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DoorDash’s CEO says he’s got an edge on Amazon in groceries

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DoorDash CEO Tony Xu says that his company’s grocery offering has a key advantage over Amazon: choice.

Amazon is doubling down on grocery delivery, especially perishables like produce and ice cream. The retail and tech giant said last month that it’s expanding same- and next-day grocery delivery to more parts of the US this year, adding to the thousands of towns and cities it already serves — news that sent shares of Instacart and DoorDash tumbling at the time.

DoorDash, though, has something that shoppers want and that Amazon isn’t replicating, Xu said on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Wednesday.

Unlike Amazon, which owns Whole Foods and several of its own food brands, DoorDash works with existing grocery chains. The delivery service has struck deals in recent years. Last year, it expanded its partnership with Kroger and signed new deals with regional chains, including Schnucks in the Midwest.

Few customers complete all their grocery shopping at a single chain, Xu said. Many stop at multiple stores each week, especially to find specific fresh groceries, such as produce, meat, and seafood.

“Consumers prefer choice,” Xu said on the call, adding that he expects there to “continue to be very strong interest in the DoorDash product” as a result.

DoorDash is also expanding its services for retailers, such as fulfillment through its DashMarts, convenience store-sized retail spaces designed for picking and delivering orders.

Xu said DoorDash is “doing that for every single grocer so that they have the capability to compete against companies like Amazon.”

DoorDash shares rose as much as 14% in after-market trading on Wednesday, despite disappointing fourth-quarter earnings and guidance for 2026. The company’s stock took its biggest one-day hit in November after it unveiled plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on tech improvements.

While DoorDash has become known for restaurant deliveries, its gig workers are increasingly making grocery deliveries — many of which make more financial sense for DoorDash.

Xu said DoorDash has attracted more big grocery orders from customers, not just small fill-in trips. That matters in the grocery industry, where grocers tend to make more money when customers buy a wider range of goods.

“People use us for both the quick runs as well as the stock-up use cases,” he said.

Ravi Inukonda, DoorDash’s CFO, said on the call that DoorDash’s retail and grocery business expects to “be unit-economic positive” in the second half of 2026.

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I was sick of never seeing my 6 kids. So I quit my Amazon job to become a tulip farmer.

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This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Andrew Miller, 50, in Mount Vernon, Washington, the owner of Tulip Valley Farms. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I remember the moment I looked around my office and saw only performative culture staring back at me.

Between 70-hour workweeks that started at 4 a.m. and growing disagreements with how the company was being run, I knew something had to give.

It wasn’t hard work that scared me. Before corporate life, I spent 14 years in the Air Force and National Guard.

But as my family grew, I started questioning the path I was on. I’d never been deployed, but I knew it was likely. With two autistic children at home, my family needed me present. After leaving the military, I landed a corporate role at Amazon.

It went well for a while, but I was rarely seeing my family, and it wasn’t the life I’d envisioned. I realized that while some people live for their role, my most important job was being a dad — I have six kids.

So, in 2015, I quit my job at Amazon. My wife, Holly, supported my decision, knowing that I was completely drained and losing my sense of purpose.


Andrew Miller and his wife Holly on Tulip Farms in Washington.

Miller’s wife, Holly, supported his decision to leave his job.

Provided by Andrew Miller



We also decided it was time to move back to Washington, where we both grew up.

Skagit County is a place where your kids can run down the trail to a relative’s house if they don’t like what you’re serving for dinner.

It’s also home to an annual tulip festival that’s been held for over 40 years.

Finding my calling back home

I took a strategy role with the county’s economic development team, working on growth and equity.

Skagit sits at the intersection of outdoor recreation, tourism, and agriculture — yet while the county once had about 4,000 acres of tulips, that number had dropped to roughly 500. I knew we needed a new model, or this county wouldn’t be the home of tulips anymore.

I came up with an idea and went for it. I decided to buy a tulip farm and reimagine what it could be — not just a working farm, but a place people wanted to hang out.


