![]() But it’s been a long time since Amazon has blown the public away with a new product or service. In the past, after all, Amazon leaders would bristle at the idea of Amazon being pigeonholed with labels such as “retailer” to them, Amazon has always been an innovation company with inventions like the Kindle e-reader, Amazon Prime, Amazon Web Services, and Alexa as proof. They also are questioning what the future of Amazon will be: Will it learn how to innovate again and continue to delight customers, or will it slide into maintenance mode? Some workers told Recode in November that they were questioning whether they wanted to stay at the company even if they weren’t axed. The prolonged layoff cycle caused panic and low morale inside the divisions of Amazon corporate targeted in the cuts. But by mid-January, it only had fewer than 300. To put the abruptness of these changes in context: As recently as June 2022, Amazon’s career site had listed more than 30,000 job openings - that’s not a misprint - in software development positions alone. ![]() And at the start of 2023, Jassy clarified that employee cuts would go even deeper: More than 18,000 roles would be axed - around 5 percent of the company’s corporate staff, but by far the largest total number of job cuts in its history. In the fall, the company also began rescinding some job offers, sometimes just a couple of weeks from would-be employees’ scheduled start dates. Then came a news report in November, saying Amazon would soon lay off more than 10,000 corporate employees - a shocking number for a company that hadn’t had any corporate layoffs of more than 1,000 people since 2001. The shops were not expensive to operate compared to the company’s high-tech convenience stores called Amazon Go, but they never created enough differentiation from competitor shops to justify their existence. The first significant cuts came to Amazon’s brick-and-mortar retail business in March 2022, when the company announced it would shut down dozens of bookstores across the US and UK, as well as a handful of stores called 4-Star that sold an array of best-selling merchandise from Amazon’s online store. And in 2023, the company and its employees will need to adapt to this new reality.Įven before Amazon’s stock began falling in April 2022 when the company revealed it had overexpanded and overstaffed its retail warehouse network, Jassy had started his new role as CEO in 2021 “ laser-focused on profits” and with a plan to kick off in-depth profitability reviews. Andy Jassy, Chief Cost-Cutterįor Amazon and its employees, 2022 served as a harsh wake-up call. The eventual answers to these questions matter not only to the millions of people across the globe who work for Amazon and its many partners in varied industries, but also to the hundreds of millions who rely every day on the company’s shopping, delivery, entertainment, and cloud computing servicesĪre you a current or former Amazon employee with thoughts or tips on this topic? Please email Jason Del Rey at or His phone number and Signal number are available upon request by email. ![]() The stakes of Amazon’s battle for its future are high - and it’s fighting at least partly against itself. Only adding to the uncertainty are open questions about whether current Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, Bezos’s hand-picked successor, can lead the company through these trials without abandoning an internal culture that led to breakthrough innovations like Amazon Prime and Amazon Web Services that helped make the company successful in the first place. “That’s what we are all asking ourselves,” a former Amazon marketing leader, who left the company in 2021, told Recode. The past two months have been a strange, even frightening, time inside the company, current and former employees told Recode: Amazon announced unprecedented layoffs of more than 18,000 corporate employees and began culling areas of the business, like its Alexa voice assistant division, that Bezos had long championed.Īs Amazon faces one of the most crucial crossroads in its nearly 29-year history, it’s dogged by a pressing question: Are the recent layoffs and cost cuts simply the sign of a company entering a new, unavoidable phase of maturity, or are they a warning flare that Amazon has plateaued and will soon start experiencing an eventual and irreversible decline? Even a pandemic couldn’t slow it down: In fact, in early 2021, the tech and retail giant reported its largest quarterly profit ever.īut a lot can change in just two years: Since then, founder Jeff Bezos stepped down and named a new CEO, the online shopping boom slowed, and Amazon had to dig itself out of a costly and overly aggressive warehouse and staffing expansion. ![]() For years, it seemed as though nothing could stop Amazon’s explosive growth and success.
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