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Say Goodbye to 30,000 Employees

The Wall Street Journal reports Amazon to Lay Off Up to 30,000 Corporate Workers

Amazon.com (AMZN) plans to lay off as many as 30,000 employees starting as early as Tuesday, according to people familiar with the matter, the latest cost-cutting move for the tech giant that is seeking to slim down and conserve cash.

The job cuts, which won’t all happen this week, would amount to roughly 10% of the online giant’s corporate workforce, the people said.

Thousands of corporate pink slips are expected to go out Tuesday, cutting across the organization and hitting human resources, cloud computing, advertising and a number of other business units, the people said. The total number of reductions hasn’t been finalized, one of the people said.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has sought to find ways for the company to do more with less. In June Jassy sent a note to employees that said increasing use of artificial intelligence will eliminate the need for certain jobs. He called generative AI a once-in-a-lifetime technological change that is already altering how Amazon deals with consumers and other businesses and how it conducts its own operations, including job cuts.

“​​As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done,” he said at the time. “It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce.”

JPMorgan Chase’s chief financial officer told investors recently that the bank now has a “very strong bias against having the reflective response” to hire more people. Aerospace and defense company RTX boasted last week that its sales rose even without adding employees.

Goldman Sachs sent a memo to staffers this month saying the firm “will constrain head count growth through the end of the year” and reduce roles that could be more efficient with AI. Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, has said it plans to keep its head count roughly flat over the next three years, even as its sales grow.

In a note to clients following the results, Bernstein said Amazon’s results raised “uncomfortable questions” about whether the company should be considered an “AI winner” or a laggard.

The company said its capital expenditures rose to $31.4 billion for the period, most of which went to AI and cloud-computing investments. At the time, Amazon said the figure was “reasonably representative” of its planned spending for the rest of the year.

Looking Ahead

If 30,000 people out of buying less and less (plus layoffs at Microsoft (MSFT), Goldman Sachs (GS) etc.), and no hiring by Walmart (WMT), where is consumer spending headed?

We also saw 100,000 government workers with expiring benefits in September. They were not working but were considered employed by the BLS because they got paid.

And tariffs will take a big toll on small businesses any time soon. I expect bankruptcies.

Finally, Trump is still threatening to fire government workers if Democrats do not end the shutdown.

So, who’s hiring?

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