Newsletter Issue #1043 — Apple and the 5% Factor
March 7th, 2023The fundamentals aren’t new. Financial results in the tech industry so far in 2023 are mixed, and lots of people, many hired during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, have received their pink slips. Despite the complaints that Elon Musk’s decision to fire half the staff of Twitter was outrageous, perhaps irrational, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and others have taken the hint and also announced large layoffs. Not as large as Twitter, but it’s clear they were overstaffed. I mean it’s not that these services are running less efficiently with smaller staffs.
The layoffs maxed out with Amazon at 18,000. In passing, this total is larger than some of the places I’ve lived in over the years, especially during the early days of my broadcast radio career back in the late 1960s. Two of the towns, Piedmont, Alabama and Windom, Minnesota, had populations below 5,000.
Imagine the population of an entire town disappearing overnight; well, aside from sci-fi films and TV shows of course. Imagine the equivalent of three or four of those towns.
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