Amazon to Hire 80,000 Temp Workers for Holiday Shopping Season

Amazon is hiring 80,000 seasonal workers for its distribution centers as it looks to improve its shipping efficiency during the critical holiday season. That's 14% more than last year's hiring of 70,000 workers, as Amazon has been opening more distribution centers. It now has more than 50 centers in the U.S., up from 40 last year. In July, it announced it was opening eight smaller sorting centers for a total of 15 by year-end. At the centers, packages are sorted by zip code and then transported to U.S. Postal Service offices. The company says the sorting centers help Amazon offer services, such as Sunday delivery, with a later cutoff time. Thousands of the seasonal jobs are expected to become permanent positions. Amazon hopes to avoid problems that occurred late in the holiday season last year, when shippers such as UPS were caught off guard by spiking online orders, particularly from Amazon.com.