After Amazon announced last week that they are ending use of its “Just Walk Out” checkout-free shopping at its grocery stores, today the retail behemoth announced they were pivoting to use the technology to automate and streamline mass layoffs.
“Do you ever wish you could do away with awkward human interaction and streamline your layoffs? Well, now you can, with ‘Just Walk Out’ layoff technology,” said Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. “Using the same advanced sensors and computer vision we used at Amazon Fresh checkouts, we can now scan employees and tally their value to the company. AI will then calculate which employees should be laid off, and they’ll automatically have their keycards deactivated and receive a termination receipt after they walk out the door.”
Amazon promises the tech could distinguish between employees that companies want to keep, like middle managers and underpaid employees that do the work of two people, and top layoff candidates, like pregnant employees about to go on maternity leave or people who were hired for a remote position before the return to office policy changed.
“This is a game-changer for us: Now we don’t need to manually choose which employees we want to lay off, and write a whole email—it was a huge hassle,” said Beth Galetti, Amazon’s top HR executive. “Plus, we used to have to wait until before the holidays for layoffs so we could get our bottom lines right before the fiscal year comes to a close, but this is so efficient we can start doing layoffs way more often—starting with the team that developed this technology in the first place.”
At press time, the new use of the technology was reportedly already backfiring after a separate, grassroots form of the program led by labor rights advocates somehow popped up and instead told every single Amazon employee to “just walk out.”
