Amazon Says No Impact From Black Friday Labor Strikes

Glenn Taylor
·4 min read

Amazon said Black Friday was its best ever, with the highest sales it’s recorded on the day after thanksgiving and most items sold in the e-commerce giant’s nearly three-decade history. This comes despite labor strikes affecting company operations in 30 countries in action coordinated by the “Make Amazon Pay” coalition.

As is often the case with the tech titan’s high-traffic holiday shopping extravaganzas, like Prime Day or the fall Prime Big Deal Days event, Amazon hasn’t revealed actual sales numbers generated during the occasion.

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On CNBC’s Squawk Box, Beryl Tomay, vice president of last mile delivery and technology at Amazon, said on average, customers ordered more than 1,000 items per second throughout Black Friday. Top-selling categories included home goods, kitchen, toys and beauty products, according to Tomay.

When anchor Becky Quick pressed Tomay on specific sales details, the executive said she didn’t have those numbers on hand, but that Amazon had a “great season” and is “geared up for Cyber Monday.”

Amazon told Sourcing Journal it has not seen any impact to its operations stemming from the Black Friday labor activity, which saw workers at warehouses in the U.K., Italy, Germany and Spain, among other countries, walk off the job in protest of Amazon’s often-criticized pay and working conditions.

“We fundamentally disagree with these perspectives,” Amazon spokesperson Mary Kate Paradis said of the labor actions. “The fact is Amazon has created millions of good jobs, while helping create and support hundreds of thousands of small businesses around the world. We offer great pay and benefits for our employees, with great career opportunities, and provide a modern and safe working environment for all.”

In Germany, Amazon’s second-biggest market by sales in 2022, the Ver.di trade union estimated that around 2,000 workers went on strike at six fulfillment centers. And in the U.K., 1,000 workers walked out of warehouse in Coventry, England, while hundreds more took part in protests outside Amazon’s country headquarters in London.

Amazon got a reprieve from its staff in Spain on Monday, days after one of the country’s largest trade unions, Confederación Sindical de Comisiones Obreras (CCOO), urged roughly 20,000 warehouse and delivery workers to walk out to demand higher pay and better working conditions.

The company reached a new contract agreement with these workers, enabling Amazon to avoid the full impact of a planned one-hour strike per shift on one of the busiest online shopping days of the year.

But approximately 5,000 Amazon delivery workers will continue with the protest, stopping work for the last hour of their shifts, because they decided the company’s pay proposal wasn’t enough, according to CCOO leader Douglas Harper. The union said it would continue negotiations with the company to improve pay and conditions at the local level.

With strikes hanging over Amazon’s head, the question remains whether the e-commerce giant was able to outperform the industry’s online sales growth on Black Friday.

According to Adobe Analytics, U.S. e-commerce sales hit a record $9.7 billion, up 7.5 percent versus last year, while also jumping 8.1 percent year over year to $5 billion on Saturday and increasing 6.4 percent year over year to $5.3 billion on Sunday. Adobe covers more than 1 trillion visits to U.S. retail sites, 100 million SKUs and 18 product categories.

Similarly, Mastercard reported that U.S. e-commerce sales rose by 8.5 percent year-over-year, while Salesforce, which bases its numbers on transactions for 1.5 billion consumers, said U.S. online sales jumped 9 percent to $16.4 billion. The CRM giant said online sales reached $70.9 billion globally, an 8 percent increase from Black Friday last year.

While Amazon hasn’t reported its numbers, another e-commerce giant was more transparent about the holiday start.

Shopify merchants set a Black Friday record with a combined $4.1 billion in sales, a 22 percent increase from the year period. Collective sales reached $4.2 million per minute at 12:01 p.m. ET on Friday, with the average cart price amounting to $110.08 on a constant-currency basis. According to the Canadian company, the hottest product categories among Shopify merchants include clothing, personal care and jewelry.

Ahead of the holiday weekend, the Wall Street Journal report on Monday said that Amazon beat UPS and FedEx in total parcel volumes delivered this year.

Before Thanksgiving this year, Amazon had already delivered more than 4.8 billion packages in the U.S., and its internal projections predict that it will deliver around 5.9 billion by the end of the year, according to documents viewed by the WSJ. Amazon shipped 5.2 billion packages in 2022.