Andrew Miller is holding a sheep on Tulip Farms.

Miller’s focus wasn’t just on growing tulips; it was about the farm experience.

Provided by Andrew Miller



Lessons on buying a farm

In 2018, I bought my first farm. In the months leading up to the purchase, I quickly learned that many agricultural problems are really business problems.

The questions weren’t just about growing tulips; they were about the experience: How many tulips could we grow? What kind of customer experience could we create? And how should we design the layout of the fields for tourists?

To prepare, I raised capital with friends and spent six weeks shadowing an 85-year-old Dutch farmer who had been growing tulips since 1984. He and his wife told me they had turned down 16 other buyers before choosing me. He died shortly afterward, and after his death, I moved forward with taking over the farm.

My former business partner and I bought the 30-acre property for $1.6 million, including both the land and the business.

In those first months of farm life, my approach was pure curiosity.


Andrew Miller is pointing at tulip bulbs.

Miller raised capital with friends and spent six weeks shadowing a farmer.

Provided by Andrew Miller



Bumps in the road

Then the pandemic hit, just 10 days before opening.

We pivoted to flower shipping, and eventually added you-pick experiences once restrictions eased. From what I could see, no one in Skagit County was doing that.

I’ve learned that I tend to learn things the hard way. My daughter even bought me a pen that reads: “Maybe I like doing it the hard way.”

The fresh approach worked, but my business partnership didn’t. After differences in vision, we split, and I went on to buy a second farm: Tulip Valley Farm, which I still run today. I bought it from a 70-year-old potato farmer with hazelnut trees.

He believed in my vision.


Andrew Miller and his family on Tulip Farm.

Miller and his family on Tulip Farm.

Provided by Andrew Miller



Building a new career and a legacy

Today, my 23-year-old son can operate a forklift, which he learned when he was 15. My sister runs business management and communications.

I still work from 5 a.m. until bedtime, but now I’m home. I’m serving my community.

I’ll walk into Costco, and my kids will scatter when someone recognizes me from the farm. My family is happy to know we can take three weeks off in the summer because of how hard we work the rest of the year.

They’ve seen the strain, the kitchen-table meetings, the risk of starting from scratch. I want them to see that.

Healing in the soil — for us, and for guests

Today, the farm is flourishing. Visitor numbers have doubled year over year for the past three years. We design the fields not just for farming, but for connection — proposals, photos, moments people want to share.

In a world where we are gagging for meaningful in-person experiences, people are drawn to farms. I get it. As someone with PTSD from my former career, I can also affirm that dirt therapy is the best therapy.

Being able to shape your own environment and build your own future is essential.




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Ashley Stewart Business Insider

Amazon execs say layoffs are part of turning the company into the ‘world’s largest startup’

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Internal memos from Amazon executives explained the company’s decision to lay off 16,000 corporate workers as necessary to become the “world’s largest startup,” according to the messages viewed by Business Insider.

“Our ambition is to be the world’s largest startup,” Amazon executives wrote in two such memos viewed by Business Insider. “That means doubling down on a culture of ownership, speed, and experimentation — which requires us to continue evolving how we’re structured.”

The “world’s largest startup” has become a common refrain under Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who repeatedly referenced the company’s ability to operate like a startup in his latest shareholder letter.

The memos viewed by Business Insider, written by Amazon Web Services vice president Prasad Kalyanaraman and senior vice president Colleen Aubrey, include other similarities, providing insight into how Amazon likely directed its top executives to communicate about the layoffs:

  • Notifications within the teams in the US and Canada have been completed.
  • Identical language stating, “Please take care of yourselves and each other,” and that “the Employee Assistance Program (EAP) is available 24/7 for free and confidential support.”
  • Acknowledging that changes are difficult and ending with a forward-looking statement about what remaining teams can accomplish.

Greg Pearson, another AWS VP, also addressed layoffs in a memo and urged staff to “use technology to simplify work,” Business Insider previously reported. Amazon also shared more information for laid-off employees in an FAQ and emails from Amazon HR chief Beth Galetti.

