Warehousing is an essential part of the global supply chain. Warehousing plays a critical role in the success of businesses across various sectors. It would be nice to know how many warehouses there are and how fast these numbers are growing.
Because of e-commerce, it is believed that the number of warehouses in the US is increasing quickly and that there are more but smaller warehouses. But without good baseline numbers, no one can say if that is true.
Here are some different sources and their very different numbers:
The first question is why the Department of Energy has these kinds of statistics. Why not the Department of Commerce? The Department of Commerce lists warehousing companies, but of course, most warehouses are not owned by third party logistics or public warehousing companies. Retailers, manufacturers, and distributors own more warehouses than 3PLs.
The US Energy Information Administration, within the DOE, does periodic surveys to understand the total energy consumption and consumption across different types of buildings. Their last survey was in 2018. The previous survey had been in 2012, and the compound annual growth rate in the number of warehouses over that time was 4.0%.
Then there is JLL. JLL (Jones Lang LaSalle Incorporated) is a global commercial real estate and investment management company that helps clients buy, build, occupy, manage, and invest in a variety of commercial properties, including warehousing. To engage in those activities, they do detailed research on commercial markets. According to JLL, the CAGR between 2010 and 2020 was 1.3%
Then there is Statista. Statista is a German online platform that specializes in data gathering and visualization. The CAGR numbers for Statista cover 2010 to 2021. I’m going to discard the Statista data because they don’t give an explanation of how they arrived at their numbers.
When you dig into the DOE’s numbers a bit more, you can see that they include public storage buildings in their numbers. Because I cover logistics, those warehouses are out of scope. If you eliminate them, you are left with approximately 725,000 warehouses. The DOE’s other categories include nonrefrigerated warehouses, distribution centers, and refrigerated warehouses. DCs and refrigerated warehouses make up 17% of total warehouses for a total of roughly 170,000 warehouses. With those eliminations, the JLL and DOE data starts to converge – there is only a difference of about 20,000 warehouses. Presumably, what they call “nonrefrigerated warehouses” make up a whole lot of small warehouses. Still, a small warehouse is still a warehouse. It does not make sense to eliminate them. So perhaps the best number for logistics warehouses is DOE’s 725,000. However, this is old data. Further, the DOE data does not allow one to look at the growth in the number of warehouses by category of warehouse, which makes CAGR numbers suspect. It also makes their total square footage and average square footage numbers dubious.
Of course, if you were trying to calculate the total addressable market for technologies like warehouse management systems or warehouse robots, you would not just want the number of buildings classified as warehouses. You would want the total number of warehouses. So, for example, if the back of a store is picking and packing ecommerce orders, that backroom is a warehouse. If a factory and a small warehouse are part of the same building, that manufacturing warehouse should also be counted in the total warehouse numbers. In short, we have no idea how many warehouses in the US there are. And the global numbers are even worse. Which is a real shame.
