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    Tech Layoffs Continue as Shares Fall and Interest Rates Rise

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    Eighteen months ago, the online used car retailer Carvana had such great prospects that it was worth $80 billion. Now it is valued at less than $1.5 billion, a 98 percent plunge, and is struggling to survive.Many other tech companies are also seeing their fortunes reverse and their dreams dim. They are shedding employees, cutting back, watching their financial valuations shrivel — even as the larger economy chugs along with a low unemployment rate and a 3.2 percent annualized growth rate in the third quarter.One largely unacknowledged explanation: An unprecedented era of rock-bottom interest rates has abruptly ended. Money is no longer virtually free.For over a decade, investors desperate for returns sent their money to Silicon Valley, which pumped it into a wide range of start-ups that might not have received a nod in less heady times. Extreme valuations made it easy to issue stock or take on loans to expand aggressively or to offer sweet deals to potential customers that quickly boosted market share.It was a boom that seemed as if it would never end. Tech piled up victories, and its competitors wilted. Carvana built dozens of flashy car “vending machines” across the country, marketed itself relentlessly and offered very attractive prices for trade-ins.“The whole tech industry of the last 15 years was built by cheap money,” said Sam Abuelsamid, principal analyst with Guidehouse Insights. “Now they’re getting hit by a new reality, and they will pay the price.”Cheap money funded many of the acquisitions that substitute for organic growth in tech. Two years ago, as the pandemic raged and many office workers were confined to their homes, Salesforce bought the office communications tool Slack for $28 billion, a sum that some analysts thought was too high. Salesforce borrowed $10 billion to do the deal. This month, it said it was cutting 8,000 people, about 10 percent of its staff, many of them at Slack.Even the biggest tech companies are affected. Amazon was willing to lose money for years to acquire new customers. It is taking a different approach these days, laying off 18,000 office workers and shuttering operations that are not financially viable.Carvana, like many start-ups, pulled a page out of Amazon’s old playbook, trying to get big fast. Used cars, it believed, were a highly fragmented market ripe for reinvention, just the way taxis, bookstores and hotels had been. It strove to outdistance any competition.The company, based in Tempe, Ariz., wanted to replace traditional dealers with, Carvana said grandly, “technology and exceptional customer service.” In what seemed to symbolize the death of the old way of doing things, it paid $22 million for a six-acre site in Mission Valley, Calif., that a Mazda dealer had occupied since 1965.More on Big TechLayoffs: Some of the biggest tech companies, including Alphabet and Microsoft, have recently announced tens of thousands of job cuts. But even after the layoffs, their work forces are still behemoths.A Generational Divide: The industry’s recent job cuts have been eye-opening to young workers. But to older employees who experienced the dot-com bust, it has hardly been a shock.Supreme Court Cases: The justices are poised to reconsider two crucial tenets of online speech under which social media networks have long operated.In the Netherlands: Dutch government and educational organizations have spurred changes at Google, Microsoft and Zoom, using a European data protection law as a lever.Where traditional dealerships were literally flat, Carvana built multistory car vending machines that became memorable local landmarks. Customers picked up their cars at these towers, which now total 33. A corporate video of the building of one vending machine has over four million views on YouTube.In the third quarter of 2021, Carvana delivered 110,000 cars to customers, up 74 percent from 2020. The goal: two million cars a year, which would make it by far the largest used car retailer.An eye-catching Carvana car vending machine in Uniondale, N.Y.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThen, even more quickly than the company grew, it fell apart. When used car sales rose more than 25 percent in the first year of the pandemic, that created a supply problem: Carvana needed many more vehicles. It acquired a car auction company for $2.2 billion and took on even more debt at a premium interest rate. And it paid customers handsomely for cars.But as the pandemic waned and interest rates began to rise, sales slowed. Carvana, which declined to comment for this article, did a round of layoffs in May and another in November. Its chief executive, Ernie Garcia, blamed the higher cost of financing, saying, “We failed to accurately predict how all this will play out.”Some competitors are even worse off. Vroom, a Houston company, has seen its stock fall to $1 from $65 in mid-2020. Over the past year, it has dismissed half of its employees.“High rates are painful for almost everyone, but they are particularly painful for Silicon Valley,” said Kairong Xiao, an associate professor of finance at Columbia Business School. “I expect more layoffs and investment cuts unless the Fed reverses its tightening.”At the moment, there is little likelihood of that. The market expects two more rate increases by the Federal Reserve this year, to at least 5 percent.In real estate, that is trouble for anyone expecting a quick recovery. Low rates not only pushed up house prices but also made it irresistible for companies such as Zillow as well as Redfin, Opendoor Technologies and others, to get into a business that used to be considered slightly disreputable: flipping houses.In 2019, Zillow estimated it would soon have revenue of $20 billion from selling 5,000 houses a month. That thrilled investors, who pushed the publicly traded Seattle company to a $45 billion valuation and created a hiring boom that raised the number of employees to 8,000.Zillow’s notion was to use artificial intelligence software to make a chaotic real estate market more efficient, predictable and profitable. This was the sort of innovation that the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen talked about in 2011 when he said digital insurgents would take over entire industries. “Software is eating the world,” he wrote.In June 2021, Zillow owned 50 homes in California’s capital, Sacramento. Five months later, it had 400. One was an unremarkable four-bedroom, three-bath house in the northwest corner of the city. Built in 2001, it is convenient to several parks and the airport. Zillow paid $700,000 for it.Zillow put the house on the market for months, but no one wanted it, even at $625,000. Last fall, after it had unceremoniously exited the flipping market, Zillow unloaded the house for $355,000. Low rates had made it seem possible that Zillow could shoot for the moon, but even they could not make it a success.Ryan Lundquist, a Sacramento appraiser who followed the house’s history closely on his blog, said Zillow realized real estate was fragmented but perhaps did not quite appreciate that houses were labor-intensive, deeply personal, one-to-one transactions.“This idea of being able to come in and change the game completely — that’s really difficult to do, and most of the time you don’t,” he said.Zillow’s market value has now shrunk to $10 billion, and its employee count to around 5,500 after two rounds of layoffs. It declined to comment.The dream of market domination through software dies hard, however. Zillow recently made a deal with Opendoor, an online real estate company in San Francisco that buys and sells residential properties and has also been ravaged by the downturn. Under the agreement, sellers on Zillow’s platform can request to have Opendoor make offers on their homes. Zillow said sellers would “save themselves the stress and uncertainty of a traditional sale process.”That partnership might explain why the buyer of that four-bedroom Sacramento house, one of the last in Zillow’s portfolio, was none other than Opendoor. It made some modest improvements and put the house on the market for $632,000, nearly twice what it had paid. A deal is pending.