Amazon workforce staffing

This'll be a little long but I appreciate any and all help. I am a CCA (1+year) for a smaller office. We operate on our own, so to speak. I'm not sure of the correct terms. The city near us however, operates as a cluster of offices, there's about 10. There's a POOM or something like that in charge of everything, including us. There's many other offices nearby that operate alone as well.
We used to have an Amazon drop right to our office on Sundays, run our own packages, and gtfo. It was great, you knew you'd be out by 3 on Sundays. Well since we cater to Amazon, we now get dropped at the city annex with the other ten or so offices in the cluster.
Every Sunday, the supervisors make everyone take out 2 routes a piece since the city is a shitshow and call-ins, etc. Supposedly there's been a gentleman's agreement amongst my supervisors and the city supervisors that we'd only help them by taking a particular area out. I understand this means shit but some supervisors seem to know and honor it, others dont seem to care (surprise?!) Lately however, they have been trying to get us to do other routes, areas their own CCA's don't want. Their the dangerous parts of town, obviously. Sometimes they are short staffed but sometimes I think they're just playing us.
Some of my coworkers are doormats, and let them do anything to us. Which doesn't help. Some of my coworkers agree with me that we should only be doing the agreed upon area. But I am the only one standing up for myself. My question really is just, do I have any recourse to just walk in there, get my packages and leave? Maybe they'll learn to save the agreed upon area if they want our help? Do they even have to save my home office for me or can they just start fucking with me further? Idk, I don't like rocking the boat but they've messed with my sundays haha. I'm a big boy and do what I gotta do, but what if anything can be done? Again, any and all help is welcome and appreciated!

Company Name	Title	City
Olive Garden	Barman	Albuquerque
Sandia National Laboratories	Analog Electrical Engineer	Albuquerque
Sandia National Laboratories	R&D S&E, Electrical Engineer (Experienced)	Albuquerque
Township of Pine	Splash Pad Attendant - Pine Community Park	Albuquerque
Care At Home	Weekend Hours CAREGIVER in New London County, CT (Per Diem)	Albuquerque
TalentSphere Staffing Solutions	Residential ReRoof Sales	Carlsbad
Thorntons	Seasonal Worker	Hobbs
Money Mart	Customer Service Representative	Jal
Sandia National Laboratories	Computer Scientist (Experienced) - Space, Satellites, Remote Sensing Systems	Rio Rancho
Joe Johnson Equipment USA	Outside Sales - Parts & Service (PSSR)	Santa Fe
Washita Valley Ent. Inc.	Yard Inspections Crew Team Member	Carlsbad
Cascadia Services, LLC	Licensed Practical Nurse (LPN) - Las Cruces Post-Acute Care & Rehabilitaton ofCascadia	Las Cruces
NMSU Workforce Development & Career Readiness	Part-Time Instructors	Las Cruces
NMSU Facilities	Fire Protection Shift Captain	Las Cruces
Guardian Flight	FIXED WING PILOT - Located in Albuquerque, NM	Los Lunas
Guardian Flight	FIXED WING PILOT - Located in Albuquerque, NM	Los Ranchos De Albuq
Guardian Flight	FIXED WING PILOT - Located in Albuquerque, NM	Meadow Lake
Las Palmas Medical Center	Emergency Department Registered Nurse	Sunland Park
Navajo Nation Oil & Gas Company	Immediate Openings Controller Farmington	Farmington
All American Technical	Manual Machinist	Farmington
Navajo Nation Oil & Gas Company	Army Financial Management Technician	Farmington
WEXFORD HEALTH SOURCES INC	Grants Director	Grants
WEXFORD HEALTH SOURCES INC	Immediate Openings Director Of Nursing Western NM Correctional Facility South Grants	Grants
WEXFORD HEALTH SOURCES INC	Grant Director	Grants
WEXFORD HEALTH SOURCES INC	Immediate Openings Director Of Nursing Hobbs County NM Hobbs	Hobbs

Hey guys, here are some recent job openings in nm. Feel free to comment here or send me a private message if you have any questions, I'm at the community's disposal! If you encounter any problems with any of these job openings please let me know that I will modify the table accordingly. Thanks!

