Amazon's headcount has soared, but its workers' pay has halved

The report shows that Amazon's quarterly revenue per employee has dropped from $ 229,000 a decade ago to $ 84,000 now . Although Amazon has expanded other businesses such as AWS ( Amazon Cloud Service ) , third-party markets and advertising during this period, the data shows that Amazon employees' income has been halved.

At the end of the second quarter , Amazon had a total of about 1.3 million workers (excluding third-party contractors and seasonal workers) , most of whom were engaged in warehouse management and logistics. Last year, Amazon announced the recruitment of 75,000 people in March , 100,000 people in September , and another 75,000 people in April this year . It currently has more than 57,000 vacancies on its recruitment website, most of which are engaged in software development.

However, according to Amazon's recently released Q2 financial report, Amazon's revenue in the second quarter only increased by 27 % to $ 113.1 billion, despite a 52% increase in the number of employees . As a result, each employee's quarterly income fell to $ 84,000 , a record low . A year ago, Amazon employees' quarterly income averaged $101,000 ( about RMB 650,000 ). Ten years ago in 2011, Amazon employees' quarterly income averaged $ 229,000 ( about RMB 1.48 million ).

Amazon now has 950,000 employees in the United States . In the future, Amazon is likely to become the company with the largest number of employees in the United States , surpassing Walmart to become the first. However, compared with other technology companies such as eBay, Google or Facebook , its employees earn much less .

The speed and scale of Amazon's employee expansion has sparked debate. No company has ever added so many employees in a single year. The combined number of employees at eBay, Google , and Facebook is not as high as Amazon's last year.

Only half of Amazon's total revenue comes from website sales , and the rest comes from services such as AWS, third-party markets, and advertising . Compared with website sales, these services do not require as many employees .

Amazon 's employee problem is one of the most talked-about topics in the foreign media . Rather than being similar to a retailer like Walmart , Amazon is more like a technology company like Google or Facebook. Technology companies do not need many employees, but Amazon seems to have an inexplicable obsession with "adding hundreds of thousands of employees every year ." As Amazon's sales continue to break records, increasing the number of employees becomes a matter of course, so the outside world always easily overlooks whether the growth rate of the number of employees matches the growth rate of sales . The huge number of employees brings increasingly complex and far-reaching management problems .

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