“If it were really this easy, everyone would be a flipper,” Mr. Lundquist said.An Amazon bookstore in Seattle in 2016. The store is now permanently closed.Kyle Johnson for The New York TimesThe easy money era had been well established when Amazon decided it had mastered e-commerce enough to take on the physical world. Its plans to expand into bookstores was a rumor for years and finally happened in 2015. The media went wild. According to one well-circulated story, the retailer planned to open as many as 400 bookstores.The company’s idea was that the stores would function as extensions of its online operation. Reader reviews would guide the potential buyer. Titles were displayed face out, so there were only 6,000 of them. The stores were showrooms for Amazon’s electronics.Being a showroom for the internet is expensive. Amazon had to hire booksellers and lease storefronts in popular areas. And letting enthusiastic reviews be one of the selection criteria meant stocking self-published titles, some of which were pumped up with reviews by the authors’ friends. These were not books that readers wanted.Amazon likes to try new things, and that costs money. It took on another $10 billion of long-term debt in the first nine months of the year at a higher rate of interest than it was paying two years ago. This month, it said it was borrowing $8 billion more. Its stock market valuation has shrunk by about a trillion dollars.The retailer closed 68 stores last March, including not only bookstores but also pop-ups and so-called four-star stores. It continues to operate its Whole Foods grocery subsidiary, which has 500 U.S. locations, and other food stores. Amazon said in a statement that it was “committed to building great, long-term physical retail experiences and technologies.”Traditional book selling, where expectations are modest, may have an easier path now. Barnes & Noble, the bricks-and-mortar chain recently deemed all but dead, has moved into two former Amazon locations in Massachusetts, putting about 20,000 titles into each. The chain said the stores were doing “very well.” It is scouting other former Amazon locations.“Amazon did a very different bookstore than we’re doing,” said Janine Flanigan, Barnes & Noble’s director of store planning and design. “Our focus is books.” More

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    For Tech Companies, Years of Easy Money Yield to Hard Times

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    Eighteen months ago, the online used car retailer Carvana had such great prospects that it was worth $80 billion. Now it is valued at less than $1.5 billion, a 98 percent plunge, and is struggling to survive.Many other tech companies are also seeing their fortunes reverse and their dreams dim. They are shedding employees, cutting back, watching their financial valuations shrivel — even as the larger economy chugs along with a low unemployment rate and a 3.2 annualized growth rate in the third quarter.One largely unacknowledged explanation: An unprecedented era of rock-bottom interest rates has abruptly ended. Money is no longer virtually free.For over a decade, investors desperate for returns sent their money to Silicon Valley, which pumped it into a wide range of start-ups that might not have received a nod in less heady times. Extreme valuations made it easy to issue stock or take on loans to expand aggressively or to offer sweet deals to potential customers that quickly boosted market share.It was a boom that seemed as if it would never end. Tech piled up victories, and its competitors wilted. Carvana built dozens of flashy car “vending machines” across the country, marketed itself relentlessly and offered very attractive prices for trade-ins.“The whole tech industry of the last 15 years was built by cheap money,” said Sam Abuelsamid, principal analyst with Guidehouse Insights. “Now they’re getting hit by a new reality, and they will pay the price.”Cheap money funded many of the acquisitions that substitute for organic growth in tech. Two years ago, as the pandemic raged and many office workers were confined to their homes, Salesforce bought the office communications tool Slack for $28 billion, a sum that some analysts thought was too high. Salesforce borrowed $10 billion to do the deal. This month, it said it was cutting 8,000 people, about 10 percent of its staff, many of them at Slack.Even the biggest tech companies are affected. Amazon was willing to lose money for years to acquire new customers. It is taking a different approach these days, laying off 18,000 office workers and shuttering operations that are not financially viable.Carvana, like many start-ups, pulled a page out of Amazon’s old playbook, trying to get big fast. Used cars, it believed, were a highly fragmented market ripe for reinvention, just the way taxis, bookstores and hotels had been. It strove to outdistance any competition.The company, based in Tempe, Ariz., wanted to replace traditional dealers with, Carvana said grandly, “technology and exceptional customer service.” In what seemed to symbolize the death of the old way of doing things, it paid $22 million for a six-acre site in Mission Valley, Calif., that a Mazda dealer had occupied since 1965.More on Big TechLayoffs: Some of the biggest tech companies, including Alphabet and Microsoft, have recently announced tens of thousands of job cuts. But even after the layoffs, their work forces are still behemoths.A Generational Divide: The industry’s recent job cuts have been eye-opening to young workers. But to older employees who experienced the dot-com bust, it has hardly been a shock.Supreme Court Cases: The justices are poised to reconsider two crucial tenets of online speech under which social media networks have long operated.In the Netherlands: Dutch government and educational organizations have spurred changes at Google, Microsoft and Zoom, using a European data protection law as a lever.Where traditional dealerships were literally flat, Carvana built multistory car vending machines that became memorable local landmarks. Customers picked up their cars at these towers, which now total 33. A corporate video of the building of one vending machine has over four million views on YouTube.In the third quarter of 2021, Carvana delivered 110,000 cars to customers, up 74 percent from 2020. The goal: two million cars a year, which would make it by far the largest used car retailer.An eye-catching Carvana car vending machine in Uniondale, N.Y.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThen, even more quickly than the company grew, it fell apart. When used car sales rose more than 25 percent in the first year of the pandemic, that created a supply problem: Carvana needed many more vehicles. It acquired a car auction company for $2.2 billion and took on even more debt at a premium interest rate. And it paid customers handsomely for cars.But as the pandemic waned and interest rates began to rise, sales slowed. Carvana, which declined to comment for this article, did a round of layoffs in May and another in November. Its chief executive, Ernie Garcia, blamed the higher cost of financing, saying, “We failed to accurately predict how all this will play out.”Some competitors are even worse off. Vroom, a Houston company, has seen its stock fall to $1 from $65 in mid-2020. Over the past year, it has dismissed half of its employees.“High rates are painful for almost everyone, but they are particularly painful for Silicon Valley,” said Kairong Xiao, an associate professor of finance at Columbia Business School. “I expect more layoffs and investment cuts unless the Fed reverses its tightening.”At the moment, there is little likelihood of that. The market expects two more rate increases by the Federal Reserve this year, to at least 5 percent.In real estate, that is trouble for anyone expecting a quick recovery. Low rates not only pushed up house prices but also made it irresistible for companies such as Zillow as well as Redfin, Opendoor Technologies and others, to get into a business that used to be considered slightly disreputable: flipping houses.In 2019, Zillow estimated it would soon have revenue of $20 billion from selling 5,000 houses a month. That thrilled investors, who pushed the publicly traded Seattle company to a $45 billion valuation and created a hiring boom that raised the number of employees to 8,000.Zillow’s notion was to use artificial intelligence software to make a chaotic real estate market more efficient, predictable and profitable. This was the sort of innovation that the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen talked about in 2011 when he said digital insurgents would take over entire industries. “Software is eating the world,” he wrote.In June 2021, Zillow owned 50 homes in California’s capital, Sacramento. Five months later, it had 400. One was an unremarkable four-bedroom, three-bath house in the northwest corner of the city. Built in 2001, it is convenient to several parks and the airport. Zillow paid $700,000 for it.Zillow put the house on the market for months, but no one wanted it, even at $625,000. Last fall, after it had unceremoniously exited the flipping market, Zillow unloaded the house for $355,000. Low rates had made it seem possible that Zillow could shoot for the moon, but even they could not make it a success.Ryan Lundquist, a Sacramento appraiser who followed the house’s history closely on his blog, said Zillow realized real estate was fragmented but perhaps did not quite appreciate that houses were labor-intensive, deeply personal, one-to-one transactions.