Early last year I worked as a conference director and we had our yearly conference at a local venue. We had two conferences back to back with 4k people at both. I ended up working 6am to 12-1am everyday for 5 days straight due to staffing issues and so many moving parts. Since I lived almost an hour away, I either slept in my office or went out to my car and would shower at the local Planet fitness.
After, the big boss gave everyone bonuses for their hard work. The big boss gave me mine personally and said it was from him because he really appreciated my hard work. I felt great until I realized it was a $20 amazon gift card that was never loaded. When I brought it up to his assistant, she said that his wife got them and must’ve given me the wrong one. She said to give him a few days then he will get me another one…
Turns out, I never got another one and ended up getting taxed on it. His assistant quit the same time I did and she told me that she had to buy a lot of gift cards but also grab several empty ones to give out randomly, and he kept the loaded ones for himself at the companies expense. Said most people don’t spend a gift card immediately so they wouldn’t realize it until later.
Moral of the story… don’t be a sleezeball.
Edit: this is also the first time I’ve ever received any type of bonus in 12 years of work.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/23/walmart-lays-off-hundreds-of-workers-at-e-commerce-facilities-.html
Walmart is laying off hundreds of employees at e-commerce facilities across the country, as the big-box giant and other retailers brace for a tougher year ahead.
Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, is shrinking its workforce as many retailers plan on roughly flat or declining sales. Inflation and the shift back to services is taking a bite out of sales of goods, particularly after a pandemic-fueled spending boom.
Walmart’s e-commerce rival, Amazon, announced 9,000 job cuts on Monday, following 18,000 layoffs in January. Amazon has also closed, cancelled and delayed the opening of new warehouses, as some online sales shifted back to stores. Another competitor, Target, plans to cut up to $3 billion in total costs over the next three years, but CFO Michael Fiddelke said at a February investor day that the company is “not backing away from investments in our team and guest experience.”
A spokesperson for Walmart confirmed it was cutting jobs at fulfillment centers. In a statement, the company said it made the cuts “to better prepare for the future needs of customers.”
“This decision was not made lightly, and we’re working closely with affected associates to help them understand what career options may be available at other Walmart locations,” the statement said.
The news was first reported by Reuters.
The company confirmed to Reuters that it is eliminating hundreds of job cuts at five fulfillment centers, including Pedricktown, N.J.; Fort Worth, Texas; Chino, Calif.; Davenport, Fla.; and Bethlehem, Pa. It told Reuters it was reducing its workforce because of a reduction or elimination in evening and weekend shifts.
About 200 workers will be affected at the southern Jersey facility, according to a notice filed with New Jersey.
Walmart anticipates slower sales growth and lower profits in the coming fiscal year. The company said last month that it expects same-store sales for its U.S. business to grow between 2% and 2.5%, excluding fuel. That compares to 6.6% growth in the previous fiscal year.
The company expects adjusted earnings per share to range from $5.90 to $6.05, excluding fuel, for the fiscal year. That’s lower than the adjusted earnings per share of $6.29 for the past fiscal year.
Online sales have continued to grow, though at a slower pace than during the peak of the pandemic. E-commerce sales for Walmart’s U.S. business rose 12% in the most recent fiscal year, which ended Jan. 31. That compares to to 11% growth in fiscal 2022 and 79% in fiscal 2021.

Mainly rate-sensitive technology and growth stocks rose after the Federal Reserve signaled an imminent pause in rate hikes amid turmoil in the banking sector, with the Nasdaq leading Wall Street's main indexes higher.
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Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL ), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT ) and Amazon. STARQ: AMZN ) were each up about 2% on Thursday.
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Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA ) shares rose 3.3% after Needham raised its price target on the chipmaker, citing the company's potential to benefit from recent data center strength.
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Communication services and technology stocks led gains in the S&P 500 .
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The Federal Reserve raised interest rates by 25 basis points on Wednesday, but its policy statement stopped saying "continued rate hikes" might be appropriate, marking a marked shift in its stance.
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The Fed's dovish tone has eased markets that have been roiled by concerns about a liquidity crisis in the banking sector since the collapse of two regional U.S. banks earlier this month.
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"The market is hoping that you might have one more hike," said Robert Pavlik, senior portfolio manager at Dakota Wealth in Fairfield, Connecticut.
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"I can imagine hopes (for a rate cut) being dashed. You don't want things to get to the point where you need to cut rates."
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According to CME Group's (NASDAQ: CME ) Fedwatch tool, traders' bets are almost evenly split between a 25-basis-point pause and another hike in May.
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Meanwhile, troubled regional lender First Republic (NYSE: FRC ) fell 6%, and was in volatile trade after Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said there was no discussion of insuring all bank deposits. Extend the decline.
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However, Peers Truist Financial (NYSE:TFC) Corp and Western Alliance (NYSE:WAL) Bancorp rose 2.1% and 4.4%, respectively.
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Data showed initial jobless claims fell to 191,000 last week from the previous week, compared with expectations for a rise to 197,000.
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Globally, the Bank of England raised interest rates by a further 25 percentage points and predicted that the surge in UK inflation would cool faster than before.
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At 12:07 p.m. ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 398.52 points, or 1.24%, to 32,428.63, the S&P 500 was up 59.20 points, or 1.50%, to 3,996.17 and the Nasdaq Composite was up 251.34 points, or 2.15 percent to 11,921.30.
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Block Inc fell 12.8 percent after Hindenburg Research said it had a short position in the Jack Dorsey-led payments company.
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Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN ) Global Inc fell 11.1% after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission threatened to sue the cryptocurrency exchange over some of its products.
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Accenture (NYSE: ACN ) rose 7.7 percent after it planned to cut about 2.5 percent of its workforce.
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Advancers outnumbered decliners by a 3.08-to-1 ratio on the New York Stock Exchange and a 2.01-to-1 ratio on the Nasdaq.
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The S&P posted four new 52-week highs and 10 new lows, while the Nasdaq posted 42 new highs and 130 new lows.

Just heard during the FAA Reauthorization hearing. I can post the timestamp later. Just shows how incredibly disconnected Santa is from the workforce.
He then gave an example of how a controller who certifies at Oakland center would be able to transfer to another center closer to home, referring to controllers as "homers" when they want to work in the facility close to home. This guy....
edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zSUg3VwLNo
skip to the -29:00 (no longer a livestream so that makes the timestamp) 2:53:40 moment. Bonus clip at -2:01:00 1:21:00 when he blames the AUS incident on staffing too. Every time he talks its "staffing and the FAA bad. NATCA good."

