Amazon has announced that it’s going to hire 200,000 temp workers for the holiday season, according to Bloomberg. The workers will handle tasks like packaging, working the warehouses and making deliveries. The number of workers is double the amount Amazon hired last year, and it means that Amazon expects this shopping season to be huge.
The company said it needs the workers to help with its massive logistics apparatus, which includes the transport of goods from its warehouses to people’s homes. Amazon also said that it promoted 19,000 people to supervisory roles. As of Sept. 30, the company said it had 750,000 full- and part-time employees.
The holiday shopping season is expected to rake in $143.7 billion in online sales — an approximate 14 percent increase from 2018.
In other Amazon news, the company recently discontinued a program that would send users free samples based on the products they previously purchased. Amazon began the program earlier in the year, and it included products like mascara, perfume and food items. However, the program raised privacy flags about how data was being collected and used.
“Amazon is constantly testing and launching new offerings to innovate on behalf of customers,” an Amazon spokesperson said. “At this time, we have decided to discontinue the sampling program in 2020.”
Any brand that wanted to take part in the program paid about $2 for each sample, in addition to the cost of the product.
The company is regularly in regulatory crosshairs. A newly released document by the U.S. House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee said Amazon uses “aggregated data” from sellers who use the platform to improve its own business. The committee is conducting a congressional antitrust probe into the company, and it released Amazon’s answers to questions from the investigation on Tuesday (Nov. 19).
Amazon said it pulled data from its first-party sales, as well as public sources, according to the document, which is dated Oct. 11.
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