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Amazon Tops 540K Employees After Swallowing Whole Foods in $13.7B Deal (geekwire.com)
A reader shares a report: Amazon added a whopping 159,500 employees in the last quarter, pushing its total employment to 541,900 people worldwide, according to new numbers from the tech giant released today. Amazon's headcount grew 77 percent over this time last year, and a big reason for that is the completion of Amazon's blockbuster deal to buy Whole Foods Market for $13.7 billion and the acquisition of e-commerce company Souq. The Whole Foods deal includes 87,000 people who worked at the grocery chain, making up a big chunk of the employment growth this quarter. Even factoring out the acquisitions of Whole Foods and Souq, Amazon's headcount climbed 47 percent over this time last year. "Certainly hiring continues to remain strong, especially in the tech areas and sales force, particularly in AWS," Amazon's CFO Brian Olsavsky said on a call with reporters.
Now I can pay ten bucks for a pound of rice that was watered by the bollock sweat of buddhist monks and get it delivered to my door!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Why is this allowed?
I'm so glad that so much power rests with one shitty company. Yay, cant wait for more oligopolies.
Dotcom Bubble 1.0 was pretty easy to detect the top of...the 1999/2000 Super Bowl ads, pets.com sock puppet and the AOL-Time Warner merger come to mind. I wonder if this transaction will be the top of this one. 540,000 employees in what's basically a conglomerate at this point seems like a lot, and I'm sure they're going to get around to firing as many as they can ASAP.
I also wonder if Amazon is going to find a way to jettison its low-margin retail business and concentrate on AWS. That's probably the business they want to keep...Internet startups pay them handsomely to run everything IT-related, as do some large companies, and a lot of that is profit. Apple and Google basically create money out of nothing by selling apps and ads and subscriptions, so AWS isn't quite like that but is probably extremely profitable.
Getting rid of retail, or at least distancing themselves from it, may be the reason Amazon is looking to build a "second headquarters" in a cheaper location. It'll make the employees and/or operating costs cheaper for the low-margin parts of the business while allowing them to build a hipper Microsoft-esque campus in Seattle to compete with Azure. And then when Amazon announces the split, or sale to a hedge fund or something, they can just cut the entire second HQ loose in a package deal. It's funny because cities around the country are bending over backwards begging to have Amazon build there...zero taxes, free utilities, custom-built infrastructure and housing, whatever it takes. It'll suck for whatever jurisdiction gives them the 99-year tax holiday after they fire everyone or the jobs turn out to be back-office drone jobs at slightly over minimum wage instead of hipster developers.
If they didn't want retail it's odd they bought a chain of grocery stores?
It's not Kroger or Safeway...Whole Foods is the definition of high margin groceries. I think they wanted it to drag more customers in via Prime subscriptions, and show how they can squeeze every single drop of blood out of a supply chain like grocery retailing. Think Whole Foods' warehouses replaced by Amazon's fully robotic warehouses, or at least the ones where they're paying just over minimum wage for warehouse work.
So when will they announce job losses?
They wanted to get into food delivery. Whole Foods stores are their local warehouses now and they are putting their lockers in them so that people who live in apartments with no lobby security can pick up their deliveries.
To help bolster their retail business before spinning it off? You know kinda like how people might spend 10k doing renovations around their house before putting it on the market hoping to increase market value by 20-40k
How about they fix the crazy sellers who are asking $80 to ship a $5 item to Canada?
#DeleteFacebook
Amazon jumping +11% since last night, with a P/E ratio of 275... for a company with market cap of ~$500B that's like $50 billion-market-value created out of *nothing* but excitement. Overnight. And Amazon isn't the only one! Even the Fed's QE program wasn't that crazy at creating paper value...
Bubble? I dunno... this is pets.com 2.0 mentality all over again.
And then they read the real estate contracts the bar these activities (see recent articles). They should have done their due diligence if this was their plan. There are restrictions on running a warehouse and/or lockboxes out of a retail joint in both the real estate leases and city codes. The city may roll over but the wal-marts and the targets of the world will push hard on enforcing the lease restrictions.
same price with ny state tax as of this morning...
They are destroying retail. Perhaps it is inevitable, but it is terrible: retail was the last way that an average person could have their own business - by opening a "shop". Now all the "shops" are going under because everyone buys online. No more shops - just Amazon employees, all working for "the man".
They already have amazon lockers in malls in NYC. How is that different from in a Whole Foods? Oh boohoo some shitty berg owned by Walmart will ban this, too bad. The people that live in the middle of no where don't have any money anyways or they wouldn't live in the middle of nowhere.
Um, Amazons stock price "jumped" 11% because they announced a $0.52EPS vs $0.03 estimates. They are making huge profits.
> I'm sure they're going to get around to firing as many as they can ASAP.
Did you notice in the summary it said Amazon has 47% MORE employees than they did a year ago, even not counting the aquisitions? They're hiring like crazy. They're working hard and finding more people to hire, running radio ads in my city.
> I also wonder if Amazon is going to find a way to jettison its low-margin retail business and concentrate on AWS.
AWS is only 10% of Amazon's business. A very successful 10%, but only 10%. Amazon didn't buy it's own fleet of delivery trucks this year in order to not use them.
I don't think you get Amazon. They exist to own as much of any market as they can. It doesn't have to be a standalone success, it only needs to feed the mothership in terms of control. If something isn't so critical now, Amazon will hang on to it and find a way to fit it into a larger scheme later.
I rarely use Amazon. I try to buy everything from small mom and pop shops even if that means paying a little extra. Could someone explain to me in layman terms what would happen if everyone stopped buying through amazon. What would this process look like? Would the stock slowly dip the next month? How fast would this monolithic empire crumble? I feel Amazon is a great service, but I do not like concentrating power in the hands of ONE GUY. Jeff Bezos seems like a great guy, don't get it twisted, but I feel this company has way too much power. In addition, if they put all these other retailers out of business, people will be forced to find other jobs or straight up work for Amazon. Amazon is touching every business it seems. Today they are now going aiming for Pharmaceuticals. What if people just spent a little more for what they need?
If they didn't want retail it's odd they bought a chain of grocery stores?
It's also odd that they are building their own distribution network, to replace UPS.
I think it's clear that Amazon has absolutely no intention of getting out of retail.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
And that profit is coming from cloud services, not retail.
Creating money out of nothing.
Which means, you get power to make people actually work for you, but you did no work yourself, nor did anybody else, to give that money actual worth. [Case A] (Unless they did the same, of course.) Which is equivalent to making people give you money, but not do any work in return. [Case B]
The next level, is of course, to create money out of nothing, using other people's resources. [Case C]
Case A is called "profit" by the way.
Case B is called theft (or fraud, or robbery if with force, or usury if only for a part of it).
And case C is called banking.
(Because banks can take $8 your, and legally lend out $100 to you, of which the other $92 were just made up from thin air, [demanding that you pay them back $100 + 8% of what you paid last year per year or month, even though that means that you need to take it from somebody else, who then won't have that money to pay back his debt.])
I also wonder if Amazon is going to find a way to jettison its low-margin retail business and concentrate on AWS.
That sure happened a lot right before the dot-com bust. Most companies that jettisoned a cash cow to focus on Growth! went under, but most of the cash cows survived. (My favorite, Agilent, is now worth twice what it was worth when HP dumped it, while HP swirls the drain). The only smart one was AOL, who used their over-valued junk stock to buy a cash cow.
The Amazon leadership was around for the dot bust. They all saw that stuff happen. Seems unlikely they'll repeat that particular mistake. In fact, they seem to have just bought another large retail business. Funny, that.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
is bad for digestion.