I just need to write and vent somewhere. I'm just a concerned parent who's concerned about other parents (and their kids). Having a child is wonderful, it's a miracle, it should be congratulated, but I'm so cynical and salty about it, because, at least in America, it means you have to deal with a Cthulhu amount of paperwork. Good luck if you don't have a job, even gooder luck if you have a job that doesn't pay squat. Go apply for SNAP, EBT, Wic, you'll either get denied, confused, or forgotten. The programs are supposed to be designed to transition people out of poverty. But no it don't. We're stuck here. Waiting for markdowns at the Supermarket. Or worse yet, clamoring for a Wal-Mart-Amazon-Cthulhu Great Greeter Job- with no benefits.
And the politics are brutally benign. Politicians love talking about parents, and their kids, and what they need and don't need, at least Republicans, but being on the left isn't much better. I'm very concerned that my son won't have enough positive male role models growing up because of an inversion of previous gender norms. I really don't care if my boy decides he's a girl who likes girls who likes boys, but at least let them have that dorky science teacher in 5th grade with a handlebar mustache who's way too into their pet tarantula. I'm not worried about "wokism" or even racial justice, my son is a mixed-brown American, he'll have to encounter those things regardless, what I'm actually worried about is the lack of social communities. Public Schools is kinda all he gets, and with how great standardized tests are and how many bosses teachers have.... Everything is meh. I feel like we need better social services and care designed for parents. And really we need a place for parents to come together, ask each other questions, and share common concerns with each other. It's really basic, but... work gets in the way... we've lost commonality with each other... social media and covid messed good talk me can... idk... I really don't think it should be this hard, and me suffering at an individualistic level also isn't helping (it does give therapists a steady stream of income)
And you know... gosh forgive the American who depends on the National-Socialist services of America to create a stronger and more dynamic American for the future workforce of America. How Un-American of me. And. I can talk about my pride in America. But my goodness. The world trembles in fear at the mighty US Dollar, citizens from all over the globe would stake their entire livelihoods just to live here, we have so much food and water, but not enough for our own children. The future generation of this country. The inheritors not just of a planet polluted from climate change, but also a world that was forever changed from the first atomic weapon
And solidarity to the protesters in France. My dad is in his 70s and still "needs" to work.

Hi everyone,
For context I currently make 21.77 an hour at my permanent full time job with decent benefits. I am a Sys Admin. This is my first I.T job, and I have been here for about a year. I feel that this hourly rate is pretty low. I was recently contacted by a recruiter for a 12 month contract sys admin job. The pay I was told was 28/hr with good chances of a raise/bonus (almost 30% increase). This is at a very respected large energy company in my area that I would definitely like to work for (Fortune 500). I was told that I would be a W2 through the staffing agency while on this 12 month contract and at the end I could either be renewed for another 12 months or hired on. (Or not renewed obviously) The Recuriter told me roughly 90% of the people he has worked with renew the contract or get hired with this company. I was told the company has a large % contractor workforce (70% FTE, 30% Contractor). They tell me that the company treats contractors well, giving them almost all federal holidays off as well as some managers will give PTO and the average tenure of this company (not sure if I was being told the contractors too or just employees) is 10+ years. Obviously I would prefer to become a FTE, is it worth it to take my chances and work a 12 month contract? I have had some phones calls with the staffing agency and got an interview scheduled with the actual employer. I have seen job listings from the past that are the same title and description with the same company that are FTE but these are no longer currently open.
I see people saying anything from C2H jobs never actually hire and generally treat contractors bad, or that most of the time they do hire and are treated well. So which is it?
Any insight would be great. Thanks so much.

Job Title	Company	Location	Country	Skills
Data Engineer	CRB Workforce	New York	United States	AWS
[Data Analyst - Remote	WFH (Remote)](https://datayoshi.com/offe350856/data-analyst-remote-wfh-r)	Staffingly	New York	Remote
Marketing Data Analyst (Remote)	Staffingly	New York	Remote	Looker
Senior Data Engineer	Accrete	New York County	United States	Kafka, Scala
Marketing Data Analyst	Cash App	New York	Remote	ETL
Data Analyst, Internal Audit	The New York Times	New York	United States	AWS
Machine Learning Engineer (Remote)	Meetup	New York	United States	Spark, Machine Learning, Scala

Hi guys, here are 7 New NYC Data Science, Data Engineering and Machine Learning jobs.
For more, check our Google sheet with more opportunities in Data Science and Machine Learning (updated each week) here
Let me know if you have any questions. Cheers!

Today as moved trailers to and fro around our yard at work I ran into an old friend of mine, a union brother who has been working at UPS for 22 years. I was excited to see him, we chatted about this and that and then we parted ways.
But in-thereof lied the real story. Twenty two years. This man has worked here before many of his supervisors were born. This man has lifted millions of tons of boxes and seen tens of thousands walk through the gates. This man has sorted, swept, unloaded, loaded, driven, responded to hazardous spills, taken workers to the hospital and has even gotten thrown off a donkey that was set up by Red Bull in our parking lot in the early 2000s as part of some weird publicity stunt. He told me the story of the old way grievances at work were settled, with an undercover fight club that was broken up by the police a few years later outside the management bar, which is across the street from the union one.
Last year Darryl broke his back in a pretty bad car accident. He was adamant to get back to work but it still took him about 4 months of PT to be able to function. 4 months of FULLY UNION PAID PT. If he worked at an Amazon he would have been thrown to the streets. This wonderful man wold have not been able to celebrate his daughters 17th birthday with a trip to Halloween horror nights at Disney. This man, but for the power of our union is discardable to the capitalist class that only sees profit. They don’t his vulgar jokes and horrible taste in food or the 20 tape guns he hides around the building like a pack rat. They don’t see his daughter who is about to graduate and go to a distinguished art school or the mother that he cares for in a house he built next to his own. They only see a bottom line for their shareholders 5th vacation home in the Maldives staffed by modern slaves.
In about 8 years Darryl is looking to retire, having subjected himself to one of the most physically demanding jobs in the building solely because he enjoys talking to the new hires and getting them their union chops. He will retire with a full pension, something we as a country have almost forgotten was the norm for working class people for generations and is now a pipe dream for most. And I assume his weird ass will move to Orlando and spend every waking moment at Disney.
God bless the union and Godspeed brother Darryl