“This idea of being able to come in and change the game completely — that’s really difficult to do, and most of the time you don’t,” he said.Zillow’s market value has now shrunk to $10 billion, and its employee count to around 5,500 after two rounds of layoffs. It declined to comment.The dream of market domination through software dies hard, however. Zillow recently made a deal with Opendoor, an online real estate company in San Francisco that buys and sells residential properties and has also been ravaged by the downturn. Under the agreement, sellers on Zillow’s platform can request to have Opendoor make offers on their homes. Zillow said sellers would “save themselves the stress and uncertainty of a traditional sale process.”That partnership might explain why the buyer of that four-bedroom Sacramento house, one of the last in Zillow’s portfolio, was none other than Opendoor. It made some modest improvements and put the house on the market for $632,000, nearly twice what it had paid. A deal is pending.“If it were really this easy, everyone would be a flipper,” Mr. Lundquist said.An Amazon bookstore in Seattle in 2016. The store is now permanently closed.Kyle Johnson for The New York TimesThe easy money era had been well established when Amazon decided it had mastered e-commerce enough to take on the physical world. Its plans to expand into bookstores was a rumor for years and finally happened in 2015. The media went wild. According to one well-circulated story, the retailer planned to open as many as 400 bookstores.The company’s idea was that the stores would function as extensions of its online operation. Reader reviews would guide the potential buyer. Titles were displayed face out, so there were only 6,000 of them. The stores were showrooms for Amazon’s electronics.Being a showroom for the internet is expensive. Amazon had to hire booksellers and lease storefronts in popular areas. And letting enthusiastic reviews be one of the selection criteria meant stocking self-published titles, some of which were pumped up with reviews by the authors’ friends. These were not books that readers wanted.Amazon likes to try new things, and that costs money. It took on another $10 billion of long-term debt in the first nine months of the year at a higher rate of interest than it was paying two years ago. This month, it said it was borrowing $8 billion more. Its stock market valuation has shrunk by about a trillion dollars.The retailer closed 68 stores last March, including not only bookstores but also pop-ups and so-called four-star stores. It continues to operate its Whole Foods grocery subsidiary, which has 500 U.S. locations, and other food stores. Amazon said in a statement that it was “committed to building great, long-term physical retail experiences and technologies.”Traditional book selling, where expectations are modest, may have an easier path now. Barnes & Noble, the bricks-and-mortar chain recently deemed all but dead, has moved into two former Amazon locations in Massachusetts, putting about 20,000 titles into each. The chain said the stores were doing “very well.” It is scouting other former Amazon locations.“Amazon did a very different bookstore than we’re doing,” said Janine Flanigan, Barnes & Noble’s director of store planning and design. “Our focus is books.” More

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    Billions of Dollars at Stake in a Puzzling Holiday Shopping Season

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    It promises to be unpredictable, with retailers and consumers still figuring out how much will be spent and on what kinds of goods.No one quite knows what to make of this year’s holiday shopping season. But billions of dollars are riding on it.After two pandemic holiday seasons messed with doorbusters, party plans and supply chains, retailers were hoping that this year would be a return to sanity. But just as it started to appear that families and stores could pull out their old playbooks, along came near-record inflation and the war in Ukraine, only increasing general unease about the state of the world.Some things are looking up. The pandemic has receded, supply chains generally stabilized, and the labor market is strong.But in March, the Federal Reserve started raising interest rates to slow down inflation, just as retail executives were making plans for which toys, wreaths and fuzzy socks shoppers would buy come winter. To try to ensure a robust shopping season, retailers leaned in early and often. Christmas trees showed up at Costco in August. Amazon threw what amounted to a second Prime Day in October. And it seems every day has brought ads for Black Friday deals, like the ones that Target offered throughout October.Still, shoppers seem confused. Should they buy now or later? Purchase for a lot of people or put a priority on a few? Give items or shared experiences? Trust online deliveries or go with local shops?“The truth is, we don’t know whether consumers will spend more or less on gift giving or whether they’ll do more shopping online or in the mall,” Etsy’s chief executive, Josh Silverman, told investors recently.That has left companies making predictions for the all-important retail season that amount to a shrug.“We’re not quite sure how strong holiday spending will be versus last year,” Brian Olsavsky, Amazon’s finance chief, told investors in October, “and we’re ready for a variety of outcomes.”Or, as Peter Boneparth, the chair of Kohl’s board, told analysts this month, “I think everybody believes that Christmas will come, but I don’t think anybody out there knows for sure exactly what’s going to happen.”Feeling inflation’s squeezeMathias Wasik for The New York TimesInflation is on everyone’s mind. Higher prices on all sorts of items have made people rethink what they’re buying and whom they’re buying for. While inflation is moderating slightly, it’s at the highest levels since Indiana Jones was bullwhipping raiders of the Lost Ark at the mall cineplex.More on Big TechMicrosoft: The company’s $69 billion deal for Activision Blizzard, which rests on winning the approval by 16 governments, has become a test for whether tech giants can buy companies amid a backlash.Apple: Apple’s largest iPhone factory, in the city of Zhengzhou, China, is dealing with a shortage of workers. Now, that plant is getting help from an unlikely source: the Chinese government.Amazon: The company appears set to lay off approximately 10,000 people in corporate and technology jobs, in what would be the largest cuts in the company’s history.Meta: The parent of Facebook said it was laying off more than 11,000 people, or about 13 percent of its work forceThe National Retail Federation predicts that holiday sales in November and December will increase 6 to 7 percent from last year, but that’s below the rate of inflation.“Folks are really looking for deals this year,” said Melissa Burdick, who spent a decade at Amazon and founded Pacvue, which helps big brands sell online. “They’re shifting what they’re buying to favor lower-priced brands and more necessary items.” She summed up the sentiment as: “I used to want Bose headphones. Now I will buy chips on sale on Amazon.”Cristian Tinoco, 19, who works 45 hours a week at a gym in Seattle and attends community college, said his family would focus on spending Christmas together after a rocky year.“Gas has especially gone up. I probably spend about $400 a paycheck on gas because I commute 35 minutes each way, each day. I have three siblings, so my parents have four kids at home and spend more than $1,000 a month on groceries. I help sometimes pay for food with my paycheck.