Amazon confirmed that it had cut a small number of jobs, primarily within its Stores unit, which oversees the company’s main e-commerce website.
The layoffs in Amazon’s retail business come during one of the company’s biggest shopping events, Prime Big Deal Days. The promotion began on Tuesday and runs through Wednesday, offering discounts across various products.
The latest reductions follow a series of smaller job cuts since Amazon began a larger round of 30,000 layoffs last year, which continued into January. A person familiar with the matter said Amazon let go of fewer than 1,000 white-collar employees.
“We’ve adjusted parts of our store’s business because we believe this structure will better enable us to deliver on our priorities,” a spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
Meanwhile, an internal Slack channel indicated that several divisions within Stores were affected, including customer service and selling partner services, along with potentially other units across the company. Employees in the US, India, and the UK were among those who received pink slips.
Jeff Bezos, the founder and executive chairman of Amazon, said in an interview that continued job cuts were necessary because the company had overhired during the pandemic. Addressing the 30,000 jobs eliminated in the previous round, he said, “People were staying home and they were ordering, and it was an incredible, stressful period for us, by the way.”
“The whole team worked extremely hard and did so much, but we really grew our head count.”