Its other brands include Peugeot, Fiat, Alfa Romeo and Jeep,The Eisenach plant, in the German state of Thuringia, was opened in 1992, when Opel was part of General Motors. The London-based firm, which has offices in Africa, Southeast Asia and Europe, laid off 35% of its workforce in January, citing market turbulence. Ether, the second-biggest token, has risen 50% year-to-date and is now worth $1,800 apiece. WATCH: Bitcoin at $10,000 — or $250,000?A Division of NBCUniversalData is a real-time snapshot *Data is delayed at least 15 minutes. "It's still very early," Argenti conceded, although he compared the development of generative AI to "the beginning of the internet. "Markets are substantially underestimating the likelihood that policy rates will move higher and then remain at higher levels for longer, in our view," Citi economist Andrew Hollenhorst wrote Tuesday. "I've been in technology probably almost four decades or so, and this is one of the biggest disruptions I've ever seen," Argenti said. "Probably comparable to the internet, apps, the cloud — it's that order of magnitude. "Everything is changed," said Komal Sri-Kumar, president of Sri-Kumar Global Strategies and a frequent Fed critic. All Rights Reserved. AI could take the steering wheel on which investment decisions to make, for example, or automate many customer service functions. To use them, customers need to link their loyalty program accounts to Amazon One, which they can do at home or inside the restaurant. © 2023 CNBC LLC. The firm launched Marcus, a standalone digital bank focused on consumers, in 2016 and rolled it out to the U. K. in 2018. These include continuing to cut excess costs, including in Europe, where we have already initiated exits and partial winds downs in certain countries. Global Business and Financial News, Stock Quotes, and Market Data and Analysis. Data also provided by Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker"Furlong added that "we expect to continue to incur transformation charges in the first quarter of 2023, as we aggressively cut costs. "However, mortgage rates have not dropped as much as Treasury rates due to increased MBS market volatility. "Every three months, FOMC members fill out their individual projections for rates. "Now what I think they should do and what I think they will announce are the same namely, a very soft 25 basis point hike. - Alpha AI

After laying off more than 18,000 people in January, Amazon is shrinking its workforce again, this time by cutting 9,000 jobs in their cloud service, human resources, and advertising divisions. A further 400 Twitch employees will be affected, according to a brief memo from Twitch’s new CEO Dan Clancy.
Read more Link to article

I have a high level DoD security clearance and am looking for new opportunities as my current contract is wrapping up. I'm highly qualified with a few years of experience, so this shouldn't be an issue. However it seems like there's been a shift in the industry (or maybe, the workforce as a whole) in the past 6 months or so. It doesn't seem like anyone is interested in hiring.
They might have hundreds of open positions that they are unable to fill (because it's not that easy to find skilled & cleared people) yet they at the same time seem to have little interest in filling those positions, certainly not with any haste.
It used to be that these companies would be the ones actively contacting and cold calling me, trying to see what it would take to poach me from my current role. They would want to interview ASAP and typically give me a competitive offer and I'd even be able to negotiate higher because I'd have other offers.
Now I have to apply and my application either goes into the void, or I get some automated email about how the position is filled even though it's not. I've been in talks with probably 40 different defense contractors in Springs and almost all of them have this weird AWOL vibe like everyone on their HR team works for 30 minutes a week. I know these companies can't win/re contracts without the necessary staffing, so they are 100% losing contracts because they refuse to hire anyone.
Does anyone know what's going on behind the scenes?

