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Amazon now employs more people than FedEx, UPS, or the United States Postal Service, according to Rakuten. Amazons headcount now tops 648,000, growing its work force by 5.5 times since 2013.

Armstrong & Associates pointed out in its yearly 3PL report that if Amazon was considered a third-party logistics provider and we think it should be it would have the second-largest warehousing operation in the world after DHL Supply Chain and Global Forwarding. Amazon manages about 233 million square feet of warehouse space, more than XPO (190 million) and less than DHL (248 million).

Amazon freight flows through that logistics infrastructure network which now totals more than 390 structures, according to Rakuten on 50 planes, 300 trucking power units, and 20,000 Sprinter vans. Thousands of Amazon trailers, now a common sight on U.S. interstate highways, are being hauled by Amazons contracted carriers, many of them sourced through Amazons digital freight brokerage platform.

Several American transportation companies have been caught off guard by the explosive growth of Amazons logistics capabilities. XPO Logistics guided revenue down when Amazon pulled hundreds of millions of dollars worth of postal injection business from the less-than-truckload carrier. FedEx, which had considered Amazon a valuable customer just a year ago, publicly broke up with the e-commerce retailer earlier this month, saying that its Express division its largest business unit consisting of air cargo and next-day delivery would no longer do business with Amazon.

FreightWaves proprietary research group, Freight Intel, has published an in-depth study of Amazons impact on the transportation and logistics sector, research that is now live on the FreightWaves SONAR platform. One of the findings from that study suggested that trucking carriers perceived Amazons entry into freight brokerage more negatively than they perhaps should, while shippers were not taking the threat seriously. The theory was that Amazon would have to pay carriers something close to market rates to ensure that capacity showed up, while any shipper using Amazons logistics services would be foolish to give up control of its supply chain data and freight to one of its most ruthless competitors.

However, recent reporting by Business Insider has confirmed that indeed, Amazon is paying trucking carriers below-market rates and that drivers who are happy to order personal goods from the e-commerce company are unwilling to haul freight for it.

Even as Amazon has gradually raised rates on its Prime subscriptions by 50%, from about $80 to $120, its operations have gotten sloppiers as it has scaled. According to Rakuten, in 2017, about 5% of items arrived late, while in 2019, that number had tripled to 15%.

Amazon Primes performance has been more or less efficient over the years as Amazon uses it as a high-pressure laboratory to understand and work through the bottlenecks in its network.

According to one ex-Amazon executive who corresponded with FreightWaves, Amazons in-sourcing of its logistics capabilities was initially driven by fear. Amazon did not want transportation capacity to constrain its growth, and feared its lack of control over a fragmented, volatile industry.

Amazon entered transportation to survive, is now disrupting the industry by disintermediating its previous transportation providers, and has already begun monetizing the network built up, leveraging a stealth-mode digital brokerage platform to generate revenue by filling backhauls and repositioning its trailers.

Thats the true Amazon flywheel: disintermediate to survive; monetize to fund innovation; innovate to grow; disintermediate to survive, the executive wrote to FreightWaves.