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Last week, Amazon became the latest company to announce massive layoffs. In a memo, senior vice president of people experience and technology, Beth Galetti, revealed that the company would let go of approximately 14,000 employees, citing AI innovations and a fast-changing world. “This generation of AI is the most transformative technology weve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones),” Galetti wrote. “Were convinced that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business.” Amazon is hardly the only company shedding employees. UPS cut 48,000 jobs this year, and just days before Amazon’s announcement, Target eliminated 1,800 corporate roles after a turbulent year. And while Amazon’s recent announcement blamed AI for the move, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had suggested otherwise. Last week, Jassy said on an earnings call that the layoffs were about the company slimming down and speeding up. The announcement that we made a few days ago was not really financially driven, and its not even really AI-driven, not right now at least, he said about the job cuts. Its culture. Jassy added that, when thinking about transformation, its important to be lean, its important to be flat, and its important to move fast. Still, Amazon’s own numbers suggest that the company may be preemptively slimming down to pay for its technological advances. “Free cash flow decreased to $14.8 billion for the trailing twelve months, driven primarily by a year-over-year increase of $50.9 billion in purchases of property and equipment, net of proceeds from sales and incentives,” according to an October 30 news release revealing Amazon’s third quarter financial results. It’s true the company is majorly ramping up its spending, specifically around its Trainium2 chip subscriptions and data center expansion. Chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky said during the firm’s earnings call on Thursday that the company would be very aggressive in spending on data centers, investing $125 billion this year and said he expects the amount “will increase in 2026.” Since the Amazon layoffs hit the news, many have taken to social media to offer their own explanations for the company’s reorganization. “Time for your periodic layoff reminder: do not take seriously the stated ‘reasons’ for layoffs,” Drew Harry, vice president of data science at Thumbtack, wrote in a social media post. “Amazon laying off corporate staff is not proof of anything regarding realized AI efficiencies or management inefficiency. They can say whatever they want.” Harry added, “The only explanation you really need is that Amazon wants to cut costs and (likely) redeploy the money elsewhere.”
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E-Commerce
I always dream of the same mall. So begins a recent post on the popular subreddit r/The MallWorld. The subreddit was first created in 2021, and currently has 10,000 monthly visitors detailing their recurring dreams of eerie, often empty spaces. The description reads, Have you been to one of these common dream locations? The post continued: It has a very vintage feel to it. It always has warm amber lighting and wooden guard rails. It has 3 main floors, and one secret lower floor. The lower floor is usually kept pristine, a time capsule of the 90’s. The stores are closed, but the merchandise remains. It smells like my kindergarten class did.. If this dream sounds familiar, you are not alone. The post is among thousands on Reddit and TikTok who say they also dream of the same space, collectively referred to as Mall World. But this is no ordinary shopping mall. While not always identical, many say their mall worlds share similarities. It has endless stairwells, forbidden floors, and looping elevators. Some have dreamed of the same food court, others of an arcade. Sometimes the dreamscape is not even a mall at all but a water park or an airport. People have tried to draw maps of Mall World. I finally dont feel alone, wrote one on Reddit. I feel so much relief in not being the only one. The dreamscape has recently seen a resurgence in interest. One TikTok user said she discovered the Mall World subreddit after searching for answers about a recurring dream she was having. She explained, Finding the Mall World has literally changed my life because there are 20 thousand people having the same exact dreams as mine. The video was posted earlier this year and currently has over 400,000 views. So why is everyone having the same dream? There are a number of theories circulating the internet. One suggests it is related to Carl Jungs theory of collective unconsciousness the idea that all humans share a deep, inherited layer of the unconscious mind that shapes how we think and dream. Others have linked the idea to astral travel, where the physical body is left behind to go explore other planes of consciousness. Another conspiracy theory links these shared dreams to the gifted and talented program in the 1980s and 1990s. Or perhaps the real reason is less intriguing. Most of us have been to a mall at least once in our lives and our brains tend to feed off existing mental maps and memories to construct our dreamscapes. As Dylan Selterman, an associate teaching professor at the Johns Hopkins University department of psychological and brain sciences, told The New York Times, sometimes people dream about weird stuff. Liminal spaces have been a source of online fascination for years. A simpler explanation may be that the online discourse is unconsciously influencing peoples dreams. If youve not visited Mall World and are feeling left out, just reading about Mall World might be enough to trigger a visit.
Category:
E-Commerce
Want more housing market stories from Lance Lamberts ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. D.R. Horton, Americas largest homebuilder, is doubling down on mortgage rate buydowns to keep its sales volumes up amid an affordability-strained housing market. On its October 28 earnings call, the builder said 73% of its homebuyers in fiscal Q4 2025 received a mortgage rate buydownup slightly from 72% in the previous quarter. As we anticipated on our last call, we did expect to lean in more heavily to the offering of 3.99% [mortgage rate buydown], said Jessica Hansen, D.R. Hortons senior vice president of investor relations. That is something that we’ve been doing, and we saw the mortgage rate in our backlog come down. It’s actually below 5% today coming into this quarter. For D.R. Hortons buyersmany of whom are first-time homeownersthe monthly payment remains the decisive factor. The most attractive monthly payment we can put them in is with a lower rate, said CEO Paul Romanowski. Its a benefit to the homeowner over time in terms of paying down more of their principal. The strategy has come at a cost: incentive spendingincluding mortgage rate buydowns. The companys gross margin on home sales fell to 20% in Q4 2025, down from 23.6% in Q4 2024 and well below the 26.9% in Q4 2021. Indeed, increased incentive spending accounted for 61% of D.R. Hortons recent margin compression in Q4, while higher litigation costs made up another 33%. The incentives appear to be working. Net new orders rose 5% year-over-year in Q4 to 20,078up from 19,035 a year earlierdemonstrating D.R. Hortons ability to maintain sales momentum despite affordability headwinds. However, its backlog continues to shrink as the builder intentionally slows housing starts to better align inventory levels and capitalize on easing construction costs. Regionally, D.R. Horton pointed to softness in parts of Florida, including Jacksonville and Southwest Florida, where excess inventory has weighed on absorption rates. The company also described Texas as choppy and California as a bit of a struggle, while noting signs of stability across the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic. window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}}); Even with new tariffs and immigration policy headlines, the company said material and labor costs remain under controldown 1% quarter-over-quarter and 1.5% year-over-year. Many giant homebuilders are crediting softer housing starts for helping offset policy-related cost pressures. ResiClub PRO members can read our full D.R. Horton analysis here.
Category:
E-Commerce
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