Amazon Shoppers Ignore Bezos Advice on Record Holiday Weekend

Amazon's chairman had some advice for American consumers last week that could have potentially hurt his business, but it seems they didn't listen.

Well this is kind of awkward. 

Last week, Amazon  (AMZN) - Get Free Report founder, executive chairman, and former CEO Jeff Bezos had some shopping advice for the American public during the holiday season. 

The man who built his considerable fortune on American's insatiable need to spend money on stuff they don't really need has a bad feeling about the economy going forward and thinks consumers need to practice some austerity. 

"Things are slowing down. You're seeing layoffs in many many sectors of the economy," Bezos told CNN last week ahead of the national Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping holidays. 

"If you're an individual considering purchasing a big-screen TV, you might want to wait, hold onto your money, and see what transpires. The same is true with a new automobile, refrigerator, or whatever else. Just remove some risk from the equation.”

But based on his company's receipts from the biggest shopping weekend of the year, not many people are listening to Bezos.

Amazon's Record Setting Cyber Monday

Amazon says that the 2022 Thanksgiving holiday shopping weekend was its most successful ever, with consumers globally purchasing hundreds of millions of products on the e-retailer's platform. 

In the U.S., the best-selling categories were home, fashion, toys, beauty, and Amazon Devices. That data may suggest that U.S. consumers did stay away from big ticket items like refrigerators and televisions. 

The best selling items on Amazon were the Echo Dot, Fire TV Stick (both made by Amazon), and Apple AirPods. 

“This was a record-breaking holiday shopping weekend for Amazon. Customers shopped millions of deals this weekend and we have many more amazing deals to come,” said Doug Herrington, CEO, WW Amazon Stores.

The company did not provide sales figures for the weekend, so investors will have to wait for the company's fourth quarter earnings release to get a more complete picture of just how well the company did. 

Consumers across the board spent $9.12 billion online on Black Friday, a 2.3% increase from the previous year, while online Cyber Monday sales jumped 5.8% to $11.3 billion, according to Adobe Analytics, CNBC reported. 

Amazon needs a strong holiday season because while the macro environment has seemingly spooked its patriarch, the company is also showing signs of stress. 

Amazon Holiday Job Cuts

Earlier this month, Amazon began to carry out some of the largest job cuts in the company's history.

The company is expected to cut 10,000 jobs, or about 3% of its corporate workforce.

Amazon seems ready to flip the calendar to December as November has been a rough month for the company. 

Amazon became the first public company is history to shed more than a $1 trillion in market value amid the market downturn that depressed a number of stocks. 

Amazon issued a disappointing holiday revenue forecast in late October, and unveiled slowing growth in its lucrative Web Services business, both of which clouded a better-than-expected third-quarter earnings report.

Jassy told investors at the time that while he was "encouraged" by the third quarter progress, "we recognize there's still a lot of opportunity to continue to improve productivity and drive cost efficiencies throughout our networks."

"We have identified initiatives that the teams continue to work hard on, and we expect to see further improvement in the quarters ahead," he added.