Internal Slack messages viewed by Business Insider suggest affected teams include those within the company’s AWS cloud unit, such as the AI cloud service Bedrock, the cloud data warehouse service Redshift, and the ProServe consulting team, as well as retail business teams such as the Prime subscription service and the last-mile Delivery Experience team.

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Read the memos below:

Prasad Kalyanaraman, VP of AWS Infrastructure:

Team,
I want to provide an update on the organizational changes that Beth Galetti shared in her A to Z post earlier today. As Beth noted, these decisions are part of our ongoing effort to position the organization for the future while staying nimble and focused on delivering for our customers. Our ambition is to be the world’s largest startup. That means doubling down on a culture of ownership, speed, and experimentation—which requires us to continue evolving our structure.
The notifications to impacted colleagues in our organization who are based in the U.S. and Canada, have now been completed. In other regions, we are following local processes, which may include time for consultation with employee representatives and possibly result in longer timelines to communicate with impacted employees.
First and foremost, I want to thank the impacted colleagues who have worked tirelessly for our customers. I want to acknowledge that changes like this can be hard on our entire team. These decisions are difficult and are made thoughtfully as we position our organization for future success. Changes like these are difficult, especially when they affect colleagues we value. These decisions don’t diminish what we’ve built together; rather, they’re about positioning us to sustain and extend that impact as we continue to build the foundation for the future.
I also want to recognize what our team has accomplished this past year as we’ve made tremendous progress on scaling to meet unprecedented customer demand. These results reflect the talent, dedication, and collaboration across the breadth of our very diverse organization that must work together seamlessly — and those are qualities that will remain our foundation as we move forward.
Please take care of yourselves and each other. Remember that the Employee Assistance Program (EAP) is available 24/7 for free and confidential support.
Thank you for your resilience and continued focus on delivering for our customers. I’m confident in our team’s ability to navigate this transition and emerge stronger.
I’m looking forward to what we’ll accomplish together in the months ahead.
Prasad

Colleen Aubrey, SVP of Applied AI Solutions:

Hi,
I wanted to follow up on Beth Galetti’s post about organizational changes to A to Z earlier today. As Beth noted, this is a continuation of the work we’ve been doing for more than a year to strengthen the company by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy, so that we can move faster for customers. Our ambition is to be the world’s largest startup. That means doubling down on a culture of ownership, speed, and experimentation—which requires us to continue evolving how we’re structured.
Our organization plays a critical role in putting AI to work for our customers, transforming how companies deliver value to their customers, and these changes will help us sharpen our focus. I’ve seen how this team innovates and collaborates to solve real-world business challenges through applied Al. These strengths will be essential as we move forward with focus and clarity.
The notifications to impacted colleagues in our organization who are based in the U.S., Canada, and Costa Rica have now been completed. In other regions, we are following local processes, which may include time for consultation with employee representative bodies and possibly result in longer timelines to communicate with impacted employees. Changes like this are hard on everyone. These decisions are difficult and are made thoughtfully as we position our organization and AWS for future success. Please take care of yourselves and each other. The Employee Assistance Program (EAP) is available 24/7 for free and confidential support.
Thank you for your continued focus on delivering for our customers. I’m confident in our team’s ability to navigate this transition and emerge stronger, and I am positive that we’ll accomplish great things together in the months ahead.
Colleen

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Some Amazon employees get ‘Project Dawn’ calendar invitation discussing upcoming job cuts

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Some Amazon employees got a worrying calendar invitation on Tuesday, stoking more concern about job cuts that are expected in coming days.

The invitation addressed impending job cuts and mentioned “Project Dawn,” an initiative to improve efficiency at Amazon, according to a copy obtained by Business Insider.

The invitation had the subject line “Send Project Dawn email” and was written by Colleen Aubrey, senior vice president of AWS Solutions, although it appears to have been sent by an assistant.