“My student loan application got messed up, so I’ve been paying for college out of pocket. I don’t want to drop out. I may finally be able to start saving. I want to buy a truck — it just feels like me.”The experience is the thingPeople spent two pandemic years buying stuff. With stimulus checks, rising wages and nowhere to go, last year’s holiday season generated the biggest annual growth in retail spending on record — 14.1 percent.This year, Covid-19 travel restrictions have eased, and masking mandates are virtually gone. Retailers are bracing to lose out on spending as more people go on trips, attend concerts and eat out.The Transportation Security Administration said screenings were up 33 percent from last year, and concert bookings are up 51 percent, according to Eventbrite.“They were reminded that life is very short, and coming out of this pandemic they want to experience life again,” Mike Daher, an executive at the consultancy Deloitte, said.Mary Anna Ball, 25, a ballerina and research analyst in West Virginia, usually starts squirreling away Christmas gifts in July but this year wants to give gifts that will help her family experience the world.“I love sweaters and little kitschy things like that, but I know not everyone is that way, and you’ll kind of remember the experience more than when you’re going through your clothes of, ‘How did I get this sweater?’ If you give an experience, that’s something you’ll remember a bit longer, or maybe it’ll introduce you to a new hobby or something like that.“I have two younger brothers. Some people get siblings tattoos. I refuse to do that. But they’ve said it would be fun to go skydiving one day. I thought, I can get them a voucher and, whenever they can, they can just go down and skydive or something.”Christmas came early in many storesMathias Wasik for The New York TimesGetting what you want this year shouldn’t be a big issue. Remembering last year, when popular items were stuck at ports or somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, brands ramped up production, and retailers ordered more products. They did this earlier than usual to make sure items arrived on time, but the supply chain improved. When orders arrived earlier than expected, retailers piled items in warehouses that in some cases were already stuffed with merchandise ordered in 2021.That, combined with uncertain consumer demand, left retailers with record-high inventories, according to data from the Census Bureau.That’s leading to more deals and a hodgepodge of goods on store floors, no matter the season. In other words, Christmas came early to stores.Mike Campese, a guitarist and instructor in Las Vegas, knew this year was going to be strange when he saw holiday merchandise unusually early.“The other day, I was in Costco, and as soon as you walk in, the very first aisle is the Christmas stuff. It is still September! Oh, my God.“It is the earliest I have seen it. Usually the day after Halloween it’s like the malls are playing Christmas tunes and the decorations are up. Some people go shopping in September. I can’t do that. I am not in the spirit yet.”Waiting on deals, even for everyday itemsAmazon tried its best to hype an early holiday sale at the start of October. Some of the top-selling products in the United States — like Crest Whitestrips and protein powder — weren’t exactly typical presents.“No one is buying gifts for Christmas,” said Jason Murray, an Amazon veteran whose company, Shipium, advises online retailers. “They are buying for themselves.”It doesn’t matter much to retailers, who used the early holiday sales to try to offload products before most shoppers had even picked out their Halloween costumes. But it signaled that shoppers are motivated by deals, no matter what they’re for. After two years of limited discounts, shoppers are showing they are willing to hold out for a bargain.Brands are getting on board. “We made too many,” the bike maker Specialized said on its website, telling customers that they can “save BIG.”Rakuten, an online platform that offers deals and shopper rewards, said retailer participation in Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions was the “biggest in the last three years.”Natalie Rodriguez, 47, who works for the Indiana Department of Revenue, said the products on sale weren’t what she wanted to give for Christmas.“I am really cognizant of those deals that are coming up right now. I think it is a grab to see who gets my money first. Am I taking advantage of it because I perceive it was a deal?“On the Amazon sale, I had 150 things in my cart and saved for later, but I didn’t see anything that is comparable to what I would think is a Black Friday deal. When I was a kid, Black Friday was superlow-cost, like 80 or 90 percent off. Most of what I saw was 30 and 40 percent on some items. It’s like, ‘Nah, I will just pass,’ especially if it is not an essential item. Crest Whitestrips were a great deal, but I don’t need them right now.“All I got was a $50 gift card with a $10 bonus on it.”On-time arrival, finallyFor years, largely spurred on by Amazon, consumers got used to fast shipping — often in two days or less. The pandemic upended that. Driver and inventory shortages meant people had to plan ahead.This year, industry experts do not expect another Shipageddon. There are more than enough delivery and warehouse workers to meet demand. Shippers should be able to deliver 110 million packages a day, almost 20 million more than shoppers are expected to order, according to ShipMatrix, a consultancy.“Because of experiences of what has gone on with global supply chains in the last few years, folks are stretching the holiday season over a longer period,” said Jamil Ghani, the vice president of Amazon Prime.Miranda Rosas, 21, a student at the University of California, Merced, was nervous about late-arriving Christmas gifts, so she started ordering last month.“Shipping last year was so awful, and a lot of items that I ordered a little bit last minute came in time, thankfully, but it took a long time. I tried to start a little sooner.“I really thought that it was going to take a couple weeks or a whole week and then it would ship and then it would take another two weeks to come. Now, a lot of my stuff it’s been like, ‘Oh! Already?’”Luxury is its own thingMathias Wasik for The New York TimesThe vibes are good for people with money to spare.More than three-quarters of luxury shoppers say they plan to spend the same as or more than last year, according to a survey from Saks. Twice as many as last year said they planned on dressing up in formal attire for the holidays, and 40 percent wanted to “self-gift” shoes. Luxury goods companies are giving signals that they’re confident about the U.S. market. This month, Estee Lauder agreed to buy Tom Ford for $2.8 billion, widening its reach into fashion apparel.“Customers are going back to a social life,” said Geoffroy van Raemdonck, chief executive at Neiman Marcus, whose top customers spend an average of $25,000 a year with the brand. “This is one of the first holidays that they feel more comfortable sharing it with their loved ones. I think that there’s a lot of good things coming with the holiday.”Sabah Essa, 49, a style adviser at Neiman Marcus in Atlanta, has been working with her clients, who include doctors, housewives, reality-TV stars and young professionals, to build their holiday wish lists.“Mostly everyone wants a big expensive piece compared to last year. For example, someone maybe got a Prada bag last Christmas, and now they’re upgrading it to high-end jewelry.“They want to find an outfit for going out to dinner or a party or birthday or to grab a gift for another friend. Everybody is just really happy to go out, and they can go without a mask.“A lot of them are also traveling. They want their suitcase to be all new stuff.“One client wants to give his wife 30 different gifts for her turning 30. He wants to have that plus Christmas because her birthday falls right around Christmas. The gifts are all different ranges, from stocking stuffers to high-end jewelry to Chanel bags to shoes — a lot of shoes, from sneakers to heels to boots.“It helps that we offer our clients a glass of champagne when they come in to make it easy for them to shop. Or if they want a cup of tea or coffee. It’s more fun than the years in the past now.”Interviews have been lightly edited for clarity. More

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    ‘No Jobs Available’: The Feast or Famine Careers of America’s Port Drivers.