March 21, 2023
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Good morning,
The Daily Upside
Laxman Narasimhan, who was slated to take the reins as Starbucks' CEO on April 1st, is already in control of the global coffee giant, outgoing chief Howard Schultz told staffers in a surprise goodbye memo on Monday. While Schultz's two decades as the most caffeinated exec in America ended in a finely-ground fog of labor disputes that will put him before Congress in the coming weeks, Narasimhan apparently couldn't wait to get started, and must have been pounding ventis in the wings.
Morning Brief
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The banking crisis is crashing The Fed’s inflation fight.
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Microsoft keeps sweetening the antitrust pot.
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China gets creative trying to boost its birth rate.
Fiscal Policy
The Fed Weighs Inflation, Banking Crisis Ahead of Possible Rate Hike
Here we go again. The Federal Reserve will decide on Wednesday just how aggressively it wants to pursue its rate-hiking, inflation-fighting campaign, only this time it will do so against the backdrop of a roiling bank crisis.
Addressing one crisis may only exacerbate the other, and (surprise, surprise) pretty much all of Wall Street has an opinion on what Fed Chair Jerome Powell and his board should do.
Powell’s Sophie’s Choice
It’s less a question of what Powell will do than what will happen when he does it. The smart money is on yet another 25 basis point increase, an acknowledgment that inflation — as well as the high consumer spending and a strong labor market — remains persistent. A month ago, another small hike may have been met with optimistic predictions of a soft landing. But that crash-free fantasy has been harshed by the reality that many mid-tier, regional banks are at risk of becoming overleveraged if rates continue to increase, potentially sending them the way of Silicon Valley Bank.
The Fed is already at work mitigating the spread of SVB’s collapse, offering some banks one-year loans on more friendly terms than the current 4.75% interest rate, and sources told The Wall Street Journal that Fed officials could continue to utilize emergency lending tools if the banking sector continues to falter. But inflation is likely to persist whether or not banks are properly prepared for rate hikes. That leaves Powell fighting a war on two fronts, putting him in a position of potentially having to pick between his two mandates: maximum employment and price stability.
Suddenly everyone is turning to their personal crystal ball to see where the Fed falls:
•
“I would advise them to go ahead with the 25,” Richard Clarida, Fed vice chair circa 2018 to 2022, told the WSJ. “If they pause, you can get into this ‘what do they know that we don’t know.’”
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Eric Rosengren, former Boston Fed president, offered a different perspective to the WSJ: “One 25-basis-point increase now will have a fairly modest effect on inflation, but it could have an amplified effect on financial conditions.”
Have Your Rate and Eat it Too: Some rate-hike doves have raised an alternative viewpoint: the prospect of becoming the next SVB may be scaring banks into self-consciously tightening their own lending policies — which is the intended effect of a rate hike anyways. “You would want to say, ‘This is doing some of our monetary policy job for us,’” former Fed Governor Jeremy Stein told the WSJ. “If you can communicate that well and effectively, the choice between 25 and 0 is less consequential than how you explain it.”
- Brian Boyle
Tech
Microsoft Says It Wants To Launch App Store Rival
(Photo Credit: Ed Hardie/Unsplash)
As if Microsoft weren’t already all up in Google’s grill with its gussied-up new Chat-GPT-powered Bing, now it wants to make an app store too.
Xbox head Phil Spencer told the Financial Times Microsoft plans to launch an app marketplace to compete with Apple and Google as soon as next year, so long as antitrust authorities wave through its proposed acquisition of game maker Activision Blizzard.
Press F To Persuade Regulators
Xbox’s owner announced its intention to buy Activision Blizzard for $69 billion in January 2022 and if it goes through it will be the biggest deal in video game history. But it’s faced some full-throated objections from Xbox’s rival PlayStation. The fear is that ownership of game titles means Microsoft could potentially make them Xbox exclusive, and execs at both companies have publicly bickered over whether Microsoft could seal PlayStation gamers off from wildly popular games like Call of Duty.
Microsoft has already run into some sticky patches with regulators. The UK Competition and Markets Authority said last month the deal raises concerns, and the company has been trying to convince the EU of the deal’s soundness by notching licensing deals with competitors (though not PlayStation).
Spencer’s comments about launching a Microsoft app store are not entirely out of the blue as the company started laying the groundwork in October, but the timing is important:
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The new EU Digital Markets Act is expected to come into force in March 2024, and may compel Apple and Google to allow access to each others’ app stores on their devices. For Apple especially, that’s a big hole being blown in the side of its walled garden.
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Regulators in the EU have previously targeted Apple and Google’s control of their app stores with antitrust investigations, so Spencer’s comments seem geared towards portraying Microsoft as a competitive force to challenge the Gapple duopoly.
Candy Crushing It: Microsoft opening up its own app store for mobile games would come with some distinct advantages. The Activision Blizzard deal would bring mobile game maker King, which makes the era-defining phone game Candy Crush, under Microsoft’s umbrella. Plus a bespoke app store would mean being able to side-step the in-app payment taxes both Apple and Google impose.
- Isobel Asher Hamilton
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Economics
Chinese City Launches State-Sponsored Dating App
What’s more romantic than a candle-lit dinner? A candle-lit dinner organized by your local city officials.
Guixi, a city in China with a population of around 640,000 inhabitants, has launched its own dating app with the aim of boosting the marriage rate in the region and, implicitly, the birth rate.
Baby Un-boom
Local Chinese authorities have ramped up their interest in boosting China’s birth rate since the nation’s population was found to have fallen in 2022 for the first time in 62 years. Declining birth rates have long spooked sovereign states, as they portend aging populations with more retirees and a proportionally smaller workforce to pay into state pension pots.
China has tried to clamp down on a tradition it views as partially responsible for young people’s reluctance to get married, where a prospective husband pays a sum to his bride-to-be’s family. In recent years, the prices have shot up:
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One local official told Bloomberg families charge suitors as much as $43,000 as a betrothal gift.
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China has added a raft of other policies to encourage marriage and kids such as promoting marriage leave, increasing subsidies for newborn babies, and making it easier for unmarried couples to register children.
China isn’t the only nation pulling the Tinder card. Japan has also used state-sponsored matchmaking services to combat a now three-decade-long decline in births. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said in January the nation was "on the brink of not being able to maintain social functions." So, no pressure, kids.
The Wrong Approach? Pronatalist policies are not necessarily a good solution to declining birth rates. Prof. Feinian Chen, a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University, told Bloomberg that the increasingly entrenched expectation that women will stay home and raise the children means “the opportunity costs of having more children or having children at all are simply too high.”
- Isobel Asher Hamilton
Extra Upside
•
Not So Prime Time: Amazon is laying off another 9,000 employees.
•
Eager for Beavers: London wants to introduce a beaver couple later this year.
•
These throwback shoes will have you lookin’ like a snack – Dunkaroos, to be specific. Everyone’s favorite childhood comestible is making a triumphant return via sneaker customizer Katty Customs, who will be dropping a limited run of exclusive 90’s inspired kicks. These “Dunk-A-Shoes” (talk about a name) will only be available via the NTWRK app, which you can download right here.*
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After laying off more than 18,000 people in January, Amazon is shrinking its workforce again, this time by cutting 9,000 jobs in their cloud service, human resources, and advertising divisions. A further 400 Twitch employees will be affected, according to a brief memo from Twitch’s new CEO Dan Clancy.
Read more Link to article

