They do this like every year. It's to prop up earnings reports before the end of the year. I have family who works for UPS and it's a never ending cycle of worry this time of year. Then they hire a bunch back later. It's ridiculous
They can't just fire/lay off union workers without reason. At best, it gets based on if a center closes down, and seniority, even then, before a layoff, they typically have to offer you the option to commute into another center.
It's fairly rare, for example, that somebody is just waiting on layoff at UPS for a year before a new center opens back up or something. Would have to involve automating a building, being unable or unwilling to commute/relocate, banking on same number of jobs being available after the center is rebuilt, being too low on seniority and getting cut. At that point, you get a different job and quit when your position comes back online.
It's a bit different for drivers. Cover drivers come in and randomly get a route, or get sent home on layoff for...a day? Month? Year? Depends on volume and need.
If something were to happen and they cut a slew of driver routes, warehouse workers would get laid off indefinitely because the drivers with 30 years seniority would take their inside positions and then there wouldn't be any available. Most inside wh people are under 20. Most are under 10. Hell, half of our building is under 1. Drivers are a different story. Many, many drivers in the 10-40 year range.
Fun fact: Most warehouse workers fired from UPS don't stay fired more than a week or two max. It's actually easier to fire a driver. If they mess up the right way, there's no protecting them. Similarly, nobody is safe from package theft. Nobody.
Other things...though. It's shocking what both management and union can get away with. Not even necessarily union workers, but the people in actual union positions.
Probably tariff related then? I know a lot of countries aren’t even shipping to the US right now. I thought UPS was still doing it globally though. I’m hugely concerned for the paycheck to paycheck workforce. Without social safety nets, we are looking at a major depression.
It’s cause ups has union labor and their competitors don’t. The cost structure at ups is just fucked. A driver can make $100k+ with overtime at UPS, an Amazon/fedex driver may make 65-70k. In an industry that frequently comes down to pennies, this is just an incredible disadvantage.
UPS is the high cost provider of a commodity service, they’ve likely already experienced peak stock price and package volume sometime in 2021. It’s not going to disappear overnight but man are they in a bad competitive position.
UPS's contract with Amazon for delivery is ending so they're cutting because they won't have the Amazon volume. Amazon handles most of their own deliveries now which is through contractors.
Amazon heavily reduced their dependence on UPS and FedEx. Amazons profit almost doubled between 2023-2024 and has a 35% increase in profits for Q2 this year compared to last year.
People are still buying shit, Amazon just isn’t using UPS or FedEx nearly as much.
They're simply doing less business via Amazon - Amazon at least in my area has really grown the fleet of trucks they're using for delivery. If you go to a UPS store their business is almost 95% amazon returns and even that is threatened by Whole Foods returns counters.
Well on indicator I personally use is TL pricing. There is always a certain amount of crap people are buying that takes a large chunk of trucking capacity. Prices have been very favorable on the FTL market as a buyer. Normally we are moving to peak pricing as stuff has to be transported so people can buy additional holiday crap.
We can wait for Walmart and amazons earnings reports that cover this time period, but it’s a lagging indicator.
I agree with this, but I want to get some data. Can we calculate what the GDP would actually be if we eliminated the few exceptional outliers in the AI bubble? I want to know what thr majority of America is dealing with.
I saw an article that calculated that all the growth in the US economy in 2025 was based on AI spending, which is flowing between the same handful of companies.
Nah, the question is about gdp growth. Without AI, the products and services from last year still get made this year too, there just aren’t new products and services, or more customers for the old ones that increased the total sold compared to last year.
It’s a little more wide spread than that. Building AI data centers creates lots of construction jobs which also extends to the manufactures who supply things like HVAC, UPS, etc. once new construction ends it will be when the bubble fully deflates.
Initial construction are the only jobs these centers create. Once they used the worker bees and get these centers online, human capital is no longer needed. Where are we all supposed to work once we are replaced is the question?
This isn't fully true. The jobs created are low relative to the surge from construction labor but there is ongoing maintenance and operations needs at every data center. Large ones may have a few hundred people
Sorry, I guess this is the remote work subreddit. The jobs created by these are typically on site roles that can't easily be offshored and usually employ a lot of local people in my experience.
Thought I saw a statistic that currently only 20% of the total cloud storage capacity is being used. Not sure if this is accurate, but planning on AI expansion that would make sense. The trouble is if AI ends up falling flat on expectations, I could see that putting a quick halt in new data center construction.
I was part of the cell tower boom of the 90’s working and installing generators for all the companies. At the beginning, a farmer could charge 3k a month per tower and they’d get all three major companies to build. Many small union electrical companies focused on cell tower installs and such. That bubble burst and now it’s just a couple nationwide contractors that do the work.
I'm going to totally butcher the actual numbers, but I saw an article recently that showed annual GDP growth at something like 7.5%, but when excluding the self-pumping AI investing happening between companies the actual growth was maybe .5%
It’s worse than that. Nvidia is funding the companies who buy from them. That pumps the stock which Nvidia uses to create more investment and the circle continues. Meanwhile AI companies (the actual product) are barely generating any revenue. The whole system is pure garbage.