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    Just before 4 o’clock on a Tuesday morning, the sky still black save for the reddish glow of the freeway, Marshawn Jackson rolls over in his bed at his home in Southern California and reaches for his iPhone.He clicks on an app used by truck drivers seeking assignments. The notification he absorbs is both familiar and disheartening: “No jobs available.”Mr. Jackson is paid per delivery. No work means no income. His day is already booked with two assignments, but the rest of his week is dead. Over the next 15 hours, he refreshes the app constantly, desperate to secure more jobs — an exercise in vigorous futility.He refreshes after he pulls his tractor-trailer into a nearby storage yard to pick up an empty shipping container, and again while he rolls down the freeway, toward the Port of Los Angeles — one hand on the wheel, one hand on his phone.He refreshes as he drops off the empty box, and a dozen more times while he waits for a crane to deposit another container on the chassis behind his rig, this one loaded with toys from factories in Asia. He refreshes while he fuels his truck.Each time, the same result.“You reach a point where you’re like, ‘Man, am I even making money?’” Mr. Jackson says. “Is it worth even getting up in the morning?”The sudden disappearance of work is an unexpected turn for Mr. Jackson, 37, and the rest of Southern California’s so-called dray operators — the drivers who transport shipping containers between the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach and the sprawl of warehouses filling out the Inland Empire to the east.For much of the pandemic, as the worst public health crisis in a century tore at daily life, these drivers were inundated with work, even while they contended with excruciating delays at the ports. Americans sequestered in their homes filled bedrooms with office furniture and basements with exercise equipment, summoning record volumes of goods from factories in Asia. The flow overwhelmed the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the gateway for roughly two-fifths of the nation’s imports.As dozens of ships sat at anchor miles off the coast, awaiting their chance to unload, dray operators like Mr. Jackson idled for hours on land before they could enter port gates. They waited hours more to pick up their containers, and yet again before they could drop them off at warehouses.These days, the lines are mostly gone, and loading and unloading goes smoothly. But the same truck drivers who endured the worst of the Great Supply Chain Disruption are now suffering another affliction as the docks reverts to a semblance of normalcy. The frenzied chaos that dominated the first years of the pandemic has been replaced by an uneasy stillness — not enough work.Like many truck drivers, Mr. Jackson works long hours.Brandon Pavan for The New York TimesHe checks his phone many times during the day to try to secure more jobs for his two employees and himself.Brandon Pavan for The New York TimesIncoming shipments are diminishing at Southern California’s two largest ports. This is partly because American demand for kitchen appliances, video game consoles and lawn furniture is finally waning. It also reflects how major retailers are bypassing Southern California, instead shipping to East Coast destinations like Savannah, Ga., to avoid potential upheaval as West Coast dockworkers face off with port managers over a new contract.Mr. Jackson’s journey through a maze of traffic-choked freeways exemplifies the bewildering, often-perilous road confronting tens of millions of workers in a global economy still grappling with the volatile effects of the pandemic along with soaring inflation.As central banks raise interest rates to choke off demand for goods and services in an effort to lower consumer prices, they are reducing income for legions of workers who are paid per assignment. The situation is especially fraught for the nation’s 75,000 dray operators and other foot soldiers of the supply chain.Dockworkers, who wield equipment to load and unload containers at ports, are protected by fierce and disciplined unions that have succeeded in commanding some of the higher wages in blue collar American life. Dray operators work primarily as independent contractors, buying their own fuel and insurance.Their status leaves them subject to constant shifts in economic fortune. In good times, like last year, dray operators command whatever the market must pay to keep them rolling. In lean times, they are guaranteed nothing.As he navigates five lanes of traffic on the way to the port, Mr. Jackson dons headphones to conduct a series of phone calls.More on CaliforniaBullet Train to Nowhere: Construction of the California high-speed rail system, America’s most ambitious infrastructure project, has become a multi-billion-dollar nightmare.A Piece of Black History Destroyed: Lincoln Heights — a historically Black community in a predominantly white, rural county in Northern California — endured for decades. Then came the Mill fire.Warehouse Moratorium: As warehouse construction balloons nationwide, residents in communities both rural and urban have pushed back. In California’s Inland Empire, the anger has turned to widespread action.He talks to his wife, sharing worries that they might not be able to close on their purchase of a newly built home. His income has fluctuated wildly in recent months. The mortgage company is demanding more documents, filling him with dread.He speaks with two men who drive a pair of trucks that he owns. He coordinates their schedules and helps them navigate unfamiliar shipping terminals. He frets that they may not bring in enough to cover the expenses on his other rigs.He passes billboards for beachfront homes in Baja, flights to Las Vegas, spa resorts. He wonders when he will be able to take his wife and 13-year-old daughter on a vacation.He contemplates the tenuous nature of American upward mobility, the forces tearing at the life he has constructed.“The way we’re living is hard times right now,” Mr. Jackson says. “You’ve still got to smile through it. You’ve still got to be positive. But, man, I’m dealing with a lot right now.”Container ships waited to enter the Port of Los Angeles during a large backlog last year.Erin Schaff/The New York Times‘Pray you can make it out.’Raised in South Central Los Angeles, Mr. Jackson says he embraced trucking as a form of liberation from a community he described as chronically short of good jobs and bedeviled by gang violence.“You get used to seeing things,” he says. “All you can do is pray you can make it out.”Growing up, he helped his grandmother with a hair care products business, packing boxes in a warehouse when he was only 10. But when the company failed in the aftermath of the long recession that began in 2007, Mr. Jackson sought a reliable way to support his partner and their then-infant daughter.A friend told him there were good jobs in long-haul trucking. He signed up for a training program arranged by Swift, a giant in the industry.He hopped the Greyhound to Phoenix for the three-week program, sharing a motel room full of scorpions with two other trainees. They practiced on aging rigs that lacked air conditioning despite summer heat reaching 117 degrees.He was soon earning $1,000 a week hauling trailers from a Dollar Store distribution center in Southern California to Phoenix and back.But as the routes grew longer, the strains on his family life intensified. He was hauling refrigerated trailers full of lettuce from the fields of central California to a distribution center in North Carolina. He was routinely away for two and three weeks at a stretch.When his daughter graduated from kindergarten in 2016, he pleaded with the company to schedule him to be home, just for that day. One dispatcher — a gruff, former Marine — mocked him.“This is what you signed up for,” he said.Mr. Jackson did not make it to the ceremony.“I felt like I was letting my whole family down,” he says. “It changed my whole outlook.”He drove back to California and turned in the keys on the truck he leased from the company. He used savings to buy a used rig and began picking up routes as an independent contractor, limiting his time away to no more than three days.Then he figured out how to sleep at home every night. He began working in and out of the port.He eventually bought the other trucks and took on the pair of drivers, paying them a share of the proceeds on the loads they deliver.