Twitch announced that it has has undergone a mass layoff, with more than 400 employees losing their jobs. Along with this news, Twitch CEO and co-founder Emmett Shear has stepped down after 16 years.As explained in a recent blog post written by new Twitch CEO Dan Clancy, the company has let go of 400 people as a means to cut costs."User and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations," Clancy said. "In order to run our business sustainably, we’ve made the very difficult decision to shrink the size of our workforce."This comes as part of a larger round of layoffs across Amazon, which owns Twitch Link to article

Hi ShopifyeCommerce - I'm Paul and I follow the e-commerce industry closely for my Shopifreaks E-commerce Newsletter. Each week I post a summary recap of this week's top stories, which I cover in depth in the newsletter.
.

1. STAT OF THE WEEK: 92% of Zillennials prefer to shop in-store despite being digital natives. They are also leading the charge in consumer demand for cross-channel experiences. – According to PYMNTS .
2. Shopify is in talks with Amazon about adding its Buy with Prime service as a payment / fulfillment partner. When speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology Media and Telecom Conference earlier this month, Finkelstein said, “I'm optimistic we'll get there with Amazon. We have a good history and a good relationship with them.” However Finkelstein later added that if a deal were to get done with Amazon, it would be on Shopify's terms — leaving merchants in control of their customer and order data. .
3. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) published a report analyzing the financial profiles of consumers who use BNPL. The report found that BNPL borrowers on average are more likely to be active users of credit cards and payday loans, more likely to exhibit signs of financial distress, had higher usage of loan products compared to non-borrowers, had a higher frequency of reported delinquencies in other accounts, and had average credit scores in the sub-prime range of 580-669 versus the near-prime range of 670-739 of non-borrowers. In a statement released with the report, CFPB Director Rohit Chopra noted that there is a common misconception that BNPL borrowers lack access to other forms of credit and that the survey data instead indicates that BNPL borrowers are more likely to use a wider variety of credit products than non-borrowers. .
4. The Biden administration is planning to take action on at least three of its half-dozen investigations of Amazon. POLITICO spoke to more than 10 people with direct knowledge of the investigations by the FTC to learn how the agency is now pursuing Amazon, why it didn't take action on the One Medical acquisition, and what's likely to happen in the coming months. .
5. eBay competes with Facebook Marketplace, but NOT with Facebook's social network — at least that's what it told a judge last Monday. eBay filed a motion to quash Meta's deposition subpoenas, claiming that it had already worked with Meta for a year and already disclosed nearly 2,500 pages of internal records to the company. eBay's lawyers said, “Meta's discovery gluttony confirms its request of eBay is not worthy of the burden Meta seeks to impose. The breadth of the subpoena is alarming.” .
6. Klaviyo laid off 10% of its workforce, or approximately 140 staff members across all teams including engineering and design, in what they said is an effort to reduce redundancy and recalibrate their areas of investment for the future. .
7. Fetch Rewards, a shopper rewards startup, also laid off 10% of its workforce, comprising of around 100 employees. Fetch was impacted by the SVB situation, but a spokesperson for the company said that the decision to restructure was in the works prior. .
8. Anchorage Digital, a fintech that offers prime brokerage services and custom API integrations for financial institutions, laid off 20% of its staff, or about 75 employees, citing regulatory uncertainty, crypto market volatility, and macroeconomic headwinds. In December 2021, the startup raised $350M in a Series D round, valuing the company at over $3B. .
9. Twitch announced it would be laying off over 400 of its 13,600 employees, also pointing to the current macroeconomic and missed projections as the cause. The layoffs come a week after cofounder and CEO Emmett Shear stepped down from his role. .
10. In addition to those lay offs at Twitch, its parent company Amazon also announced another 9,000 lay offs, bringing its total to around 27,00 since late last year. Most of the cuts will be from AWS, advertising, and human resources. .
11. Amazon sent a survey to users asking detailed questions about which features would convince them to download and try a new desktop browser from Amazon. Users were asked to rate the important of features including text to speech, extensions, data syncing across desktop and mobile devices, and blocking third-party cookies. This would not be Amazon's first attempt at a browser. The company launched Silk browser in 2011, which is built on the Chromium Project and used for its own products including Fire Tablets, Fire TVs, and Echo Show devices. .
