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Courtesy of Joanelle Cobos/John Paul Martinez/Iren Azra Zou
It’s been a few weeks since Amazon announced plans to cut 14,000 corporate jobs, but many laid-off employees are still coming to terms with it.
While the original announcement cited a need to be leaner in the age of AI, CEO Andy Jassy later said, “It’s about culture.”
Business Insider spoke with six former Amazon employees who lost their jobs in the latest round of layoffs. One was an anonymous single parent who said they’d just moved to Seattle in June due to the company’s return-to-office mandate — only to be laid off. Another, an anonymous former product manager, said he got wind of the layoff timing and set his alarm for 3 a.m. that day to check his email.
The unexpected nature of the layoffs — and the tough job market — are among the factors making it harder for some workers to move on.
Here is a selection of their responses, lightly edited for length and clarity.
Iren Azra Zou: Software engineer, 27, based in New Jersey. Employed at Amazon for roughly one year.
I woke up to a 6 a.m. automated text from Amazon telling me to check my email for a message about my role. When I tried to log in to my work account, I received authorization denied errors. At that moment, I was pretty sure I had been laid off.
John Paul Martinez: Technical support engineer, 35, based in Orlando. Employed at Amazon for over three years.
I received an email at 5 a.m. EST from HR advising that I’d been laid off.
James Hwang: IT support engineer, 27, based in Michigan. Employed at Amazon for roughly four years.
I got an automated text message from Amazon telling me to check my personal email before clocking in, and then I saw an email from HR. I was home at the time.
Joanelle Cobos: Design manager, 37, based in Las Vegas. Employed at Amazon for roughly four years.
I was at home getting ready to head to the office, and I happened to notice two text messages from Amazon that looked like spam, asking me to click a link or check my email. Since I didn’t trust the texts, I went to my work laptop and signed in, only to be met with a message saying that my account had been disabled. At this point, I was already guessing that my position had been eliminated.
Zou: There were rumors the day before that something big was coming. I had a strange feeling in my gut that I might be one of them, even though I was performing well — I had met my goals earlier than expected. This wasn’t the first time budget cuts had affected me in my career, and I know how, in these situations, people can become numbers on a spreadsheet. So I was surprised — but also not surprised.
Martinez: Extremely surprised, since we were not given any indication of this massive layoff, and we are heading into the holidays.
Hwang: Very surprised. I was a high performer who did a lot for our organization, and IT employees had been safe in the last couple of rounds of layoffs. There’s a lot of work to do, and we were already low on team members
Cobos: Not terribly. I was hired in December 2021, and my tenure had been plagued by whispers of voluntary resignation programs and RIFs, basically once a year. This is also my third layoff since 2019 and my fourth in my career, so I plan my life around the very real possibility of being laid off.
Zou: My husband was next to me in bed and awake, so he was the first person I told. After that, I messaged a few close coworkers as we tried to figure out who else had been affected. When I learned that some literal rock stars on my team also got laid off, I was shocked.
Martinez: I reached out to my colleague, who worked with me in the same capacity at Amazon, to see if she had also received the email or if this was a joke or a complete misunderstanding.
Hwang: My wife and my parents.
Cobos: My mother, sisters, and I have a group chat. I sent them a message once I had confirmed everything and read through my announcement letter. They were surprised.
Zou: I made it a point to stick to my daily routines: coffee, exercise, my sleep schedule. I didn’t want everything to feel chaotic. I think I built some Legos, talked to friends and coworkers, and read a book. I just gave myself space to process.
Martinez: I broke down crying, not understanding what had occurred that morning. I started to think about all the expenses — mortgage, car payment, credit cards, and my father’s medical bills.
Hwang: I just processed what happened and looked over my résumé.
Cobos: I spent that evening at home enjoying myself. The idea of having so much free time ahead of me, even with the need to find new employment, is exciting.
Zou: I’m already looking for new opportunities. I’m not rushing, though — I want to find a good fit. I’m leaning toward a smaller company where there’s less bureaucracy and more space to contribute and see the impact of my work.
Martinez: I have been actively searching for employment. However, due to the massive layoffs at Amazon and other corporations, I am extremely fearful of the competition.
Hwang: I have been looking for a new role in cloud support or it system engineering.
Cobos: I’m looking into starting my own small business that can potentially provide income while I’m unemployed and additional income once I find new full time employment. I’m not in a rush to jump into another corporate job, even though that’s where the best income is. Ideally, I’d like to take a lower-stress, lower-paying job with good health benefits and bridge the financial gap with income from my own business.