“It was one of those things where you’ve got to take a risk,” he says. “Why wouldn’t I bet it all on myself? It was something I knew I could do.”He and his family moved into a rented apartment in the Inland Empire, east of Los Angeles, and then into a modest house they bought just off the freeway. They vacationed in Mexico and Hawaii.His daughter’s name, Bailey Jackson, is painted in white letters on the door of his rig. She is the reason he keeps rolling, he says. He takes her shopping — for clothes, for books.“That girl is always reading,” he says. “Some days, she’ll finish more than one book.”This year, he signed off on buying a four-bedroom home with space for a swimming pool in a quiet community carved into the desert in Riverside County.It was a five-minute drive from the yard where he parks his truck.It was a lifetime away from South Central Los Angeles.Dray operators like Mr. Jackson have to idle for hours on land before they can enter port gates.Brandon Pavan for The New York Times’We’ve got to survive.’Though the Inland Empire lies roughly 60 miles from the ports, its clusters of warehouses are an extension of the docks.Here, major retailers stash the bounty delivered from Asia via container ships. Distribution centers supply consumers across much of the American West.In the same way that massive slaughterhouses turned Chicago into a rail hub in the late 19th century, the Inland Empire has burgeoned into a dominant center of warehousing in the age of big box retail and e-commerce.At 5:43 a.m., the sun still a vague suggestion to the east, Mr. Jackson sits behind the wheel of his enormous blue Kenworth tractor. He guides it into a Shell station and climbs down to the pavement.Diesel is selling for $6.19 a gallon, an eye-popping number. He puts $100 in the tank, enough to get to Los Angeles to drop off the empty trailer he has picked up this morning from a warehouse for a home appliance company.Fifteen minutes later, as the sun glimmers through hazy skies, he is headed west on I-60.He wonders what the day will bring.A year ago, he could take his pick from scores of jobs at the Dray Alliance, the online platform where he secures assignments. Not anymore. Whenever a new job appears, he clicks immediately, knowing that dozens of other drivers are also keeping vigil on the site.The uncertainties of the trade are wearying. Three times in the past week, Mr. Jackson has wound up on so-called dry runs — journeys aborted because of a glitch. Sometimes, the paperwork is not in order. Other times, a pickup appointment has been made incorrectly. He heads home with a $100 fee from the shipper. It barely covers the cost of gas.Last year, when dozens of container ships were waiting their turns to unload, he sometimes sat parked in lines for as long as five hours to pick up and drop off, even as the Dray Alliance’s app steered him to jobs with the least congestion. He would grab his neck pillow and pass out in the front seat.Now, no app can redress a basic reduction in demand. Not only are jobs scarce, but compensation has fallen.Less than a year ago, Mr. Jackson was earning about $700 to haul a container from San Bernardino to the port of Los Angeles, a 70-mile journey that can take more than two hours when traffic is bad. This morning’s job brings $500, even though the price of fuel has increased.Trucks waiting to enter a terminal at the Port of Los Angeles in June.Stella Kalinina for The New York TimesStill, every job draws fierce interest, because drivers are stuck with bills.“They know we’ve got to keep working,” Mr. Jackson says. “That’s how they take advantage. We’ve got to survive.”At 7:20, a vivid sun gathering force, Mr. Jackson pulls into the container storage yard near the port, rumbling over bumpy pavement. He backs into a space between two other containers, steps out of the cab, and turns a crank handle to lower the landing gear on the chassis. Then he detaches the box.He quickly finds the empty container he is picking up. But he notices that the chassis below it is painted pale yellow — an indication that it is old. This could trigger an inspection.He drives to port, entering the gates of APM Terminals at 7:40. The terminal is controlled by Maersk, a Danish company that is one of the two largest container shipping operations on earth.The security guard waves him through. A few minutes later, a dockworker driving a top loader — a machine that lifts containers — motions for Mr. Jackson to pull up to an appointed space so he can pluck the box off the rig and add it to a stack.Mr. Jackson scans the app on his phone for his next destination: space E162, the letters painted white on the dock. He pulls in tight, his passenger-side mirror grazing the container to his right. A crane lifts a box off the stacks and deposits it onto his chassis. It lands with a thunderous boom.The morning is proceeding so smoothly that Mr. Jackson indulges visions of dropping the container, at a Mattel warehouse, with time enough to spare for a proper meal — his first of the day — before heading back to the port.But then a dockworker notices the old chassis. He diverts him to a special maintenance area. There, Mr. Jackson sits for more than an hour while a mechanic administers a repair.He pulls in to a truck stop in Long Beach, and adds another $400 worth of diesel to his tank.He walks across the lot, stepping between other tractor-trailers, on his way to the restroom — his first pit stop since dawn.One of his drivers calls to report that he has accepted an assignment from Dray Alliance to drop off an empty container at the port, and is now headed back to the Inland Empire, pulling nothing.Mr. Jackson is distressed. He had arranged for the driver to pick up a load at the port this evening. He should have waited to do both jobs on a single journey. Instead, he is burning gas on two round trips — at Mr. Jackson’s expense.“How does that cover the cost of me paying you?” Mr. Jackson asks. “The rates are down. It’s slow, bro’.”Mr. Jackson is an independent contractor who owns his truck and two others.Brandon Pavan for The New York Times‘I’m taking care of business.’At 11 in the morning, he is on the freeway again, headed back to the Inland Empire to drop off the container. He shovels a handful of popcorn into his mouth. Then he puts the bag on his console, and picks up his iPhone to refresh. No jobs.Fat clouds hang low over the Arrowhead Mountains as Mr. Jackson arrives at the Mattel warehouse just after noon. He drops the container, picks up an empty, and returns to the freeway, headed back to the port for the second half of his long day.Many truck drivers obsessively consume caffeine, perpetually fearful that they might otherwise descend into a dangerous state known as highway hypnosis.Mr. Jackson abstains. “I drink a lot of this,” he says, taking a swig from a bottle of Fiji water.To stay alert, he relies on the vibrations of his $6,000 sound system. He cranks up the dial on an old Isley Brothers classic, “Work to Do.” “I’m taking care of business, woman can’t you see. I’ve gotta make it for you, and gotta make it for me.”He rolls past a billboard for Fastevict.com, past tent cities full of homeless people, past self-storage units.He makes it to the port in time for a meal before his 3 p.m. pickup.He winds through the cracked streets of Long Beach, looking for a curb long enough to park a tractor-trailer. He finds a spot around the corner from the truck stop. He waits for an Uber Eats driver, who arrives bearing a Chipotle bowl — brown rice, chicken and avocado.He drops the container, picks up another, and parks again in Long Beach, taking a nap in the back in the cab while waiting for rush hour traffic to ease.At 6:30 in the evening, twilight settling over the parched land, he rolls toward home while again on the phone with his wife.The mortgage underwriter does not understand the division between Mr. Jackson’s personal finances and his business — a blurry line. The closing appears in danger. (He will eventually pull it off, though that will leave him staring at mortgage payments with diminished income.)Darkness fills his cab. Brake lights flicker ahead. He and his wife struggle to understand where their road leads.“People are like, ‘If you get through this point, you’ll be OK,’” Mr. Jackson says. “And I’m like, ‘How long is this point going to last?’”Major retailers are bypassing Southern California, instead shipping to East Coast destinations like Savannah, Ga., shown here, to avoid potential upheaval.Erin Schaff/The New York Times More