12. Amazon Go stores have no cashiers and instead use a system of cameras, sensors, and motion detection software to track customer shopping. New York City customers are now suing Amazon in a class action lawsuit which claims that Amazon collected data on the shape and size of customers' bodies, as well as scans of some customers' hands, without proper warning. .
13. Meta rolled out blue ticks in the US, costing $11.99/mo via web or $14.99/mo via app store. Web sign ups only receive the blue checkmark on Facebook, while the mobile app sign ups includes the blue checkmark for both Facebook and Instagram. .
14. Paramount Global is rolling out a mountain of merchandise from Paramount Pictures, CBS, MTV, BET and Comedy Central to Nickelodeon and Showtime. The site launched on Wednesday under the tagline “Where Products Are Paramount.” .
15. Lands End reported that their e-commerce net revenue decreased 10.1% to $1.1B for the fiscal year, primarily driven by lower consumer demand caused by the global supply chain challenges in the first half of fiscal 2022. Gap also reported a 10% drop in online sales for Q4, however, the company's e-commerce revenue is still up 29% compared to pre-pandemic 2019. .
16. Amazon will discontinue distributing Kindle Newsstand subscriptions in September and is no longer selling new Kindle Newsstand subscriptions for magazines and newspapers as of this month. Starting in June, Amazon will no longer alow users to manage print subscriptions either, and subscribers will have to deal with the publishers independently. .
17. Ulta Beauty is transforming its e-commerce operation with Google Cloud, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Anthos cloud-based managed services solution, which will enable the company to save several hundred thousand dollars in additional licensing fees. The company is relaunching its e-commerce platform with multiple, distinct microservices to perform unique functions. .
18. ALPHV, a ransomware group, claims to have breached Amazon Ring and is threatening to publish its data. Since Ring devices support E2EE in most countries, which means that neither Amazon, law enforcement, nor ransomware groups could access uploaded footage, it is possible that ALPHV exfiltrated corporate or customer data rather than video. .
19. About You, a German fashion e-commerce platform, introduced a minimum order amount of €30 to obtain free shipping, while customers with smaller orders will have to pay €4.90. The new feeds are already in effect in Germany, and will eventually be rolled out to all markets. Last week I reported that their parent company, The German Otto Group, was disbanding its operations of MyToys.de by next year. .
20. AliExpress launched its AliExpress Choice service in Spain, which will offer a curation of the best value products the platform has to offer and a new monthly shopping event “Choice Day”. The marketplace has been offering a nine-day delivery time for customers since the beginning of this month, and hopes to have 7,500 pick-up locations throughout Spain by the end of the month. .
21. Wix partnered with Forter, a US-based trust platform for digital commerce, to increase approval frates for merchants while minimizing fraud. Forter will deliver its real-time decisions to Wix merchants in certain regions using an identity-based decision engine. .
22. Searchspring, a specialist in site search and e-commerce personalization, appointed Alex Kombos as CEO to head up its next stage of growth. Kombos previously served as CEO at Pressable, which is part of Automattic. .
23. Brightcove, a streaming technology platform, introduced new integrations with Shopify, Instagram, and Salesforce Sales Cloud to its video cloud platform. The integrations enable merchants and content creators to leverage live and on-demand video content. .
24. WooCommerce 7.5.0 was released this week with three new blocks for the Product Archive templates including a new Store Breadcrumb block, Product Results Count block, and a Catalog Sorting block. The release includes two database updates, 278 commits to WooCommerce Core, and rolls in 170 commits from the WooCommerce Blocks plugin. .
25. Some eBay affiliates were hit with hefty bank fees after Impact, the company that eBay uses to manage its affiliate program, used wire transfer instead of ACH transfer to distribute funds to affiliate's bank accounts. eBay was responsive to affiliates and said that it will reimburse those who were unexpectedly charged wire transfer fees by their banks. .
26. Plus 13 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest including Stripe's $6.5B raise from Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Goldman Sachs, and Temasek at a $50B valuation, a steep discount from its record valuation of $95B in 2021. .

