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SEATTLE — Amazon is cutting more than 18,000 jobs, the company announced this month.
The e-commerce behemoth said it had hired too many warehouse workers in response to shoppers’ growing preference for online ordering. The company had 1.54 million workers at the end of the third quarter, making it one of the country’s largest employers.
“Amazon has weathered uncertain and difficult economies in the past, and we will continue to do so,” chief executive officer Andy Jassy wrote in a memo to employees. “These changes will help us pursue our long-term opportunities with a stronger cost structure; however, I’m also optimistic that we’ll be inventive, resourceful and scrappy in this time when we’re not hiring expansively and eliminating some roles.”
He wrote that most of the layoffs will come in the company’s Stores and People, Experience and Technology (PXT) groups.
“Companies that last a long time go through different phases,” Jassy added. “They’re not in heavy people expansion mode every year. We often talk about our leadership principle Invent and Simplify in the context of creating new products and features. There will continue to be plenty of this across all of the businesses we’re pursuing. But, we sometimes overlook the importance of the critical invention, problem solving and simplification that go into figuring out what matters most to customers (and the business), adjusting where we spend our resources and time, and finding a way to do more for customers at a lower cost (passing on savings to customers in the process). Both of these types of Invent and Simplify really matter.”