Zou: You can’t help but ask yourself, “Why me?” But eventually you come to terms with the reality that you can do everything right and still be included in a layoff simply because you’re a number on a budget sheet. I know I worked hard and brought a lot to the table. A layoff doesn’t erase that, and I’m not going to let it make me question my value.
Now, I see the layoff as a turning point. It helped me clarify what I want in my next role: more ownership, clearer growth, and a healthier environment. It’s still a difficult experience, but I’m feeling more grounded and optimistic as time goes on.
Martinez: My feelings have not changed. I think Amazon has done a poor job of communicating with everyone regarding our benefits, stock options, severance package, and job placement assistance.
Hwang: It’s been a shock. The current job market has been crazy hard. I already applied to 100 jobs and haven’t gotten any interviews yet, so I’m concerned, but I have to keep going.
Cobos: My feelings on the layoff haven’t changed. I’m not a fan of how it was handled, but I’m honestly excited for the time and opportunity to reexamine what I want to do and explore my options. This layoff has forced me to take time to reflect.
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Getty; Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI
The core of the modern American dream is cheap stuff, and contrary to the president’s suggestion earlier this year, it turns out little girls do need 30 dolls. Or, at least, their families want to be able to afford them, and they don’t want the White House telling them otherwise.
The Trump administration’s line on its economic policies in the opening months of the president’s second go-round was, in essence, deal with it. Yes, tariffs will cause short-term pain, and sure, efforts to reshore manufacturing and curb immigration may increase labor-market uncertainty, but, officials insist, it will all be worth it. That’s how we got Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent saying that access to inexpensive goods is “not the essence of the American dream,” and President Donald Trump saying that kids should make do with fewer pencils.
The messaging isn’t landing. Sacrifice is not a fun thing for consumers to do, especially when the payoff is vague at best and, at worst, contrary to the kind of economy they desire. Prices continue to rise, “affordability” is the word of the moment, and consumers are frustrated with the lack of it everywhere they look.
“They had a theory of the case of how the economy would evolve earlier this year,” says Mike Konczal, senior director of policy and research at the Economic Policy Institute, an economic think tank. The administration thought mass deportations would open up jobs for American workers, DOGE-driven government layoffs would push workers toward private-sector roles, and tariffs would incentivize a manufacturing boom and reshoring. Thus far, most of it hasn’t been working out. “Even nonpolitical people are aware that something’s floundering here,” Konczal says.
Trump, who rode to the White House in no small part on a promise to bring down costs, is scrambling to refocus. He’s floating haphazard policy ideas (economists are generally dubious), claiming prices are already down (somewhat true for select products, very much not true for others), and expressing exasperation at the whole situation.
Voters often blame the guy in the Oval Office for their problems, and right now, that guy is Trump. He’s learning a lesson the Biden team did: You can’t insist your way to a good economy.
As much as conservatives may not like New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mandami, they are paying attention to him, especially his campaign’s relentless focus on affordability. Whether or not people agree with the democratic socialists’ solutions, the overall message resonates: The rent — and the price of everything else — is too damn high.
Americans in New York and across the country are justified in being miffed. Consumer prices have increased by 25% since 2020. While inflation appeared to be slowing around the middle of 2025, it has picked up again and is on track to end the year at about 3% annual growth. The compounding effect of years of price increases is taking a financial and psychological toll.
Even nonpolitical people are aware that something’s floundering here.
“It’s that cumulative piece of it,” says Claudia Sahm, the chief economist at New Century Advisors.
Gas and egg prices have come down from their highs earlier in the year, but the price of coffee, beef, and bananas are going in the other direction. Beyond the grocery store, Ernie Tedeschi, a non-resident senior fellow at the Yale Budget Lab, explains that the price of durable goods — think furniture, appliances, and electronics — increased by 1.5% over the first eight months of the year. During the same period last year, durable goods prices fell by 1%, and there was an expectation that prices for these bigger-ticket items would continue into 2025. “It’s not just that they rose at all, it’s that we were expecting a decline,” Tedeschi says. “That’s not pandemic size, but that’s a meaningful increase.” Services prices, such as entertainment and transportation, have continued to rise at an elevated pace, too.
