150 new jobs in Grand Forks expected as a result
Grand Forks, North Dakota-November 11, 1999-Leading online retailer Amazon.com (www.amazon.com) announced today that it will expand its customer service center, acquired from Tool Crib of the North, in Grand Forks, North Dakota. The expansion will add 150 new employees to the company's Grand Forks facility.
"We are thrilled to call Grand Forks home and look forward to adding 150 great people to the Amazon.com family as we strive to provide our customers with the best customer service on earth," said Joe Galli, Amazon.com president and COO. "Our customer service representatives are our main point of contact with customers. So we're looking for bright, energetic, talented folks who are passionate about delivering our customers the best shopping experience and who share our vision to help customers find, discover, and buy anything online."
The expanding Grand Forks customer service center will ensure that the growing number of Amazon.com customers continue to receive swift and efficient customer service throughout the 1999 holiday shopping season and beyond.
The acquisition of Tool Crib helped create Amazon.com Home Improvement, which features Earth's Biggest Selection of tools and equipment. The Home Improvement Store also offers a large and growing selection of popular and hard-to-find home-improvement products and brands.
The company currently operates customer service centers in Seattle and Tacoma, Washington. The Grand Forks facility is the third Amazon.com customer service center in the U.S. and is expected to be fully operational in time for the 1999 holiday shopping season.
Amazon.com expects to fill these customer service positions with full-time employees and will also hire a limited number of full-time employees for positions ranging from catalog sales representatives to warehousing staff. All full-time Amazon.com positions come with salary, benefits packages, and stock options.
Grand Forks Open House
Amazon.com will have recruiters at the company's customer service center at 1550 S. 48th Street in Grand Forks for an open house on Saturday, November 13, and Sunday, November 14, to receive applications. The hours of the open house are as follows: Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 12 to 5 p.m. The company is accepting résumés and will be conducting onsite interviews for customer service positions and a limited number of other positions ranging from catalog sales representatives to warehousing staff.
About Amazon.com, Inc.
Amazon.com (Amazon.com, Inc. and its subsidiaries) is the Internet's No. 1 music, No. 1 video, and No. 1 book retailer. Amazon.com opened its virtual doors on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest Selection with online auctions, toys, electronics, and free electronic greeting cards. Amazon.com lists more than 18 million unique items in categories including books, CDs, toys, electronics, videos, DVDs, and computer games. Through Amazon.com zShops, any business or individual can sell virtually anything to Amazon.com's more than 13 million customers, and with Amazon.com Payments, any seller can accept credit-card transactions, avoiding the hassles of offline payments.
Amazon.com seeks to be the world's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they may want to buy online. Amazon.com's All Product Search scours the Web to help customers find merchandise that is not available at Amazon.com, Amazon.com Auctions, or Amazon.com zShops, making Amazon.com the shopping destination to find anything.
Amazon.com operates two international Web sites: www.amazon.co.uk in the United Kingdom and www.amazon.de in Germany. Amazon.com also operates PlanetAll (www.planetall.com), a Web-based address book, calendar, and reminder service. It also operates the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com), the Web's comprehensive and authoritative source of information on more than 150,000 movies and entertainment programs and 500,000 cast and crew members dating from the birth of film in 1892 to the present. Amazon.com also operates Amazon.com LiveBid Auctions (http://livebid.amazon.com), the leading provider of live-event auctions on the Internet.
Amazon.com has invested in leading Internet retailers that are improving the lives of customers by making shopping easier and more convenient: drugstore.com, an online retail and information source for health, beauty, wellness, personal care and pharmacy, at www.drugstore.com; Pets.com, the online leader for pet products, expert information, and services, at www.pets.com; HomeGrocer.com, the first fully integrated Internet grocery-shopping and home-delivery service, with operations in Seattle, Portland, Oregon, and Southern California, at www.homegrocer.com; and Gear.com, which offers brand-name sporting goods at prices from 20 to 90 percent off retail, at www.gear.com. Amazon.com also has a minority interest in Della & James, the leading online wedding-gift registry, at www.dellajames.com.
This announcement contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others, Amazon.com's limited operating history, anticipated losses, unpredictability of future revenues, potential fluctuations in quarterly operating results, seasonality, consumer trends, competition, risks of system interruption, management of potential growth, risks related to auction services, and risks of new business areas, international expansion, business combinations, and strategic alliances. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com's financial results is included in Amazon.com's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 1998 and Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q for the quarters ended March 31, 1999 and June 30, 1999.