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    Amazon Earnings: Return to Profitability But Slow Growth Signaled Ahead

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    The e-commerce giant, which also turned a profit in its latest quarter, indicated sales in the holiday period might rise at their lowest level since 2001.For much of this year, Amazon’s growth slowed and losses mounted as it faced high costs and changes in people’s shopping habits with the ebbing of the coronavirus pandemic.On Thursday, the e-commerce giant signaled that its business was rebounding. But it also cautioned that growth would be weak, possibly falling to its lowest level since 2001.Amazon, which is headquartered in Seattle, posted $127.1 billion in sales for the third quarter, up 15 percent from a year earlier, showing that high inflation has not pummeled consumer spending. It also returned to profitability, making $2.9 billion after two quarters of losses.At the same time, Amazon projected that sales might slow to as low as 2 percent in the current quarter, which includes the vital holiday shopping season. Those estimates, which fell far short of Wall Street’s expectations, include a forecast that the strong U.S. dollar will continue to depress international sales.The results come amid a rocky patch for tech giants. Microsoft, Meta and others have indicated in their earnings this week that tough days may be ahead. On Thursday, a day after Meta revealed that its profits and sales fell in the most recent quarter, the company’s stock plunged more than 24 percent, to its lowest level in at least five years. Shares of Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent of Google, also have declined this week.More on Big TechBig Tech’s Slowdown: Amid stubborn inflation and rising interest rates, Google, Meta, Microsoft and other Silicon Valley giants are signaling that tough days may be ahead.App Store Battle: Spotify wants to get into the audiobooks business, but Apple has rejected its new app three times. The standoff is the latest in a series of confrontations between the companies.Inside Meta’s Struggles: After a rocky year, employees at Meta are expressing skepticism, confusion and frustration over Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for the metaverse.A Deal for Twitter?: In a surprise move, Elon Musk has offered to acquire Twitter at his original price of $44 billion, which could bring to an end the acrimonious legal fight between the billionaire and the company.“We are seeing signs all around that people’s budgets are tight, inflation is still high, energy costs are an additional layer,” Brian Olsavsky, Amazon’s finance chief, said on a call with reporters. “We are preparing for what could be a slower growth period.”He added that demand was particularly weakening in Europe, where inflation and rising fuel costs from the war in Ukraine have affected consumers.Amazon’s stock dropped more than 19 percent in after-hours trading.Prices are rising, but the volume of items selling is falling, said Guru Hariharan, whose company, CommerceIQ, advises large consumer brands that sell products on Amazon. “That is a very concerning trend,” he said.After two years of breakneck expansion, Amazon has spent much of this year putting on the brakes. Andy Jassy, who took over as chief executive last year, has moved to swiftly cut costs after the company overbuilt in anticipation of an extended pandemic-fueled boom in e-commerce. Amazon has curtailed plans to open warehouses and worked to improve the efficiency of its fulfillment operations, and it imposed a hiring freeze for corporate and technology roles for its retail division.In the third quarter, Amazon benefited from its annual two-day Prime Day sale in July. In the previous year, Prime Day had been held earlier than July. The company called this year’s event its “biggest ever,” and it generated about $6.8 billion in revenue — about $5 billion more than a typical two days — according to estimates from the investment bank Cowen.Growth in Amazon’s cloud computing division was the slowest on record, increasing 27 percent to $20.5 billion. Amazon Web Services accounted for 16 percent of the company’s total sales but was the only division that produced an operating profit. Mr. Olsavsky said growth slowed in the late summer, as Amazon saw a “lot of customers cutting their bills, which we are glad to help with.”Its international operations, dragged down by the strong dollar, generated $2.5 billion in operating losses.The company employed 1.5 million people by the end of the third quarter, almost 100,000 fewer than at the start of the year.Mr. Olsavsky said Amazon generated more than $1 billion in productivity savings, about half a billion less than executives had hoped. The cost to ship products grew slower than the number of units it sold. But the depressed sales growth makes it harder to operate at optimal efficiency, Mr. Olsavsky said, because the company can best utilize its fulfillment and delivery infrastructure when it has more orders.Amazon’s lucrative advertising business, which Morgan Stanley estimates is worth about $185 billion, grew 25 percent to $9.5 billion, though there was a slowdown over the quarter as advertisers pulled back. The company’s subscription business, primarily Prime membership, grew 9 percent to $8.9 billion.Mr. Olsavsky said overall operating profit was reduced by high costs to market two major video offerings for Prime members — Thursday night football games with the National Football League, and its new “Lord of the Rings” series.In addition to the volatile economic environment, the value of Amazon’s investment in Rivian Automotive, an electric truck maker that has struggled to meet production goals, has added fluctuations to Amazon’s profits this year. That valuation rose $1.1 billion, contributing to Amazon’s profits in the latest quarter. More

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    Amazon Labor Union Loses Election at Warehouse Near Albany

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    By a 2-to-1 ratio, the group had its second defeat since a surprise victory in April on Staten Island.Workers at an Amazon facility near Albany, N.Y., have voted decisively against being represented by the upstart Amazon Labor Union, denting efforts to expand unionization across the giant e-commerce company.Employees at the warehouse cast 206 votes to be represented by the union and 406 against, according to a count released on Tuesday by the National Labor Relations Board. Almost 950 workers were eligible to vote.The vote was the Amazon Labor Union’s second unsuccessful election since a surprise victory in April, when workers at an Amazon facility on Staten Island voted to form the first union of the company’s warehouse employees in the United States.“We’re glad that our team in Albany was able to have their voices heard, and that they chose to keep the direct relationship with Amazon,” Kelly Nantel, an Amazon spokeswoman, said in a statement.In recent months, the Amazon Labor Union has debated whether to focus on winning a contract at the Staten Island facility, known as JFK8, or on expanding its reach to other warehouses around the country through additional elections.Christian Smalls, the union’s president, “is very much in favor of trying to create opportunities for as many workers as possible to vote,” said Cassio Mendoza, a JFK8 worker and the union’s communications director. At the same time, the union has felt pressure to demonstrate progress to workers on Staten Island, and has recently stepped up its internal organizing there after months of minimal public activity.The result on Tuesday from the ALB1 warehouse in Castleton-on-Hudson, N.Y., about 10 miles south of Albany, did not appear to dissuade the union from reaching beyond JFK8.More on Big TechIn Australia: Dozens of workers at Apple walked off the job after negotiations over pay and working conditions stalled. This is why the action is significant.Inside Meta’s Struggles: After a rocky year, employees at Meta are expressing skepticism, confusion and frustration over Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for the metaverse.A Deal for Twitter?: In a surprise move, Elon Musk has offered to acquire Twitter at his original price of $44 billion, which could bring to an end the acrimonious legal fight between the billionaire and the company.Hiring Freezes: Amazon is halting corporate hiring in its retail business for the rest of the year, joining Meta as the latest tech companies to pull back amid the economic uncertainty.