Facing layoffs, Amazon workers joke that Rings of Power writers should be fired

Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that Amazon would be laying off some 10,000 workers in the coming days. According to CNBC, that culling has begun, with Amazon shedding jobs in its Alexa division and the Luna cloud gaming unit, as well as jobs in retail and human resources.

Why is this happening? One explanation is that Amazon grew by leaps and bounds during the pandemic when everyone was stuck at home and ordering stuff, and now is facing a reckoning as people return to brick-and-mortar stores. But really, the entire tech sector is going through it right now.

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Meta laid off 13% of its staff thanks to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s ill-advised obsession with “the metaverse,” Elon Musk has been frantically firing people since taking control of Twitter, Salesforce and Shopify have cut jobs…after years of growth, the tech sector is going through a crisis.

Naturally, Amazon workers are ticked. According to reporting by Insider, some have taken to a Slack channel that includes 7,000 employees to vent their frustrations. In some cases, that includes joking that the writers behind The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power should be included in this round of layoffs.

Amazon workers think the writers on The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power should be laid off

At this point it’s almost unsporting to take shots at The Rings of Power because it’s just so easy. Amazon spent a ton of money on this show only for it to sort of make no one happy; it diverged from the source material too much to please longtime Tolkien fans and just wasn’t good enough on its own to draw in casual viewers. Viewership dwindled throughout the season, but Amazon committed to the show so hard that it really has no choice but to keep going, at least for one more season.

We don’t have the exact data, but I would imagine that The Rings of Power is losing money for Amazon right now overall, which probably frustrates employees who are losing their jobs because of what they see as bad decisions on the parts of their bosses. And of course it’s fine to blow off steam if your company is going through an upheaval. Yeah, The Rings of Power is an easy target, but at least they’re probably used to being kicked around by now.

Amazon is working on a second season of The Rings of Power as we speak. Expect it sometime in 2024.

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