wearing a black shirt, in
Seattle Between October 1999 and February 2000 Amazon's logotype has featured a curved arrow leading from A to Z, representing that the company carries every product from A to Z, with the arrow shaped like a smile. According to sources, Amazon did not expect to make a profit for four to five years. This comparatively slow growth caused stockholders to complain that the company was not reaching profitability fast enough to justify their investment or even survive in the long term. In 2001, the
dot-com bubble burst, destroying many e-companies in the process, but Amazon survived and moved forward beyond the tech crash to become a huge player in online sales. The company finally turned its first profit in the fourth quarter of 2001: $0.01 (i.e., 1¢ per share), on revenues of more than $1 billion. This
profit margin, though extremely modest, proved to skeptics that Bezos' unconventional
business model could succeed. In 2011, Amazon had 30,000 full-time employees in the US, and by the end of 2016, it had 180,000 employees. In 2014, Amazon launched the
Fire Phone. The Fire Phone was meant to deliver media streaming options but the venture failed, resulting in Amazon registering a $170 million loss. This would also lead to the Fire Phone production being stopped the following year. In August of the same year, Amazon would finalize the acquisition of
Twitch, a social video gaming streaming site, for $970 million. This new acquisition would be integrated into the game production division of Amazon. In June 2017, Amazon announced that it would acquire
Whole Foods, a high-end
supermarket chain with over 400 stores, for $13.4 billion. The acquisition was seen by media experts as a move to strengthen its physical holdings and challenge
Walmart's supremacy as a brick and mortar retailer. This sentiment was heightened by the fact that the announcement coincided with Walmart's purchase of men's apparel company
Bonobos. On August 23, 2017, Whole Foods shareholders, as well as the
Federal Trade Commission, approved the deal. In September 2016, Amazon announced plans to locate a second headquarters in a
metropolitan area with at least a million people. Cities needed to submit their presentations by October 19, 2017, for the project called HQ2. The $5 billion second headquarters, starting with 500,000 square feet and eventually expanding to as much as 8 million square feet, may have as many as 50,000 employees. In 2017, Amazon announced it would build a new downtown Seattle building with space for Mary's Place, a local charity in 2020. At the end of 2017, Amazon had over 566,000 employees worldwide. According to an August 8, 2018, story in
Bloomberg Businessweek, Amazon has about a 5% share of US retail spending (excluding cars and car parts and visits to restaurants and bars), and a 43.5% share of online spending in the U.S. in 2018. The forecast is for Amazon to own 49% of the total American online spending in 2018, with two-thirds of Amazon's revenue coming from the US. Amazon launched the last-mile delivery program and ordered 20,000
Mercedes-Benz Sprinter Vans for the service in September 2018. Amazon generated $386 billion in US retail e-commerce sales in 2020, up 38% over 2019. Amazon's Marketplace sales represent an increasingly dominant portion of its e-commerce business. On November 14, 2022, it was announced that Amazon had plans to lay off 10,000 employees among its corporate and technology staff. The number increased to 18,000 in a January 2023 announcement. In March, Amazon announced it would eliminate an additional 9,000 jobs. On September 25, 2023, Amazon and artificial intelligence startup
Anthropic announced a strategic partnership in which Amazon would become a minority stakeholder by investing up to US$4 billion, including an immediate investment of $1.25 billion. As part of the deal, Anthropic would use
Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider and will make its AI models available to AWS customers. With more than one million workers employed in warehouses around the world, Amazon in 2023 started testing
humanoid robots that provide partial
automation of its work tasks. The robots are able to position empty boxes and indicate where new ones are stored.
HQ2 In November 2018, Amazon announced it would open its highly sought-after new headquarters, known as (
HQ2) in
Long Island City,
Queens, New York City, and in the
Crystal City neighborhood of
Arlington County, Virginia. On February 14, 2019, Amazon announced it was not moving forward with plans to build HQ2 in Queens but would instead focus solely on the Arlington location. The company plans to locate at least 25,000 employees at HQ2 by 2030 and will invest more than US$2.5 billion to establish its new headquarters in Crystal City as well as neighboring Pentagon City and Potomac Yard, an area jointly marketed as "National Landing." The announcement also created a new partnership with
Virginia Tech University to develop an Innovation Campus to fill the demand for high-tech talent in National Landing and beyond.
COVID-19 At the end of March 2020, some workers of the
Staten Island warehouse staged a
walkout in protest of the poor health situation at their workplace amidst the
2020 COVID-19 pandemic. One of the organizers,
Chris Smalls, was first put on
quarantine without anyone else being quarantined, and soon afterwards fired from the company. The pandemic caused a surge in online shopping and resulted in shortages of household staples both online and in some brick-and-mortar stores. From March 17 to April 10, 2020, Amazon warehouses stopped accepting non-essential items from third-party sellers. The company hired approximately 175,000 additional warehouse workers and delivery contractors to deal with the surge, and temporarily raised wages by $2/hour. The companies agreed to the merger deal on May 26, 2021, for a total value of , subject to regulatory approval. The deal would allow Amazon to add the MGM library to the
Amazon Prime Video catalog, with the studio continuing to operate as a label under the new parent company. The merger was finalized on March 17, 2022, following the expiration of the FTC's review deadline and having cleared the European Commission two days earlier on March 15. Later that day, Amazon Studios and Prime Video SVP Mike Hopkins revealed that Amazon will continue to partner with
United Artists Releasing (MGM and
Annapurna Pictures' joint distribution venture), which will remain in operation to release all future MGM titles theatrically on a "case-by-case basis," while "all MGM employees will join my organization." It was also revealed that Amazon had no plans to make changes to the studio's production slate and release schedules nor make all MGM content exclusive to Prime Video, providing some hope that the studio would operate autonomously from Amazon Studios. These plans are expected to not impact the future of the
James Bond franchise and its creative team. Two
town halls further detailing MGM's future post-merger took place on March 18, 2022, which included one for MGM employees and one for Amazon Studios/Prime Video employees. Both revealed the new interim reporting structure as part of Amazon's "phased integration plan," which would involve De Luca, Mark Burnett (Chairman of
MGM Worldwide Television) and
COO Chris Brearton reporting to Hopkins on behalf of the studio. On April 27, 2022, it was announced that De Luca and Abdy would leave the studio. ==Amazon Go==