Report: Amazon cutting 200 jobs
Amazon is reducing staffing across its North America stores division.
According to Seeking Alpha coverage of initial reporting in Business Insider, Amazon is laying off roughly 200 employees from its North America stores group, which includes the Fashion and Fitness offering.
“We’re always looking at our team structures to ensure we’re best set up to move fast as we innovate for customers, an Amazon spokesperson told Chain Store Age in an email. "We’ve adjusted parts of our North America stores team because we believe this structure will better enable us to deliver on our priorities. As part of these changes, we’ve made the difficult decision to eliminate a small number of roles, and we’re committed to supporting affected employees through their transition."
Read more Seeking Alpha coverage here.
Amazon cuts Prime benefit, lays off thousands since 2023
These job cuts follow Amazon’s recent announcement it is shutting down its "Prime Try Before You Buy" program, which allowed members to try out clothes, shoes, and accessories and only pay for items they wanted to keep.
The company also engaged in a substantial number of layoffs between spring 2023 and spring 2024. These included hundreds of positions across several divisions of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing unit in April 2024, as well as reportedly reducing headcount by less than 5% at the unit responsible for its Buy with Prime service in January 2024.
That same month, the company eliminated several hundred roles across the Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios organization, and also laid off “just over 500 people” across its Twitch gaming streaming platform.
Earlier layoffs include November 2023 reductions in Amazon’s Alexa workforce, as well as an April 2023 decision to eliminate positions in AWS in the U.S., Canada and Costa Rica.
And in a March 2023 memo to employees, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company intended to eliminate about 9,000 workers. In the memo, Jassy explained that after hiring more than 450,000 people in the U.S. between the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020 and September 2021, the company needs to reassess its staffing levels.
[READ MORE: Amazon to enact new round of 9,000 job cuts]
At the beginning of 2023, Amazon said it planned to eliminate just over 18,000 roles in 2023, with the majority of cuts in its Amazon Stores and PXT organizations.