With the holiday shopping season upon us, one would think that the world’s most powerful retailers would be gearing up for an action-packed season full of consumerism, delivery, and the other minutia of unfettered capitalism.
But, instead, we’re getting a scary little hiccup from Amazon.com, and it could be the harbinger of bad, bad things to come.
Amazon is planning to lay off approximately 10,000 employees in corporate and technology roles beginning this week, according to a report from The New York Times. Separately, The Wall Street Journal also cited a source saying the company plans to lay off thousands of employees.
Shares of Amazon were down about 2.5% on Monday.
The cuts would be the largest in the company’s history and would primarily impact Amazon’s devices organization, retail division and human resources, according to the report. The reported layoffs would represent less than 1% of Amazon’s global workforce and 3% of its corporate employees.
The tech sector has been an employment slaughterhouse of late.
The report follows headcount reductions at other tech firms. Meta announced last week that it’s laying off more than 13% of its staff, or more than 11,000 employees, and Twitter laid off approximately half its workforce in the days following Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of the company.
While these employees certainly aren’t impacting the daily retail work of the enormous and diverse corporation, the fact that the consumer-driven section of the company wasn’t stout enough to keep these staffers on-board through the holidays is telling.
