Amazon makes fresh job cuts, mainly in retail division

By Greg Bensinger

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 7 (Reuters) - Amazon confirmed on Wednesday it had cut what it said were a small number of jobs, primarily in its Stores unit which oversees the main e-commerce website. 

The layoffs to its retail unit coincide with one of Amazon's biggest shopping days, which it calls Prime Big Deal Days. The promotion started on Tuesday and runs through Wednesday, offering varying discounts.

The cuts are the latest in a series of small reductions since a larger round of 30,000 job cuts that began last year and continued into January. Some affected employees reached out to Reuters and shared posts from internal Slack channels about the news.

Amazon let go fewer than 1,000 white-collar workers, a person familiar with the matter said. Business Insider earlier reported the layoffs.

"We've adjusted parts of our Stores business because we believe this structure will better enable us to deliver on our priorities," a spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

The internal Slack channel suggested a number of divisions within Stores were involved, including customer service and selling partner services, and possibly other units across Amazon. Employees in the US, India and the UK were among those getting pink slips.

Jeff Bezos, the founder and executive chairman of Amazon, said in a Fox News interview aired Wednesday, that continued job cuts have been necessary because the company overhired during the pandemic. "People were staying home and they were ordering, and it was an incredible, stressful period for us, by the way," he said when asked about the 30,000 jobs lost in the previous round.

"The whole team worked extremely hard and did so much, but we really grew our head count."

(Reporting by Greg Bensinger; Editing by Jacqueline Wong)