Summary:
Amazon’s is planning to hire 250,000 seasonal workers for the 2025 holiday season, which many see as an indication that the company is anticipating a big retail demand. It could even provide a potential boost to fourth-quarter GDP numbers.
There is some concern, however, that this surge in hiring may be short-lived due to accelerating automation trends. Many believe that Amazon’s seasonal hiring figures will shrink in the coming years as automation scales, especially in repetitive fulfillment roles.
Tracking year-over-year hiring trends at Amazon could reveal the pace of robotic workforce adoption and provide insight to how short-term job growth in the retail world might be impacted.
Transcript:
Douglas McIntyre: Lee, I’m heartened by the fact that Amazon is going to add the quarter of a million, you know, extra employees. I know it’s for the holidays and they aren’t permanent jobs, but, you know, that’s still a lot of people to add and if you had to say who’s good at predicting retail sales, it’s Amazon.
Lee Jackson: Oh, absolutely. Sure.
McIntyre: They must anticipate or even know that this holiday season is gonna be very good. And I always look at big retailers add as temporary employees as a bellwether for fourth quarter GDP.
Jackson: Well, exactly. And, you know, if you’ve ever been in sort of e-commerce business world or the retail business world, you know, my son works for a company where it all depends on now and the end of the year. It all rolls into we gotta sell enough stuff during the holidays to make our year. And that’s true of almost every retail outlet in the United States of America. But, yeah, I think that is encouraging. Now, I read a kind of a spicy Wall Street newsletter, and I should probably give this guy, it’s called The Water Coolest. The guy’s really funny and he is really smart, but he said, he said, and watch what Amazon will do. They’ll, they’ll use AI to transcribe every action of all the 250,000 workers that were hired so they can use bots in the future. And I was like, you know, that that could happen. They could use robots in the future, and robot, you know, for all that kind of stuff. Because a lot of it’s just, you know, retail fulfillment, pulling boxes, loading ’em into a cart, putting them on a conveyor belt, you know, yada yada yada. So I think it’ll be interesting to see, next year, Doug, if, are they hiring less? Will that number steadily go down from 2025 to say 2030 as more robots are put into the market? Because, you know, they’re starting to put robots into White Castle hamburger places. I don’t know if they still have those in the East coast, but I guess they have ’em up north, but, but you know, it’s, it’s a company called Miso. And the robot will flip the burgers and take ’em off the griddle and do all that stuff. And the whole thing was is that the robot will not complain about not being able to join a union or poor working conditions, so I think it’ll be interesting to see down the road.
McIntyre: Do you think we can get away with this headline – Amazon to hire 250,000 workers so it can fire 250,000 workers later.
Jackson: Or not hire them next year or something along those lines. I don’t think Amazon would take that very kindly, but you know, it could be the case because again, a lot of these seasonal jobs are about six weeks, maybe, maybe eight weeks, maybe middle of November to middle of January. ’cause they have returns and things of that nature. But again, there, there are just guys and gals pulling stuff from shelves and boxes that are going on, you know, conveyor belts and things of that nature, so it’ll be interesting if we, for us to track this in next year, see how many people Amazon, you know, hires for the holiday season.
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