Amazon Went On An Insane Hiring Spree In 2020 Fueled By The Pandemic

Amazon went on an unprecedented hiring spree earlier this year that over a 10-month period added an average of 1,400 workers per day, according to the New York Times.

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Since July alone, about 350,000 workers have been hired pushing the global workforce at Amazon to over the 1.2 million mark.

These numbers do not include the 100,000 temporary workers the company hired for the holiday season or the 500,000 delivery driver contractors it utilizes globally.

“It’s hiring like mad,” Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said of Amazon to the NYT. “No American company has hired so many workers so quickly.”

The New York Times article compared the Amazon hiring spree to the wartime efforts during World War II in industries such as shipbuilding in the early days of the war or home building after the war.

It also drew a comparison to emerging online rival Walmart when the discount retailer added 230,000 employees in a single year a couple of decades ago, which was one of the largest piece time expansions in corporate America.

Amazon Expecting Holiday Record Sales During COVID Pandemic

Earlier this year, Amazon got caught out a bit with the COVID lockdowns requiring the company to temporarily halt non-essential shipments to fulfillment warehouses which angered many third-party sellers.

For weeks sellers couldn’t restock inventory at Amazon fulfillment warehouses meaning many sellers claimed lost sales.

In addition, Amazon warehouse operations were impacted by COVID restrictions and changes to health and safety protocols and many deliveries, even essential products, were delayed for days and weeks.

It seems Amazon learned its lesson and invested heavily in the company’s logistics infrastructure, which included the addition of hundreds of thousands of workers.

As the 2020 holiday season now has started in earnest, Amazon seems ready to handle the expected rush that the double whammy of COVID restrictions and the holiday season is bringing this year.

For many Amazon third-party marketplace sellers, this will be the most important time of the year and the company cannot afford another blunder.