The costs of major essentials are especially daunting for many consumers, including healthcare, childcare, and housing. The median home sales price in the US is over $400,000. Just five years ago, it was much closer to $300,000. Childcare costs families thousands of dollars each year. Healthcare costs are expected to rise steeply for many Americans next year.
“People are broadly feeling pretty negative about the economy,” says Joanne Hsu, the director of consumer surveys at the University of Michigan. They’re “perfectly aware” that inflation rates have fallen, she says, but even if goods aren’t rising in price quite as fast, consumers can still remember the old sticker price, which is aggravating. Add on the fact that because of tariffs, many people don’t think we’re out of the woods when it comes to price hikes, either.
Another factor Hsu thinks is worth noting: weakening incomes. People are worried about their job security, the labor market, and their current paychecks. Twenty-nine percent of respondents to the University of Michigan’s November survey mentioned softer incomes as a negative factor in their personal finances, compared to 20% the month before. Average wages for most workers are still outpacing inflation, but the job market is stagnant, and many workers are stuck in place.
As a former Biden administration official, I will tell you we learned the hard way that consumers do not distinguish between price levels and inflation.
“The most visible part of this low-hire, low-fire job market is entry level workers being like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve done 5,000 interviews and all I got is this lousy T-shirt,’ but the other, smaller violin is people who were job-hopping to get raises for the last few years who just can’t do that,” says Michael Madowitz, the principal economist at the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank. “That’s actually neither great for them nor for their employers.”
The TL;DR here is people are tired of being surprised at how expensive everything is and increasingly annoyed that their paychecks aren’t going as far, too. A Washington Post-ABC News-Pisos poll from October found that 71% of American adults say they’re spending more money on groceries compared to a year ago. Many consumers have hoped prices would fall — they don’t realize that, in many cases, the best they can hope for is for them to stop rising so much.
“As a former Biden administration official, I will tell you we learned the hard way that consumers do not distinguish between price levels and inflation,” Tedeschi says.
When people get angry, they look for someone to blame. This time around, that’s Trump: the WaPo-ABC poll found 59% think the president is at fault for the current rate of inflation. A Quinnipiac poll from October found that just 38% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, his lowest point since February 2017.
“I think the American people realize that’s just not a priority for this administration,” Konczal says.
Trump, who campaigned on “making America affordable again,” has struggled to counter the disillusionment. Speaking with reporters in early November, Trump touted the reduced cost of this year’s Walmart Thanksgiving basket while overlooking that the 2025 edition includes fewer items and brushing aside concerns about prices, at one point declaring, “I don’t want to hear about the affordability.” Days later, Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, in an interview on ABC News’ “This Week,” said that the administration is making “substantial progress” and that prices will come down “over the coming months and next year.” In a subsequent interview with Fox News, Bessent said the administration would seek to lower coffee and banana prices “very quickly,” and at the end of the week, the president signed an executive order dropping reciprocal tariffs on food items such as beef, coffee, and avocados. The White House has also announced deals to cut the prices of weight-loss drugs.
In a post-Mamadani election scramble, Trump has floated a flurry of ideas that could be seen as addressing the cost-of-living problem. There’s the idea of sending out $2,000 checks to low- and middle-income Americans as a tariff rebate and making 50-year mortgages a thing. Many economists and real-estate analysts aren’t sold on these propositions. Congress would need to agree to send out the checks, and projected tariff revenues wouldn’t be enough to cover them. Half-century mortgages would mean homebuyers pay significantly more overall interest and take longer to build equity. It could also increase demand for homes, in turn increasing prices and adding stress to an already crunched supply if we don’t end up building more homes.
Even more Trump-friendly voices are doing some sign-tapping around affordability. Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Brett Baier have pressed the president on the issue, asking him to respond to concerns — which he’s largely dismissed — about prices. In an interview with CNN, GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was up front about her own experience as a consumer. “I go to the grocery store myself,” she said. “Grocery prices remain high. Energy prices are high. My electricity bills are higher here in Washington, DC, at my apartment, and they’re also higher at my house in Rome, Georgia.”
The thing about being president is that you get to take credit for the good things, but that also means people give you credit for the bad.
In a statement to Business Insider, White House spokesperson Kush Desai said that “cleaning up Joe Biden’s inflation and economic disaster has been a top focus since Day One.” He cited lower prices on gas and eggs and touted measures like a “historic drug pricing deal” on GLP-1 drugs. “The Trump administration will continue to implement and emphasize these and other economic policies that are cutting costs, raising real wages, and securing trillions in investments to make and hire in America,” he said.