The invitation was for a calendar event at 5 a.m. Pacific time on Wednesday, but it was canceled shortly after it was sent. Some employees noticed it and shared the information with Business Insider.

“This is a continuation of the work we’ve been doing for more than a year to strengthen the company by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy, so that we can move faster for customers,” the accompanying message read. “The notifications to impacted colleagues in our organization who are based in the US, Canada, and Costa Rica have now been completed.”

“Changes like this are hard on everyone,” Aubrey’s message continued. “These decisions are difficult and are made thoughtfully as we position our organization and AWS for future success.”

Amazon plans to cut thousands of corporate roles in coming days, Business Insider previously reported. The reductions would mark the company’s second round of mass layoffs since October, when it eliminated roughly 14,000 jobs. An Amazon spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

After the calendar invitation landed, confusion spread across an internal Slack channel with more than 36,000 Amazon employees, according to messages viewed by Business Insider. Staff questioned whether the message had been intended for Aubrey’s entire organization or only for those whose roles were being eliminated.

“Am I impacted or sent by mistake to all?” one employee wrote.

Others saw the email as confirmation that the expected layoffs were imminent.

“Well, if you needed solid proof that tomorrow is legit, the project dawn email is it,” one person wrote. “Looks like they wanted to use AI to send an email tomorrow and instead it sent a calendar invite today.”

It remains unclear which teams will be affected by the cuts. Some Amazon employees who spoke to Business Insider theorized that staff who received the accidental invitation may not be among those getting cut.

“People are speculating you’re safe if invited,” one employee said.

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Amazon staff cope with looming layoffs by roasting Jeff Bezos’ ‘2-pizza rule’

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Amazon employees are doing what Big Tech workers often do when they’re anxious about layoffs: making memes.

The company is expected to cut thousands more corporate roles as soon as next week, Business Insider reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. This coming round would mark another wave of mass layoffs at Amazon in just a few months, following the roughly 14,000 jobs eliminated in October.

In the absence of official companywide communication, workers have been trying to ease tension in an internal Slack channel with more than 26,000 employees who joined by posting memes and jokes, which Business Insider viewed.

The focus of their snark? Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos’ famous “two-pizza rule,” originally designed to keep meetings lean and productive. The rule was simple: never have a meeting so large that two pizzas couldn’t feed the entire group.

As the company continues to thin its ranks, employees are using the same logic to point out just how much leaner their teams are about to become.

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

One meme showed a single, thin sliver of pizza with the caption “how we feed two pizza teams.”

Another image featured two Amazon Web Services-branded pizza boxes, with the caption “did someone say 2 pizza team?” The meme is a nod to the company’s cloud division, where many of the cuts are expected to land.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been on a team that could be completely fed with just two reasonably sized pizzas until you were still hungry very frugal,” one employee wrote in the Slack channel. “Increasing ‘span-of-control’ for managers seems to be the new rage.”

Others wondered if two Costco pizzas would be considered “reasonably sized.”

“I was thinking more like Domino’s Large pizzas,” another employee wrote.

The pizza jokes weren’t the only coping mechanism. Employees also shared non-pizza memes.

One riffed on the rumored timing, splashing “JANUARY 27TH” over the scene from “The Shining” showing Jack Nicholson’s character smashing through a door with an ax and “AWS” over his face.

Another meme used the “panik/kalm” template to mock corporate buzzwords. It shows an error message about email not working, presumably because the employee was laid off, with the words “Mail not working (have I become Nimble?!)”, referring to CEO Andy Jassy’s 2025 remarks about cutting jobs to stay nimble.

Other posts leaned into the dread of the unknown: one meme laid out a checklist for employees for January 27: “able to login,” “mail and Slack works,” and “no random HR meeting in calendar.”

Another simply captured the vibe in all caps: “I don’t know what will happen on 27 Jan and at this point I’m too afraid to ask.”

