After Twitter and Meta Trimmed Jobs Amazon also Plans to Lay Off 10,000 Employees : Report

Amazon plans to lay off 10,000 people in the coming days, adding to the bloodbath being witness in the technology world after Twitter and Facebook parent Meta significantly trim their workforces.

The New York Times said in a report that Amazon plans to lay off approximately 10,000 people in “corporate and technology jobs starting as soon as this week.”

While the New York Times said in its report that the total number of layoffs remains “fluid”, the 10,000 people who could be let go represent roughly three percent of Amazon’s corporate employees and less than one percent of its global workforce of more than 1.5 million compose primarily of hourly workers.

As per Reports :

Amazon’s layoffs come just weeks after Twitter’s new owner billionaire Elon Musk reduce the social media’s workforce by half and Meta announce it will lay off 13% of its workforce or 11,000 employees.

The report of impending layoffs at Amazon also comes on the day its founder Jeff Bezos told CNN he plans to give away the majority of his $124 billion (approx. Rs. 10,04,100 crore) net worth to charity within his lifetime.

The New York Times report said that Amazon’s “plan retrenchment during the critical holiday shopping season, when the company typically has value stability shows how quickly the souring global economy has put pressure on it to trim businesses that have overstaffed or underdelivering for years.

After experiencing its “most profitable era on record” during the COVID-19 pandemic years, which saw exponential growth in online consumer spending,

“Amazon’s growth slowed to the lowest rate in two decades, as the bullwhip of the pandemic snapped.”

The report said that during the pandemic years, as consumers flock to online shopping and companies to Amazon’s cloud computing services, the tech giant double its workforce in two years, and channel its winnings into “expansion and experimentation to find the next big things.”

As the world recover from the pandemic and consumers scale back on online shopping,

Amazon face “high costs from decisions to overinvest and rapidly expand, while changes in shopping habits and high inflation dented sales.”

Amazon’s retail business covering its physical and online retail business and its logistics operations has been “under strain” after the surge of demand and “breakneck expansion” during the pandemic, New York Times said.

Amazon has said it has pull back expansion plans and has told investors it sees uncertainty with consumers.

The New York Times report adds that in recent months, Amazon has shut down or pare back many of its initiatives, including Amazon Care, which provide primary and urgent health care after it fail to find enough customers; Scout, the cooler-size home delivery robot, that employed 400 people and Fabric.com, a subsidiary that sold sewing supplies for three decades.

For Amazon, Devices and Alexa have long seen internally as at risk for cuts.

The New York Times report said Alexa and related devices “rocketed to a top company priority as Amazon raced to create the leading voice assistant, which leaders thought could succeed mobile phones as the next essential consumer interface.”

From 2017 to 2018, Amazon double its staff on Alexa and Echo devices to 10,000 engineers.

“At one point, any engineer getting a job offer for other Amazon roles was suppose to also get an offer from Alexa,” New York Times said.