Trump, like Biden, finds himself trying to convince a highly skeptical public that the economy is better than meets the eye. Consumers may not know the exact price of everything they buy at the grocery store, but they are aware that their weekly basket is getting pricier. Some consumers are buying less and smaller in order to cut costs, or taking on credit card debt to make ends meet. To some extent, they’re taking the White House’s advice, albeit not by choice — they are buying less, they are sacrificing.
Admittedly, the price puzzle is a hard one to solve. “There’s no low-hanging fruit here, especially on something like housing,” Sahm says. Housing policy is generally dealt with at the state and local levels, and there’s not much the federal government can do. “You can look to the White House and Congress to actually go after specific price imbalances,” Sahm says, but it takes thought and effort.
The president has attacked the Federal Reserve and demanded that it lower interest rates. That could help in some areas — such as bringing down mortgage rates and lending rates, etc. But the Fed’s is a blunt instrument, not a precise one, and some of Trump’s policies may have ultimately stood in its way.
“They would’ve lowered interest rates more this year if you hadn’t unleashed tariffs,” Sahm says.
The thing about being president is that you get to take credit for the good things, but that also means people give you credit for the bad. Fairly or not, Americans have been viewing the economy as bad for a while now, and it’s up to Trump to fix it.
Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
New York City’s next mayor, Zohran Mamdani, promised free childcare to New Yorkers. New Mexico might be writing the blueprint.
New Mexico’s new policy, which took effect on November 1, made childcare access universal to parents across the state by eliminating income limits and copays for childcare. Childcare workers are also slated to get a raise.
It could be a model for New York City. Mamdani proposed expanding childcare in the city, starting with creating more slots for kids from six weeks to 5 years old. Some of the city’s business executives agreed with his proposal for universal childcare, even if they opposed many of his plans aimed at boosting affordability.
Childcare has increasingly outpaced inflation and forced families to find other cost-effective solutions to day care deserts. Previously, New Mexican parents ineligible for full subsidies were paying an average of $12,00 a year per child. The state’s government aims to boost its economy by putting money back into the pockets of parents.
“That’s huge to a family’s budget,” said Julie Kashen, senior fellow and director for women’s economic justice at The Century Foundation, a progressive, nonpartisan think tank. “That makes a really big difference in what else they can afford, what they can save for the future, how they can get out of debt.”
It also allows parents to go to work with peace of mind, Kashen added. Without reliable childcare, parents call out of work when their kids are sick or have a day off school. For working parents, “childcare is the backbone of our economy,” she said.
One of Mamdani’s first challenges — and a challenge to any state or city aiming to expand childcare — is finding funding. His plan is to raise taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers and on corporations.
Natural resources set New Mexico’s funding apart from other cities and states, giving it an advantage in paying for its universal childcare program. As the second-biggest crude oil producer in the country, tax revenue from fracking totaled over $11 billion last year. Oil and natural gas revenue allow the state to invest in its over $30 billion permanent fund for childcare.
The fund is valued at about $10 billion this year and is expected to grow year-over-year to $12.6 billion.
For a similar program in New York City, the Mamdani campaign estimated the cost would be around $6 billion. This would expand the city’s free preschool program for 4-year-olds and 3-year-olds.
To bolster employment in the childcare industry, New Mexico also bumped up the minimum wage to $18 per hour for childcare workers, $6 above the state minimum wage. The pay can be enticing for prospective workers, as median wages for childcare workers are lower than 97% of all other jobs.
“They get paid less than dishwashers and dog walkers,” said Hailey Gibbs, the associate director for early childhood policy at the Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan progressive policy institute.
Gibbs explained that direct compensation, healthcare, and retirement benefits will attract more workers to the industry. Current childcare workers are already dedicated to the industry, and strengthening their economic outlook may keep them from looking for jobs elsewhere, she said.
“They don’t do it for the money because there isn’t money,” Gibbs said. “They do it because they’re passionate about it, because they care deeply about their communities and the families that they work with.”
In the New York City metropolitan area, median wages for day care workers sit at $18.09 per hour, well below the $28.55 median wage for the metro area. These same workers have the lowest personal income of all other care workers in the city, according to a report from Brad Lander, the city’s comptroller. Mamdani has also proposed matching pay with NYC Schools teachers’ salaries, around $70,000 for new employees.
Are you a parent struggling to navigate the economy? Contact this reporter at bdelk@insider.com.