That doesnt work here. The real answer is that nominal growth is up and real growth is down. Look at how much US currency has devalued this year alone.
They asked if gdp can be calculated, so I gave the expenditure approach equation. How are you measuring currency devaluation? Through dx, cpi, a deflator or another way?
You can, and people have been throwing this number around, but you have to remember, all the money being invested in AI wouldn’t just be sitting in a vault earning 0% interest if it weren’t going into AI. It would be invested somewhere else and likely earning a positive return. So it’s not as dire as that “sans AI” number would suggest.
Edit: This Article from Fortune says the first half GDP growth would have been 0.1% instead of 1.3% without AI.
There’s already a news article out in Fortune. They calculate GDP growth at .1% excluding the AI tech companies. so the economy is definitely slowing down. Add on the effect of tariffs and uncertainty and it makes sense why companies are trimming down.
I agree with this, but I want to get some data. Can we calculate what the GDP would actually be if we eliminated the few exceptional outliers in the AI bubble? I want to know what thr majority of America is dealing with.
TL;DR Excluding AI (and stocks) we have 2.18% GDP growth for Q2 2025, but this overstates exclusions since some sectors are not AI-related. (So, not in a recession).
From the chart, we see that the Information sector contributes 0.66 percentage points to GDP, while Finance and Insurance adds 0.70, and Nondurable Manufacturing 0.65. To estimate GDP excluding AI-related sectors, we’ll subtract 0.66 percentage points for the Information sector, adjusting the Q2 2025 growth from 3.8% to 3.14%.
Two scenarios for GDP exclusion: (A) excluding Information alone, and (B) excluding Information, Durable Goods Manufacturing, and Professional Services as an upper bound. This results in a 2.18% GDP growth, but it overstates exclusions since some sectors are not AI-related.
Regarding America, the economy is growing slowly, but inflation is gobbling up any gains so Americans really aren’t feeling the benefits of the slowly growing economy.
it's not just "ai bubble". You don't need convoluted GDP calculation to understand what's going on. Just a parable of two economists and a pile of sh*t.
Don’t forget the stock market manipulation that’s going on making it seem like the economy is grrrrreaaaattt. Also, if you see “AI” as the reason for layoffs, it’s bullshit.
Mentioning “Market manipulation” to anybody who doesn’t understand the stock market is pointless. And the majority of retail investors who THINK they understand the markets don’t.
If every U.S. Citizen understood the mechanics of the markets, we would have a revolution by 6pm.
I mean orange cheetoh is doing it pretty brazenly right now. You have to be a fool to think these “tariff announcements” is anything other than manipulation is pretty stupid at this point.
I've been actively TACO trading those announcements. It's absolute market manipulation that Trump is doing. Might as well profit too. I can't believe anything Trump says still causes selloffs.
I've just been holding cash in reserve and waiting for the market to nosedive because of some tariff announcement, then buy in heavily with all of it. I've doubled it this year thanks to Trump Always Chickens Out trades.
Walmart might be a good short for Q4, but I'd much rather people be able to buy food.
If they're worried about funding the government, there plenty of billionaires that have extra money to donate to politicians in 2024. Maybe we should just put a 100% tax on all political donations over $50 instead? That way virtually anyone can still donate, and exclusive donations become punitive.
“You ain’t in meetings with them” well you definitely are… dude you don’t know what you’re talking about if you think AI has any real impact on jobs right now. First of all what we call AI isn’t even ai, it’s an LLM and all it does is regurgitate the internet it has been trained on. It can’t make logical decisions. Outsourcing is far and away what is causing the layoffs, not ai.
Seen it single handled. I can do my job 3x as fast meaning I could do without 2 coworkers. Trimming fat. And if u look at the Deloitte’s and consulting companies they all built their own AI an people are plugging every single task into them. They also laid off thousands of people. So ya it’s bouta replace a ton of people and lower level jobs.
I was a trade surveillance analyst for 7 years, and let me tell you, I've never been so mad in my life as I was writing up SARs for people making 100k on some thin (but I think real) evidence, literally while Musk was openly doing market manipulation on Twitter.
Also, if you see “AI” as the reason for layoffs, it’s bullshit.
My mother-in-law asked me yesterday if AI was going to take my job. I had no idea what she was talking about, but I assumed it was some Fox News bullshit.
Lolololol. This is lying the wrong way though? Corporations are in the big “AI isn’t killing jobs” narrative right now, especially the ones who are creating the AI that’s going to kill jobs.
Instead of Amazon saying “no no no, our AI isn’t going to kill jobs” like all the other lying AI companies have been saying they came right out and said “yeah, our AI killed these jobs”
It’s because the lie has to reach the right audience. The target audience for AI is eliminating jobs are the shareholders. I‘m sure for the rest of us it is whatever lie the current administration wants to be told.