Amazon isn’t the first tech giant to see a nervous workforce poke fun at its internal culture. In 2023, Google employees flooded the company’s internal message boards with memes mocking its lavish developer conference, which came months after it laid off 12,000 employees.

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Amazon expected to cut thousands more corporate jobs soon

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  • Amazon plans to lay off thousands of corporate employees in coming days.
  • This second major round of Amazon layoffs since October would bring the total to about 30,000 jobs.
  • Amazon is trying to streamline operations and reset its culture.

Amazon is planning to eliminate thousands of corporate employees, with cuts expected to begin as soon as next week, according to people familiar with the matter.

The reductions would mark the company’s second wave of mass layoffs since October, when Amazon cut about 14,000 jobs. Two of the people said the company is expected to eliminate a similar number of roles in the coming round, bringing total job cuts to almost 30,000.

The latest cuts underscore Amazon’s continued efforts to streamline operations and reset its culture.

Amazon first attributed the October job cuts to changes brought on by AI. But CEO Andy Jassy later said the layoffs were instead tied to cultural fit, not cost savings or AI.

Amazon employs more than 1.5 million people globally, though its corporate workforce makes up a relatively small share, at about 350,000.

An Amazon spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

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Peter Kafka

Streaming big events like an NFL game used to be question mark. Amazon just got more than 31 million people to stream the Bears-Packers.

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On Saturday, the Chicago Bears beat the Green Bay Packers in an NFL playoff game that had everything: a bitter rivalry, an old-school outdoors atmosphere, and a historic comeback (or choke-job, depending on your POV).

It also happened to be a (mostly) streaming-only game. Did you notice? Or care?

I didn’t. Except for about 30 seconds, when I was trying to find out what network was showing the game, and it took me a beat to realize it was on Amazon’s Prime Video. Then I booted up my app and watched the game without any issue. Just like any other NFL game.

In 2026, “Guy doesn’t have a problem watching the Bears/Packers” is a true dog-bites-man story. But that’s why I’m writing about it here: Not very long ago, the idea of streaming a super-high-profile NFL game — and requiring NFL fans to subscribe to a streaming service in order to watch it — would have been a very big deal.

Now it’s a yawner: I was one of 31.6 million people who watched the game, the vast majority of whom streamed it (fans in local markets could use broadcast TV). That’s a streaming record for an NFL game, and it’s more than some other games got last weekend on conventional TV.

And that tells you just how far sports and streaming have come.

Flash back to 2013, for instance, and the idea of whether the “internet” — a catch-all term that included everything needed to get streaming video onto your screen, from web servers to fiber-optic lines to the router in your house — could support a big NFL game watched by many millions of people was an open question. “Why Web TV Skeptic Mark Cuban Thinks Google Can Make the NFL Work on the Web,” was an ungainly headline I tapped out at the time.

Back then, the NFL and other sports giants were routinely streaming big events like the Super Bowl and World Cup — but only as a sort of secondary outlet for weirdos who didn’t have traditional TV. And anyone who did stream sports had to expect to run into problems, like ESPN did when it streamed a World Cup game in 2014.

A year later, the NFL put on a streaming-only game for the first time — but made sure it was a relatively niche one, and made sure that people knew it was an experiment.

Cut to today, and streaming is just a way we watch some football games now. Amazon pays a gazillion dollars a year to show one game a week during the regular season; Netflix has paid up to show a couple games on Christmas Day. A new deal the NFL struck with Disney last year will give the league the opportunity to sell even more games to digital players.

And two years ago, the league passed another new threshold by moving one of its most valuable assets — a playoff game — to Comcast’s Peacock streamer, where it was only available to paid subscribers. That one generated a ton of complaints from people who said they didn’t want to pay another service to watch an NFL game — along with millions of sign-ups for Peacock, which showed they would.

The NFL is not ditching TV for streaming anytime soon. For many people, watching NFL games is the main reason to watch TV, and that gives the league a ton of leverage to extract ever-increasing fees from the likes of NBC and CBS. So they will almost certainly keep the majority of their games on old-time TV for the foreseeable future. But they’re going to sell them to streaming platforms too — because they’ll pay up to get them, and you’ll pay, too.




