While some businesses are struggling to stay afloat during lockdowns and others are suffering from Covid-related shortages, Amazon appears to be thriving. The online retailer has been on a hiring spree for the last ten months, adding more than 427,300 employees to its payroll, an average of 1,400 new hires per day.The vast majority of that staff was added after June.
Since July, the company added 350,000 employees at a rate of about 2,800 per day, bringing Amazon’s total regular staff count to 1.2 million, a 50-percent increase from last year.
Those employees, most of whom handle purchases in Amazon’s warehouses, do not account for 100,000 temporary workers Amazon hired for this holiday season, or 50,000 new delivery drivers, whom Amazon does not count as employees. Economists told the Times that the hiring spree was unlike any other, with the possible exception of a country gearing up for a wartime economy. Amazon has massively increased its operations and profits since the beginning of the pandemic, when the disease kept shoppers home and local stores closed.
The New York Times notes that this rapid growth far exceeds anything we have seen before. The last time a company experienced a hiring surge that even comes close was when Walmart hired 230,000 new staff in one year two decades ago. At its current growth rate, Amazon could surpass Walmart’s 2.2 million employees in as little as two years, making it the world’s largest employer.
