Karen Weise

We're scared.

Our kids aren't at school and you're buying coloring books and pop a shot basketball hoops.

These are all not hypotheticals from friends that I know.

You know, you're doing things to not go crazy.

Adults are getting coloring books, you know, and everyone starts shopping online.

Yeah.

But they couldn't staff their warehouses fully.

And so things started getting really delayed.

Like you would have two weeks to get an order.

And people did start shopping elsewhere.

Like other competitors were gaining market share because Amazon didn't have enough workers.

And so even as some workers are staying home, Amazon goes on this...

essentially historic hiring spree.

They were hiring at a level that had not happened outside of like wartime mobilizations.

I remember talking to labor economists at the time.

So it was just this massive growth.

And by 2021, they had more than 1.1 million workers in the United States.

And some of those are absolutely corporate employees and technology employees, but the heart of that is the warehouse labor force.

And the cost of labor got very high.

And they started reaching a point where they were basically not profiting because of all of this labor expense and inefficiencies in their operations.