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Amazon gives managers a new way to spot who’s barely coming into the office

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Amazon is equipping its managers with powerful new metrics to monitor their reports with a dashboard that tracks not only whether employees show up to the office, but also how many hours they spend there, according to an internal document obtained by Business Insider.

The move marks an escalation in the surveillance of white-collar workers at the e-commerce and cloud computing giant. Last year, Amazon implemented one of the industry’s most stringent RTO mandates, requiring most employees to work from an office for five days a week. Now, managers have a way to spot — and potentially confront — employees who fall short of these expectations.

The updated dashboard, which began rolling out in December, allows managers and HR to view how often employees come into an office, how long they stay, and the locations where they work. It refreshes at 5 p.m. PT daily and tracks these metrics over a rolling eight-week period.

The system flags three kinds of employees: “Low-Time Badgers,” defined as employees whose weekly median time in the office is less than four hours per day, averaged over a rolling eight-week period; “Zero Badgers,” who don’t badge into any Amazon building during that span; and “Unassigned Building Badgers,” who badge into a building other than the one they’re assigned to over half the time.

“These metrics are intended to surface employees operating significantly outside documented in-office expectations,” the document says.

“For more than a year now, we’ve provided tools like this for managers to help identify who on their team may need support in working from the office each day,” an Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider. “We recently updated the dashboard to make it more consistent for all managers, but most of the data and functionality was previously available. We continue to see the benefits of having our teams working together, and we haven’t changed our expectations for employees to be in the office.”

Amazon notes in the document that managers are expected to “apply judgment” when determining whether to initiate formal disciplinary follow-ups.

In 2023, Amazon began tracking and sharing individual office attendance records, reversing a previous policy that only tracked anonymized, aggregated attendance data.

A year later, the company began cracking down on “coffee badging” by informing some teams that they needed to be in the office for a minimum of two to six hours to have their attendance count. The crackdown received criticism from some employees, including one who compared the move to being treated “like high school students,” Business Insider previously reported.

The updated dashboard standardizes these metrics across Amazon’s entire corporate workforce, excluding workers such as warehouse staff and contractors. It grants managers direct, on-demand access to data that they would have previously had to request from HR, according to an Amazon employee familiar with the company’s policies.

Amazon is positioning the dashboard as a means to encourage in-person collaboration.

“Working In-office is important to our culture and is also about more than just being physically present during the week,” the document said. “Managers are expected to promote meaningful team collaboration through direct interactions with their team rather than just remotely monitoring badge swipes each week.”

Amazon is hardly alone in using badge data to police return-to-office rules.

Samsung rolled out a manager-facing tool that shows “days and time in building” metrics, aimed at discouraging “lunch/coffee badging.” Dell informed hybrid staff that it will track on-site presence via badge swipes and could factor attendance into performance and compensation.

Bank of America issued warning notices to employees, informing some that continued noncompliance with its RTO policy could result in further disciplinary action. At JPMorgan, employees have described an internal dashboard that calculates the share of eligible days spent in the office and is visible to senior managers.

In the UK, PwC has said it would track employees’ work locations to enforce its RTO policy.

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Amazon allows visa workers stranded in India to work remotely with restrictions. Here’s what they can’t do.

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Amazon is allowing employees who are stranded in India because of visa delays to work remotely there until early March, according to an internal memo viewed by Business Insider.

The catch: They’re not allowed to code, make strategic decisions, or interact with customers.

Amazon is one of many American companies scrambling to adapt to the Trump administration’s rapid-fire changes to the H-1B visa program, including a mandate that consular officers must review visa applicants’ social media posts before issuing visas. The additional screening has delayed processing, and some embassies and consulates have rescheduled visa appointments by several months, leaving some employees stranded outside the country.

