A bad week for Amazon

The lion's share of financial news coverage this week was about Twitter and FTX, but very quietly Amazon was taking brutal body blows.

Amazon plans to lay off approximately 10,000 people in corporate and technology jobs starting as soon as this week, people with knowledge of the matter said, in what would be the largest job cuts in the company’s history.

The cuts will focus on Amazon’s devices organization, including the voice assistant Alexa, as well as at its retail division and in human resources, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The number of layoffs remains fluid and is likely to roll out team by team rather than all at once as each business finishes plans, one person said. But if it stays around 10,000, it would represent roughly 3 percent of Amazon’s corporate employees and less than 1 percent of its global work force of more than 1.5 million, which is primarily composed of hourly workers.

This constitutes the general bad news. The worst of the specific bad news mostly comes from Europe.

(Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) is facing a lawsuit in Britain for damages of up to 900 million pounds ($1 billion) over allegations the online marketplace abused its dominant position by favouring its own products, lawyers said.

I don't think that there is any question that Amazon favors it's own products, so they will lose this case. Things on the continent continue to be bad for Amazon.

(Reuters) - Germany's antitrust watchdog said on Monday it had expanded two probes into U.S. e-commerce giant Amazon.com (AMZN.O) making use of new regulation allowing it to prohibit any anti-competitive behaviour at an earlier stage.

"We are examining in both proceedings whether and how Amazon impedes the business opportunities of sellers that are active on the Amazon marketplace and compete with Amazon’s own retail business," Federal Cartel Office President Andreas Mundt said in a statement.

So Amazon will lose this one too.
Meanwhile back in the States, Amazon workers in San Bernardino walked off the job. They demanded better treatment and pay. (note: I find it curious how often Amazon workers will wildcat strike, but how rarely a majority will vote to join the union.)
Another Inland Empire Amazon warehouse, in Moreno Valley, became the first Amazon warehouse in California to file for a union election.

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shaharazade's picture

Cant say I'm sorry that Amazon is going down the tubes. Hate them. May Bezos rot in hell. Wish all these fuckers would rot in hell. Maybe they will. Seems to me they are all crashing and burning. Good riddance. Keeping my fingers crossed that this trend continues.I'd rather face a world without these grifters.

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newly unionized employees will be on the chopping block.

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TheOtherMaven's picture

Amazon is an EEEEEVIL corporation, and deserves to go belly-up ASAP. Among the least of their offenses is throwing away a billion dollars (reportedly) on their attempt to cash in on Tolkien - which turned into a total fiasco because they hired a pair of showrunners with exaggerated ideas of their own abilities and not a speck of either experience or talent. Blum 3

(Some people like the show anyway because it's purty or because reasons that make sense to them but to no one else.)

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There is no justice. There can be no peace.

QMS's picture

Mimi has mentioned Bezos got his start by hoarding publishing rights (or something like that).
Turning extortion into a legitimatized capital scheme. Competition? fogettaboutit

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mimi's picture

@QMS
at a meeting of the Bookseller's Assodiation in 1996. These were booksellers of the past, owning a brick and mortar bookstore. At those times, bookstore owners had contracts with the book distributor Baker & Taylor (https://"www.company-histories.com/Baker-Taylor-Inc-Company-History.html"), who provided the booksellers with a CD, on which almost all books ISBNs (around 400 000 if I remember correctly) were listed. The bookstore owner put them in their store's computer and had access to all the data on those disks on his own store's computer. They used to use them as a tool to provide their customers with information of single books in their stores.

Around 1996 the world wide web was "born' Besoz recognized the role the wwww could have to sell books online. So he bought Baker & Taylor; inc. (he was a hedge fund manager, but nobody knrew about that) and gpt the rights to put the database from Baker & Taylor on the newly available www and then announced on his website that he was the biggest bookseller on earth. Of couree he put any single independent online booksellers out of business. They allt tried to have their own online website bookstores, but heh, who can go against a bookeseller, who had had over a million titles on hiw web-based bookstore. Later he offered the Little online booksellers to integrate their own databases into his 'Big One' against a fee.
It worked they all tried to surf with him on his tailcoats. May they all fall down that slippery venue.

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QMS's picture

@mimi

remembering your having mentioned his shady start eons ago
I peppered the comment with your reference
on shaky grounds (ya know that memory bit)
but Danke vielmals!

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