Are Amazon Corporate Employees Delivering Groceries?
Amazon’s corporate employees were asked on Monday to volunteer at the company’s warehouses to assist with grocery delivery as it headed into its annual Prime Day sales event, as reported by The Guardian.
In a Slack message reviewed by The Guardian that went to thousands of white-collar workers in the New York City area, an Amazon area manager called for corporate “volunteers to help us out with Prime Day to deliver to customers on our biggest days yet.” It’s not clear how many took up the offer.
The manager said that volunteers are “needed” to work during Amazon’s widely anticipated period, July 8-11, in two-hour shifts between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. in Brooklyn's Red Hook neighborhood, where the company operates a warehouse as part of its grocery delivery service, Amazon Fresh. As reported by The Guardian, corporate employees would be tasked with picking items, preparing carts and bags of groceries for delivery, packing boxes on receiving carts, and working to “boost morale with distribution of snacks.” The manager noted such an effort would help “connect” warehouse and corporate teams.
An Amazon spokesman, Griffin Buch, said that this isn’t the first time that “grocery corporate” employees have been “invited to volunteer” with fulfillment.
“This support is entirely optional, and it allows corporate employees to get closer to customers while enabling our store teams to focus on the work that’s most impactful,” Buch said.
The future of Amazon's corporate employees working in the office has recently come into question. In a June 17 message to employees, Amazon President and CEO Andy Jassy acknowledged that with the potential of GenAI, Amazon “will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”
Jassy encouraged employees to educate themselves about the technology and “use and experiment with AI whenever you can, participate in your team’s brainstorms to figure out how to invent for our customers more quickly and expansively, and how to get more done with scrappier teams.”
He went on to write, “Those who embrace this change, become conversant in AI, help us build and improve our AI capabilities internally and deliver for customers, will be well positioned to have high impact and help us reinvent the company.”
In the meantime, this year’s Prime Day July 8-11 event is the longest summer Prime Day sale to date and includes groceries and everyday essentials as well as the traditionally popular electronics, apparel, toys and home décor items.
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New for this year’s event is a “Today’s Big Deals” promotion for Prime members, with deep savings drops across themes including “Summer Savings” and “Premium Deals.”
More consumers are expected to enjoy Amazon’s fast Prime delivery as the company recently revealed that it’s expanding its same-day and next-day delivery services to millions of U.S. customers in more than 4,000 smaller cities, towns and rural areas by the end of this year. After delivering to Prime members at record-breaking speeds in 2023 and 2024, the company is on pace to get even faster in 2025: So far this year, the number of items delivered the same or next day in the United States has increased by more than 30% versus the year-ago period, according to Amazon.
For its first quarter ended March 31, Amazon reported that net sales increased 9% to $155.7 billion in Q1, compared with $143.3 billion in Q1 2024. Excluding the $1.4 billion unfavorable impact from year-over-year (YoY) changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the quarter, net sales jumped 10%. North America segment sales increased 8% YoY to $92.9 billion. Q2 earnings are expected at the end of July.
Seattle-based Amazon is No. 2 on The PG 100, Progressive Grocer’s 2025 list of the top food and consumables retailers in North America. PG also named the company among its Retailers of the Century.