The delays have prompted Google, Apple, Microsoft, and other companies to issue travel advisories in recent weeks, warning US employees with visas to avoid international travel to prevent extended stays outside the US.

Amazon allows employees traveling abroad for visa renewals to work remotely for up to 20 business days, an exemption from the normal requirement that they work in their office five days a week. Now, any Amazon employee in India as of December 13 and who awaits a rescheduled visa appointment may work remotely until March 2, according to the memo, which was posted to Amazon’s internal HR portal on December 17.

The permission to work remotely comes with a long list of constraints. Employees working remotely from India are barred from coding of any kind, including troubleshooting and testing. They cannot work from or visit Amazon buildings. And they cannot negotiate or sign contracts.

“All reviews, final decision making, and sign offs should be undertaken outside India,” the memo says.

The memo also said that “in compliance with local laws, there are no exceptions to these restrictions.”

The memo does not provide guidance for employees whose visa appointments have been rescheduled beyond March 2, 2026, or for those stranded in a different country. Some US embassies and consulates have rescheduled appointments as far out as 2027.

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

For employees in technical roles, the restrictions raised questions about what work they can actually perform.

“Seventy to eighty percent of my job is coding, testing, deploying, and documenting,” one Amazon software engineer told Business Insider.

A State Department spokesperson in December told Business Insider that the purpose of the social media reviews is to use “all available tools” to flag visa applicants who are inadmissible, including those who pose a risk to national interests.

The delays pose a particular challenge for Amazon, which is among the largest users of the H-1B program. During the 2024 government fiscal year, Amazon filed 14,783 certified H-1B applications, including 23 for Whole Foods, according to Business Insider’s analysis of publicly available data from the Department of Labor and US Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Read the full memo below:

H-1B/H-4 Visa Appointment Postponement Issue – December 17, 2025

Temporary Remote Work Authorization

Effective immediately, impacted employees who were in India as of December 13, 2025, and are awaiting their rescheduled visa appointment may work remotely until March 2, 2026. You must follow all current limitations on remote work activities, including restrictions against coding. See the FAQs below for details.
We continue to monitor developments closely and will provide further updates as more information becomes available. In the meantime, if you need additional support please reach out by asking Aza or contacting MyHR Live Support to be connected to an HR expert. You and your household also have 24/7 access to a wide range of support and resources through Resources for Living.

Employee Guidance

The remote work grace period is subject to the same activity restrictions (listed below) as all current remote work guidance in India. In compliance with local laws, there are no exceptions to these restrictions. If you have questions, please work with your manager and HRBP to determine what activities you can engage in while abroad, based on these guidelines:
  • Do not code. This includes troubleshooting, testing, or documentation.
  • Do not work from or visit an Amazon building or site. All work must be remote from a residential address or other non-Amazon location.
  • Do not give the impression of authority to bind any Amazon entity or appoint an agent authorized to bind any Amazon entity to any contract or agreement.
  • Do not undertake any strategic business decisions, business planning, product management/development, and/or business development type activities.
  • Do not negotiate any contracts, sign/execute or otherwise conclude any contracts, or secure any orders, either in the approval tools and/or DocuSign (or via any other method).
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Will Amazon and Walmart’s push for 30-minute delivery actually pay off? We debate.

by with No Comment Xpandfy

The ultrafast delivery wars are heating up.

Amazon said last week that it’s testing a 30-minute delivery option in Seattle and Philadelphia, while Walmart said it managed to fulfill a Black Friday order in 10 minutes and is expanding its drone service to the Atlanta area.

The race is on to get online orders to shoppers’ doorsteps as fast as possible, but we can’t help but wonder as companies pour money into the infrastructure to support it: Is 30-minute delivery overhyped or under-appreciated?

Business Insider’s senior retail reporters Alex Bitter, who primarily covers gig work apps and groceries, and Dominick Reuter, who mainly covers big box stores, sat down to hash it out.

Dominick: I’d say 30-minute delivery is the future. Are you saying it’s an already-failed past?

