Amazon Trims Its Stores Unit Again After 30,000 Corporate Cuts Gian Estrada Thu, October 8, 2026 at 5:18 AM EDT 2 min read AMZN +1.42% Trade AMZN on Coinbase Trading disclosure Trading disclosure The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.
Amazon (AMZN:NASDAQ) confirmed on Wednesday that it has cut jobs, mainly in its Stores unit, which runs the main e-commerce site. Fewer than 1,000 white-collar roles were affected, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters, with notices going to employees in the US, India and the UK.
"We've adjusted parts of our Stores business," an Amazon spokesperson said, adding that the new structure will better support its priorities. Internal Slack posts pointed to customer service and selling partner services. The cuts landed during Prime Big Deal Days.
Very. Amazon employed about 1,576,000 full-time and part-time workers at the end of 2025, according to its annual report. Fewer than 1,000 jobs is under 0.1% of that, and under 0.3% of its roughly 350,000 corporate staff.
It follows about 30,000 corporate cuts that began last year and ran into January. Jeff Bezos told Fox News on Wednesday that Amazon overhired during the pandemic, when "people were staying home and they were ordering."
The trimming has come alongside a big profit recovery. North America, the segment that holds most of the Stores business, earned $29.62 billion in operating income on $426.31 billion of revenue in 2025, a 6.9% margin. In 2022, the same segment lost $2.85 billion.
Last year, segment revenue grew 10% while operating income grew 19%. Each extra dollar of sales kept about 12 cents of operating profit, well above the segment's 6.9% average.
The margin jumped 2.2 percentage points in 2024, from 4.2% to 6.4%. In 2025 it added just 0.5 points. The slowdown in reported margin expansion does not necessarily mean the easy gains are exhausted: North America's 2025 operating income included a $2.5 billion FTC settlement charge. Further improvement could come from cost efficiencies, sales growth and advertising.
My view: this round is housekeeping, not a warning sign. Fewer than 1,000 roles won't move a segment with over $426 billion in sales. What it shows is that Amazon still sees room to run its retail business leaner after 30,000 cuts. North America's operating margin reached 7.9% in Q2 2026, up from 7.5% a year earlier. The number to track is whether that year-over-year improvement continues.
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