn’t slowing down, facility manager Will Pond said during a tour with media and elected officials Tuesday morning. During a ribbon-cutting ceremony, City leaders, economic development officials and company representatives touted the jobs, economic impact and faster shipping times for the region.
The hiring spree is meant to keep up with screaming demand. Going into the holiday season, Pond said he expects to be sending upward of 300,000 packages a week out of the Redmond facility.
“Our initial projections for customer demand have been exceeded in every sense of the word here these last few months,” Pond said.
Last year, company announcements said the facility was expected to create 170 jobs.
“I was told they’re already at 300 jobs this morning,” Redmond Economic Development Inc. Director Steve Curley said in an address at a ribbon-cutting ceremony Tuesday. “Those numbers represent opportunity for people, families and businesses here in Central Oregon.”
The jobs start at $23.25 an hour, according to the economic development agency. The average wage for the Bend-Redmond area is $33.30, according to May 2025 statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Curley said the facility represents $25 million in private investment. According to Curley, Amazon was eligible to receive property tax incentives for locating in Redmond, but declined to take them.
The 80,000-square-foot warehouse is located in an industrial park off of Antler Avenue east of U.S. Highway 97. Inside, workers pack online orders into boxes and load them into delivery vans.
The facility is unique, Pond explained, because it functions as both a fulfillment center, where packages are assembled, and a distribution center, which ships packages. The center has drastically slashed delivery times for people in Central Oregon, Pond said.
About 90% of orders are “everyday essentials” like toilet paper, soap, diapers and paper towels, Pond said.
“Let’s say you’re at home, you need an everyday essential,” Pond said. “It’s 8pm at night — ‘hey I need some toilet paper, I need diapers.’ We can order that and have it at your house by 4 am the next day.”
It’s relatively small compared to some other Amazon facilities, which sometimes span millions of square feet. Recently, the company has sought to build more smaller warehouses near smaller cities as it expands reach into rural parts of the state.
In some places, like Eugene, projects have been met with fierce pushback and concerns over traffic, environmental impacts and Amazon’s business practices, according to reporting from The Oregonian. There hasn’t been the same type of local pushback in Redmond.
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