For more details on each story, see the full edition: https://www.shopifreaks.com/shopify-buy-with-prime-bnpl-demographics-apple-specialists/
What else is new in e-commerce? Share stories of interesting in the comments below (including in your own business) or on shopifreaks.
See you next week.
-PAUL

Hi ecommerce - I'm Paul and I follow the e-commerce industry pretty closely for my Shopifreaks E-commerce Newsletter. Each week I post a summary recap of this week's top stories, which I cover in depth in the newsletter.
.

1. STAT OF THE WEEK: 92% of Zillennials prefer to shop in-store despite being digital natives. They are also leading the charge in consumer demand for cross-channel experiences. – According to PYMNTS .
2. Shopify is in talks with Amazon about adding its Buy with Prime service as a payment / fulfillment partner. When speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology Media and Telecom Conference earlier this month, Finkelstein said, “I'm optimistic we'll get there with Amazon. We have a good history and a good relationship with them.” However Finkelstein later added that if a deal were to get done with Amazon, it would be on Shopify's terms — leaving merchants in control of their customer and order data. .
3. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) published a report analyzing the financial profiles of consumers who use BNPL. The report found that BNPL borrowers on average are more likely to be active users of credit cards and payday loans, more likely to exhibit signs of financial distress, had higher usage of loan products compared to non-borrowers, had a higher frequency of reported delinquencies in other accounts, and had average credit scores in the sub-prime range of 580-669 versus the near-prime range of 670-739 of non-borrowers. In a statement released with the report, CFPB Director Rohit Chopra noted that there is a common misconception that BNPL borrowers lack access to other forms of credit and that the survey data instead indicates that BNPL borrowers are more likely to use a wider variety of credit products than non-borrowers. .
4. The Biden administration is planning to take action on at least three of its half-dozen investigations of Amazon. POLITICO spoke to more than 10 people with direct knowledge of the investigations by the FTC to learn how the agency is now pursuing Amazon, why it didn't take action on the One Medical acquisition, and what's likely to happen in the coming months. .
5. eBay competes with Facebook Marketplace, but NOT with Facebook's social network — at least that's what it told a judge last Monday. eBay filed a motion to quash Meta's deposition subpoenas, claiming that it had already worked with Meta for a year and already disclosed nearly 2,500 pages of internal records to the company. eBay's lawyers said, “Meta's discovery gluttony confirms its request of eBay is not worthy of the burden Meta seeks to impose. The breadth of the subpoena is alarming.” .
6. Klaviyo laid off 10% of its workforce, or approximately 140 staff members across all teams including engineering and design, in what they said is an effort to reduce redundancy and recalibrate their areas of investment for the future. .
7. Fetch Rewards, a shopper rewards startup, also laid off 10% of its workforce, comprising of around 100 employees. Fetch was impacted by the SVB situation, but a spokesperson for the company said that the decision to restructure was in the works prior. .
8. Anchorage Digital, a fintech that offers prime brokerage services and custom API integrations for financial institutions, laid off 20% of its staff, or about 75 employees, citing regulatory uncertainty, crypto market volatility, and macroeconomic headwinds. In December 2021, the startup raised $350M in a Series D round, valuing the company at over $3B. .
9. Twitch announced it would be laying off over 400 of its 13,600 employees, also pointing to the current macroeconomic and missed projections as the cause. The layoffs come a week after cofounder and CEO Emmett Shear stepped down from his role. .
10. In addition to those lay offs at Twitch, its parent company Amazon also announced another 9,000 lay offs, bringing its total to around 27,00 since late last year. Most of the cuts will be from AWS, advertising, and human resources. .
11. Amazon sent a survey to users asking detailed questions about which features would convince them to download and try a new desktop browser from Amazon. Users were asked to rate the important of features including text to speech, extensions, data syncing across desktop and mobile devices, and blocking third-party cookies. This would not be Amazon's first attempt at a browser. The company launched Silk browser in 2011, which is built on the Chromium Project and used for its own products including Fire Tablets, Fire TVs, and Echo Show devices. .
12. Amazon Go stores have no cashiers and instead use a system of cameras, sensors, and motion detection software to track customer shopping. New York City customers are now suing Amazon in a class action lawsuit which claims that Amazon collected data on the shape and size of customers' bodies, as well as scans of some customers' hands, without proper warning. .
13. Meta rolled out blue ticks in the US, costing $11.99/mo via web or $14.99/mo via app store. Web sign ups only receive the blue checkmark on Facebook, while the mobile app sign ups includes the blue checkmark for both Facebook and Instagram. .
14. Paramount Global is rolling out a mountain of merchandise from Paramount Pictures, CBS, MTV, BET and Comedy Central to Nickelodeon and Showtime. The site launched on Wednesday under the tagline “Where Products Are Paramount.” .
15. Lands End reported that their e-commerce net revenue decreased 10.1% to $1.1B for the fiscal year, primarily driven by lower consumer demand caused by the global supply chain challenges in the first half of fiscal 2022. Gap also reported a 10% drop in online sales for Q4, however, the company's e-commerce revenue is still up 29% compared to pre-pandemic 2019. .
16. Amazon will discontinue distributing Kindle Newsstand subscriptions in September and is no longer selling new Kindle Newsstand subscriptions for magazines and newspapers as of this month. Starting in June, Amazon will no longer alow users to manage print subscriptions either, and subscribers will have to deal with the publishers independently. .
17. Ulta Beauty is transforming its e-commerce operation with Google Cloud, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Anthos cloud-based managed services solution, which will enable the company to save several hundred thousand dollars in additional licensing fees. The company is relaunching its e-commerce platform with multiple, distinct microservices to perform unique functions. .
18. ALPHV, a ransomware group, claims to have breached Amazon Ring and is threatening to publish its data. Since Ring devices support E2EE in most countries, which means that neither Amazon, law enforcement, nor ransomware groups could access uploaded footage, it is possible that ALPHV exfiltrated corporate or customer data rather than video. .
19. About You, a German fashion e-commerce platform, introduced a minimum order amount of €30 to obtain free shipping, while customers with smaller orders will have to pay €4.90. The new feeds are already in effect in Germany, and will eventually be rolled out to all markets. Last week I reported that their parent company, The German Otto Group, was disbanding its operations of MyToys.de by next year. .
20. AliExpress launched its AliExpress Choice service in Spain, which will offer a curation of the best value products the platform has to offer and a new monthly shopping event “Choice Day”. The marketplace has been offering a nine-day delivery time for customers since the beginning of this month, and hopes to have 7,500 pick-up locations throughout Spain by the end of the month. .
21. Wix partnered with Forter, a US-based trust platform for digital commerce, to increase approval frates for merchants while minimizing fraud. Forter will deliver its real-time decisions to Wix merchants in certain regions using an identity-based decision engine. .
22. Searchspring, a specialist in site search and e-commerce personalization, appointed Alex Kombos as CEO to head up its next stage of growth. Kombos previously served as CEO at Pressable, which is part of Automattic. .
23. Brightcove, a streaming technology platform, introduced new integrations with Shopify, Instagram, and Salesforce Sales Cloud to its video cloud platform. The integrations enable merchants and content creators to leverage live and on-demand video content. .
24. WooCommerce 7.5.0 was released this week with three new blocks for the Product Archive templates including a new Store Breadcrumb block, Product Results Count block, and a Catalog Sorting block. The release includes two database updates, 278 commits to WooCommerce Core, and rolls in 170 commits from the WooCommerce Blocks plugin. .
25. Some eBay affiliates were hit with hefty bank fees after Impact, the company that eBay uses to manage its affiliate program, used wire transfer instead of ACH transfer to distribute funds to affiliate's bank accounts. eBay was responsive to affiliates and said that it will reimburse those who were unexpectedly charged wire transfer fees by their banks. .
26. Plus 13 seed rounds, IPOs, and acquisitions of interest including Stripe's $6.5B raise from Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Goldman Sachs, and Temasek at a $50B valuation, a steep discount from its record valuation of $95B in 2021. .

I hope you find this news recap helpful. See you next week!
-PAUL