“We are filled with resolve to continue and expand our campaign for fair treatment for all Amazon workers,” Mr. Smalls said in a statement. “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.”About 80 percent of the union’s budget of more than half a million dollars has been focused on Staten Island, union officials have said. The rest has been set aside for expansion efforts, including at ALB1 and a facility in Southern California that submitted a petition for an election last week.Mr. Smalls said the election “wasn’t free and fair.” Even before the ballots were tallied on Tuesday, the union expressed concern that Amazon had improperly interfered with the vote, potentially laying the groundwork for a legal objection to the result.Labor board staff members have been investigating 27 charges of unfair labor practices that the union filed against Amazon before the voting began, the agency said last week. The union has since lodged additional concerns.One included an accusation that a worker had been suspended for complaining that one of Amazon’s anti-union consultants followed him around and harassed him during the voting period, according to Retu Singla, a lawyer representing the union.“They try to whip votes during the election,” said Mr. Mendoza, who added that the consultant appeared to be wearing worker clothes and an Amazon vest.Another employee, who was not directly involved with the union campaign and requested anonymity, said on the first day of voting that he had seen what appeared to be “fake employees” who were wearing Amazon vests but did not know the basics of the jobs and cast doubt on the union’s ability to negotiate a contract.Matthew Bodie, a former N.L.R.B. lawyer now at the University of Minnesota Law School, said that while one-on-one conversations with workers during the voting period were allowed, seeking to deceive employees by misrepresenting the identity of company agents could amount to interference in the election.Amazon declined to comment on the accusations.The ALB1 warehouse handles oversize items like outdoor equipment and televisions. A recent report by a worker advocacy group found that the facility had the highest rate of serious injuries of any Amazon warehouse in New York for which the group was able to obtain government data.Amazon has emphasized its minimum starting wage and benefits, and has said it has improved its safety record more than other retailers in recent years. In its messaging to workers, it has questioned the Amazon Labor Union’s experience and has said workers could be worse off if they voted for a union.In interviews outside the warehouse in September, some Amazon workers said they were supporting the union because pay was too low, especially in light of how physically taxing the work could be. The company recently raised its starting base wage at the warehouse to $17 an hour, from $15.70.“I think we need a union — we need more pay,” said Masud Abdullah, an employee at the warehouse. He said he had made about $22 an hour at an industrial bakery, but left that job because the hours did not fit with his parenting responsibilities.He and other workers also said they felt Amazon’s disciplinary policies were sometimes arbitrary. “It’s like you don’t have nobody representing you,” Mr. Abdullah said. “They could get you in and out for anything.”Other workers said they didn’t believe a union was necessary because Amazon already provided solid pay and benefits, such as health care and college tuition subsidies. Even some union supporters acknowledged that the company often treated workers well.Some workers expressed skepticism that the Amazon Labor Union would deliver on its promises, such as improving pay. “I feel like I haven’t seen any evidence,” said Jacob Carpenter, who works at the warehouse. He added that he planned to vote no.Amazon has been fighting the union’s successful vote on Staten Island. After a lengthy hearing on the company’s objections to that election, a labor board official recently endorsed the union’s victory. A regional official must still weigh in, but Amazon told workers at JFK8 that it intended to appeal. The union has recently pushed a petition to pressure Amazon to negotiate a contract. More

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    Amid Inflation, Retailers Brace for Strapped Holiday Shoppers

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    Retailers have navigated pandemic closures and supply chain snarls in recent years. But dealing with the fallout from inflation could be an even tougher test.In 2020, it was pandemic closures and social distancing. Last year, it was the supply chain. Now, the problem is demand.For retailers, that may make this holiday season their biggest test yet.The holidays are the most important time of the year for retail. November and December can account for up to a quarter of the annual sales of department stores and specialty retailers. Companies place orders for seasonal and holiday merchandise months in advance so that they have enough stock on hand. The primacy of the holiday season has pretty much held steady, even during the turbulence of the pandemic. Whether through curbside pickup operations or a pivot to more expensive air deliveries during last season’s crunch, retailers still benefited from people ready to spend on all manner of products.Now, as Americans head into the season when they’re prodded to spend with abandon on holiday gifts, they aren’t showing the same willingness to do so.“You’ve had consumers that have had to weather a lot,” said Vivek Pandya, a lead analyst at Adobe Digital Insights, pointing to higher prices for gas, groceries and everyday services that have defied the Federal Reserve’s efforts to control inflation.Overall consumer demand for everyday goods and services remains robust and prices continue to increase at a faster-than-expected pace, but nearly 60 percent of U.S. shoppers say finances are factoring into their holiday shopping decisions, according to a survey by Sensormatic Solutions released this month. That’s up from 14 percent last year. One in five holiday shoppers will spend less this season because of a changed economic situation, a recent survey from the NPD Group, a marketing research firm, found.This holiday season, retailers “have to think about and pivot a little bit more to win the consumer compared to only thinking about the profit margin from the purchase,” Mr. Pandya said. “Now, with demand being weaker, they really have to go out of their way to advertise to consumers and get consumers with the highest likelihood to spend.”But discounts eat into retailers’ profit margins, and they have been able to employ that strategy only sparingly in recent years. During last year’s holiday season, in particular, retailers recorded bigger margins thanks to supply chain logjams. Inventory was low, and shoppers were clamoring to get their hands on products. The result: fewer discounts.“A lot of that is going to reverse, if not more than reverse, across department stores and specialty apparel,” said David Silverman, a senior director at Fitch Ratings. “Consumers are less compelled to buy, and they’re going to need the call to action.”A difficult holiday season for retailers could lead to restructurings and layoffs in 2023.John Taggart for The New York TimesIt’s a very difficult time for any company that sells things. The Fed has spent this year trying to combat near-record inflation by raising interest rates to tamp down consumer spending. Retailers have too much merchandise that shoppers no longer want. Consumer spending on durable goods has been easing over the past couple of months, according to data from the St. Louis Fed. Many retailers have recently revised their full-year financial outlooks, halted hiring and closed stores.Amazon is freezing corporate hiring for its retail business for the rest of the year. Peloton is laying off about 12 percent of its work force in its fourth round of job cuts this year. FedEx is halting hiring and closing stores as demand falls. Walmart plans to hire fewer seasonal workers this year. The Gap is cutting 500 corporate positions.Inflation F.A.Q.Card 1 of 5What is inflation? More