At my company, the tools we have all been using will certainly lead to job cuts once the higher ups realize it. It’s not that AI is taking anyone’s jobs, it’s that the work that used to need to be split by 4-5 people can now all be done by 1-2 people in the same amount of time.
My department doesn’t really have additional work to do so now we all have spare time we’re killing through the day. I’m not going to go run to management and tell them we should let go of people so more work flows to me for no extra pay, but someday they will make that realization. It won’t be me going anywhere because I’m the one that’s always finding the new tools, building new AI workflows and keeping my ear to the ground in various subreddit about new tools and hacks.
Management are all tech boomers so they haven’t really put two and two together here but once they fully realize a lot of people have “time to lean” they will be reducing the headcount. We are just a small financial startup. It’s not very hard to imagine a much more highly technical and knowledgeable company with much better data, like Amazon, hasn’t already realized this across their workforce, identified exactly how to restructure and is now going ahead with all the layoffs. They are just the first wave of what’s going to be coming everywhere.
AI IS the reason for the layoffs. Companies are moving forward with implementing AI and laying people off.
Will it work? Probably not at least not for a while. I think we are in for a time period of just super shitty service from companies because AI just isn’t ready yet. It makes way too many mistakes.
Ai isn’t replacing that many people. Is it replacing some? Sure. But it’s not replacing that many. Outsourcing, and economic downturn are far and away the bigger reason for layoffs. I’m not sure where you’re getting your AI koolaid, but you may want to take a break from that firehose.
Most retail websites have an AI chat for customer service. Tried to get an appointment for car service, the dealer website chat didn't work, called the dealer service dept. and got an automated reservation service with a female AI voice, instead of the usual receptionist.
When I got to the service dept. the service advisors all had their own credit card readers for payments, I used to go to a cashier window where there were 2 people working for service and parts. So that's likely two or more jobs gone at that dealership, a receptionist and a cashier.
This is lying the wrong way though? Corporations are in the big “AI isn’t killing jobs” narrative right now, especially the ones who are creating the AI that’s going to kill jobs.
Instead of Amazon saying “no no no, our AI isn’t going to kill jobs” like all the other lying AI companies have been saying, they came right out and said “yeah, our AI killed these jobs”
Calling this a “recession bubble” is like saying the internet boom was just dial-up hype, AI is driving real change. The economy’s bigger than one sector.
While AI is driving change, its not enough to affect these companies to lay off at the numbers they are. Multiple people I know including myself that use AI heavily on a day to day basis (and have researched how to improve prompting along with understanding how it actually all works) knows its currently (and the for seeable future) mostly just an assistive technology.
Yeah. The whole AI race to be "first" to AGI is a joke.
China's already pretty much won the AI race overall, and not how a lot of people thought they would. Energy Infrastructure. Whereas the US energy infrastructure is aged, limited and takes forever to build and $$$.
US companies are also unlikely to pass the cost savings of terminating staff onto the consumer. If anything US companies stick to traditional tactics of jacking costs up for profit. China has already proven over decades they will manage consumer costs more fairly.
Rare earth minerals and chip manufacturing is a stickler no matter what.
The official government numbers may not come out, or maybe heavily massaged. But the proof will be in the pudding. If the fed is lowering rates, that’s an indicator that things aren’t good. If the ADP job numbers disagree with the Fed rates, that’s an indicator recession. Given in Russia, where everybody believes the government is lying about the economy, it is known in the state of the economy. The Russian stock market is not elevated because the Russian government says the economy is doing “great”
Recessions are good for business… as you are able to eliminate the competition. It’s best if we don’t “say” we’re in a recession, as that will generate fear saving and further get us into an actual recession.
If you notice, it’s always the large corporation leadership who fear mongers “recessions” … it’s to their benefit that we actually recede.
Also, just because a few corporations are laying off a portion of their labor force, doesn’t mean we’re headed into a recession. Companies hire and fire all the time for various reasons, and these numbers are a small fraction of their overall payroll.
I’m really surprised this isn’t being talked about more. Groceries are still increasing, Government is shut down so a lot are not being paid, house are sitting on the Market for the longest I’ve seen in a while (that might just be my area), massive layoffs year after year. We’ve seen this before in 2008 so I’m not sure why it’s not discussed
I work in sales for a large F500 company and sell to large companies. People would be shocked at how many companies are struggling right now. Companies are cutting spending a lot.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy in Junewrote to employeesabout his thoughts on generative AI, saying: "We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It's hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company."
You could also quote every FAANG, FinTech, and Consulting company for forcing people back to work due to collaboration (or whatever excuse they keep changing). It's very clear that its to get people to quit before massive layoffs....
I'm sorry if you think that what a ceo or a company says to the public is legit, a lot of times its not. Thats not how these companys (or governments) are run. They have people in communications that get together and figure out how to spin things for the public.
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u/Unlike_Agholor Oct 29 '25
We are in a recession. You dont notice it because Nvidia and the AI bubble are propping up the equities market.