Fulfillment Center Warehouse Jobs Give New Life to Sleepy Towns

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"We've typically had kind of a boring downtown [in Tracy, CA], and in the last few years it's started to pick up," he told NBC News. "People are in town more. They're not commuting three hours a day after working an eight- or 10-hour day. They're actually here and have the energy to go out and eat."

"We've seen a lot of [people in their] early 20s who are just getting started, getting their first jobs in distribution, fulfillment -- and then a lot of families, which are more the management side of things; and then the construction that goes into it."

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[Such jobs created] stands somewhat in contrast to predictions about the death of retail and continued erosion of jobs by technology. By one estimate, the e-commerce industry in the past 10 years has created 397,000 U.S. jobs in the U.S., compared to 76,000 retail jobs lost, wrote Michael Mandel, chief economic strategist at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington, in a new report. And the new jobs pay about 30 percent more, he said.

Mandel also argues that more jobs are being created as some of the "unpaid labor" that shoppers used to do schlepping products from the mall to their homes is being redistributed into e-commerce.