Amazon (AMZN) expects wage pressure and supply chain issues to add billions in Q4 2021 costs

Published , by Blake Morse

Today Amazon released its Q3 2021 earnings and not everything was looking great for Jeff Bezos’ multi-billion dollar company. Not only was the company down a massive 50 percent in earnings year-over-year, but it looks like those numbers may continue to go down as they head into Q4.

While Amazon is a massive company and one of the largest online retailers out there, there have been several stories that came out over the last year or so of warehouse staff being overworked and underpaid. Probably the most well-known story at this point has been about workers having to urinate in empty bottles since they could not take bathroom breaks while the company's founder headed into space.

When you couple that with supply chain issues that have arisen as part of the ongoing global pandemic, it should not be that shocking that Amazon is facing tough comparisons to their year-over-year earnings on top of harsh criticism of the way they treat their employees.

In Amazon's Q3 2021 earnings report released earlier today, Amazon took a moment to address the their expectations of lower profits for Q4 2021:

Even though Amazon earnings were down 50 percent in Q3 2021, the company still turned a profit. It just wasn’t as large as last year’s. The same will most likely be true for the company in Q4 of 2021 as well. Hopefully this also means that workers will get a living wage and better working conditions overall, as Amazon has stated that part of the increased costs is going to be increased wages paid, but we’ll have to wait and see what happens in Q4. We’ll be sure to keep you up to date on everything happening with Amazon until then.