Amazon job cuts hit its Stores division during the Prime Big Deal Days sale

Amazon cut jobs in its Stores division on Thursday, 8 October, while its Prime Big Deal Days sale was still running. Fast Company put the number at fewer than 1,000 people in three countries. Retail Dive said hundreds of staff were affected.

Stores is the part of Amazon that runs Amazon.com and Whole Foods. Business Insider first reported the cuts, citing internal Slack messages. Amazon then confirmed them. A spokesperson said the company “made the difficult decision to eliminate a small number of roles” and would support the people who lose their jobs.

Amazon has not said which Stores teams lost staff

Amazon declined to name the roles or the countries. According to Fast Company, the cuts appear to hit customer service, engineering and marketplace support. Marketplace support is the team that helps third-party sellers who list products on Amazon.

The spokesperson told Retail Dive the company is “adjusting parts of” the Stores business to better fit its priorities. No new strategy was announced alongside the cuts.

Amazon cut 16,000 jobs in January and 14,000 a year ago

This is the latest of several rounds. In October 2025 Amazon removed about 14,000 corporate roles. HR chief Beth Galetti said then that the company should be run “more leanly, with fewer layers”. In January 2026 it cut 16,000 jobs across the company. Smaller cuts followed in robotics in March and in the artificial general intelligence group in July.

The physical store estate is also shrinking. Earlier this year Amazon said it would close all Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh shops. Of the 70 closed sites, some will reopen as Whole Foods. Amazon still plans a large store near Chicago next year.

Online store sales grew 15% in the second quarter

The cuts do not follow weak sales. Amazon’s online store revenue rose 15% year on year to about $70.4bn in the second quarter. Its cloud unit AWS grew 37% to just over $42bn. In Europe, the retailer keeps gaining ground: Amazon and its sellers now take 63% of German online retail.

Counting only the two largest rounds, Amazon has announced about 30,000 corporate job cuts in twelve months. Sellers who rely on marketplace support, and brands that use Prime delivery on their own websites, now deal with a smaller Stores team during the busiest quarter of the year.