Alex: The fundamentals are not there. Unless there’s some massive other piece that we’re not seeing, I don’t get why Amazon is doing this.

Dominick: I definitely think it only works as part of a larger strategy where this service builds and strengthens customer relationships. It does not fly on its own.

Alex: A few years ago, we saw some startups try to do something very similar. You had companies like Gorillas — a German grocery delivery concept — pop up to deliver items in 15 minutes.

It was the same pitch: Is there an ingredient or two that you forgot for dinner tonight? No problem. We’ll deliver it to your door, fast.

Now, though, many of those startups either no longer exist or have scaled back significantly. Getir, an ultrafast delivery company from Turkey, left the US. Gopuff is still around and raising money, though reportedly at a lower valuation than it did during the height of the pandemic.

Grocery is already one of the lowest-margin categories in retail. With delivery this fast, you’re making it even less profitable.

To be fair, Amazon has a lot more money and experience than those startups did. But that does not change the fundamental truth that this is a challenging business model.

Dominick: Scale is everything here — the biggest players have a shot at making this successful. Even though it didn’t work out for the startups, their very existence shows the consumer demand for fast service.

But it takes such an astonishing volume of inventory to support that speed of fulfillment. Companies like Amazon or Walmart already have that inventory, which eliminates one of the biggest hurdles to making 30-minute delivery work.

It’s working in China, it’s working in India, and it’s gaining momentum in other global markets. The big challenge in the US is suburbia, but that’s solvable.

Although I will say 15 minutes is wildly unrealistic.

Alex: When we reported on the ultrafast delivery startups a few years ago, an analyst told me that a 30-minute delivery promise is more reasonable than a 15-minute one.

But Amazon already has fairly fast delivery. Not 30 minutes, obviously, but you can get orders from Amazon Fresh or Whole Foods in as little as a few hours.

Also, this is yet another grocery offering for Amazon. It feels like it has too many now. Consider Whole Foods Daily Shop, a small-format grocery store that’s designed for the same kind of fill-in trips that Amazon seems to be targeting with its 30-minute delivery option.

Dominick: When it comes to adding more stores and fulfillment centers, that’s exactly what Amazon needs to be doing, and it needs to get people going to those brick-and-mortar stores and counting on Amazon-exclusive products.

Walmart and Target are proving that having lots of physical locations can get you way closer to making these ultrafast deliveries successful. Walmart has 4,600 stores, Target has 2,000 — that counts for a whole lot.

There are 25,000 Amazon drop boxes, but those obviously can’t contain what’s in a typical Supercenter. Amazon is working on it, though.

Alex: Maybe this is Amazon figuring out how it can compete with Walmart — and Albertsons and Kroger, for that matter — without having the same store footprint. This also puts it in more direct competition with Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Instacart.

Many US consumers live in smaller towns or suburbs. I don’t think 30-minute delivery works well in those areas. People drive themselves to stores — something the retailers love because it’s cheaper for them than making deliveries.

Amazon is not yet in a lot of those areas, like it is in the densest cities in America.

I could see this 30-minute idea working in Manhattan, though people in such densely populated urban areas already have lots of options for a quick grocery run (bodegas, anyone?).

Amazon has been trying for years to boost its market share in grocery. I’m not sure this is it.

Dominick: The last thing I’ll say is I see ultrafast delivery as a key complement to the marketplace strategy that Amazon and Walmart are leaning on.

When customers need something now, that lets the company serve up an ad or some other exposure to the marketplace for a later purchase.

If Amazon and Walmart can get you to check their app first to get that missing ingredient, they could also sell you on some higher-margin product that might take a couple of days to arrive.

Alex: You need toothpaste, onions, and eggs right now, but that Christmas gift you’ve been meaning to buy can come this weekend.

Dominick: That, I think, is the reason it’s going to be these two giants driving this shift: you need to be very big to offer 30-minute delivery in the first place, and then you need to be very big to see any benefit from it as well.


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