Amazon Hiring A Massive Number Of People For The Holidays
Amazon is planning on hiring more than 150,000 new seasonal workers for the holiday rush this year.
This article is more than 2 years old
Retail giant Amazon is hiring 150,000 new employees to lighten the company’s load during the busy holiday season. Full-time, seasonal, and part-time warehouse and delivery workers can expect to earn between $19 and $26 per hour, plus potential sign-on bonuses at certain locations. Sign-on bonuses range from $1,000 to $3,000 and are part of the company’s increased effort to attract and retain employees.
Warehouse positions are available in different areas of the process, including order fulfillment, sortation, and preparation for delivery. These jobs can be physically demanding, so applicants should be prepared to stand and walk for their entire shift and be able to lift up to 49 pounds. Interested applicants can find detailed information about its open positions on the Amazon Jobs website.
Amazon delivery positions are full-time, requiring four 10-hour workdays per week. No commercial driver’s license is required and the company will provide a delivery vehicle. Like the warehouse positions, applicants need to be able to handle the job’s physical requirements, which include heavy lifting and the ability to go up and down stairs repeatedly.
Just last week, Amazon bumped its starting wage for warehouse and delivery workers from $18 to over $19 to compete with an ever-tightening labor market. Amazon is facing several economic challenges, including a slowdown of e-commerce sales, soaring inflation, and a potential recession. Consequently, the company is doing all it can to ensure a longer, more profitable, holiday shopping season.
Third-party merchants who provide products for over half of Amazon’s online sales are predicting a rather somber holiday shopping season. It’s likely that many will have to cut prices to move inventory since inflation has left consumers with less discretionary income this year. Even so, spending on Amazon is expected to hit $400 billion, which is up 9% from last year.
Amazon is America’s second-largest private employer, after Walmart. Despite being the U.S.’s biggest private employer, Walmart plans to hire less than one-third of Amazon’s number of seasonal workers this year—approximately 40,000. Retail competitor Target is closer to Amazon’s target, seeking to employ 100,000 new holiday staff.
Though Amazon always hires extra workers between Halloween and Christmas, this year they are also preparing for a Prime Early Access Sale on October 11-12. This is the first time the company has hosted two Prime Day sale events in one year. Prime Day is usually held during the summertime, but Amazon hopes that adding another exclusive event for Prime members will help boost sales between now and the end of the year.
This reflects the trend in recent years to start pre-holiday sales well before the usual Black Friday and Cyber Monday events. Black Friday—the day after Thanksgiving—used to be seen as the first day of the holiday shopping season. Now, it’s not unusual to see retailers dangling holiday deals in front of consumers in October.
Amazon’s plan to hire 150,000 workers is a repeat of the numbers they required in 2021. In 2020, Amazon only announced 100,000 seasonal jobs. As in years past, part-time and seasonal employees who perform well are likely to be offered permanent, full-time positions in the new year.
