Andrew Jassy: Yes. I would say I think for any leadership team, each era is different, and it’s often meaningfully impacted by what’s happening around you. And I think that if you look at the last couple of years with things like the pandemic and the labor shortage in 2021 and the war in Ukraine and inflation and uncertain economy, good leadership teams look around and try to figure out what that means and how they should adjust their businesses. And so if you look at — in the early part of 2022, I think we realized that as we tried to make sure we met the surge in demand for consumers and sellers and having to make decisions in 2020 for what fulfillment network investments we’re going to make in 2022, we just had more capacity than we needed.
And you saw us in the early part of 2022 delay some of our builds and mothballed some of our facilities to try and be more economic. And I think when we look at some of our physical business investments, physical store investments, I think there were just some areas where we didn’t have conviction that they were going to be big needle movers for Amazon. And so that’s why we closed down our 4-Star bookstores. And as we got into the early part of the summer, where we start our operating planning process, we — and there was a lot of things happening in the macro economy, we started that process with the high-level tenet of we want to find a way to meaningfully streamline our costs in all of our businesses, not just their existing large businesses, but also in some of the investments we’re making.
We want to actually do a pretty good, thorough look about what we’re investing and how much we think we need to, but doing so without having to give up our ability to invest in the key long-term strategic investments that we think could change broad customer experiences and change Amazon over time. And you saw that process led to us choosing to pause on incremental headcount as we tried to assess what was happening in the economy, and we eliminated some programs in fabric.com and Amazon Care and Amazon Glo and Amazon Explore. We decided to go slower on some — on the physical store expansion in the grocery space until we had a format that we really believed in rolling out and we went a little bit slower on some devices, and until we made the very hard decision that Brian talked about earlier, which was the hardest decision I think we’ve all been a part of, which was to reduce or eliminate 18,000 roles.
And so those were all done with an eye towards trying to streamline our cost but still be able to invest in the things that we think really matter over the long term. Now we have a way of looking at investments that is different maybe from some other companies. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong. It’s just the way we look at it, which is when we think about big areas to invest in, we ask ourselves a few questions. We ask, if we were successful, could it really be big and move the needle at Amazon, which is a high bar at a place like Amazon? Do we think it’s being well served today? Do we have a differentiated approach? And do we have some competence in those areas? And if we don’t, can we acquire them quickly? And if we like the answers to those questions, we will invest.
