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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.
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.
Why is this allowed?
In a free society, things are allowed unless you can argue that they cause harm. What specific harm do you see in Amazon hiring half a million people?
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".