About three-quarters of the Peapod workers at its soon-to-be-closed distribution center in Gaithersburg will making the move to the larger new warehouse in Anne Arundel County, but as many as 90 others have decided to remain in the Gaithersburg area and they will be losing their jobs.
Peapod’s Gaithersburg warehouse near the Shady Grove Metro, which employs a total of 375, is scheduled to shut by the end of May, clearing the path for major new development by Montgomery County government offices which will include a new police headquarters and the Department of Liquor Control.
Elana Margolis, Chicago-based spokeswomen for Peapod, confirmed the job loss numbers in a telephone interview Friday afternoon, noting that they are higher than some earlier reports. “They based it on our WARN notice” which was requiredonly for 120 employees at the Peapod center, she noted. She said the actual head count at the Gaithersburg center is 375.
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Peapod, the fast-growing home delivery service, is a subsidiary of Giant Food.
Margolis said the company plans to hold a job fair Tuesday (April 26) for the roughly 90 workers at the existing facility who decided not to make the move to the center’s new warehouse in Anne Arundel.
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The new distribution center in Hanover, Md. covers 150,000 square feet and is “50 percent larger” than the Gaithersburg center, she said. It will enable Peapod to serve a much wider geographic area in the Baltimore-Washington region from its new base.
“We’re hiring more people over there now,” Margolis said. “We’re also going to be growing in the next year or so adding more jobs as we grow.”
The new county offices will be located on the Shady Grove Road site bordering also on the Interstate 370 off-ramp and Crabbs Branch Road.
Bethesda-based development firm Eakin-Youngentob Associates plans to submit preliminary plans foe the county-owned site by late summer, according to a report in the Washington Examiner (Peapod leaving MontCo to make way for major development).
That sector plan reportedly includes more than400 townhouses and 1,214 apartment units as well additional retail and office space. It’s envisioned as a mix of ‘moderately-priced’ housing units.
