Amazon cracks down on an alarming workplace trend | Official Website of Louis Velazquez, entrepreneur, finance guy and tech innovator

Amazon (AMZN) , which has over 315 million customers worldwide, recently delivered record sales during the 2024 holiday season.

In Amazon’s fourth-quarter earnings report for 2024, it revealed that its U.S. sales increased by 10% year-over-year during the quarter.

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This contributed to it generating an operating income of $9.3 billion in the U.S., a roughly 30% increase from what it earned during the same quarter in 2023.

“The holiday shopping season was the most successful yet for Amazon and we appreciate the support of our customers, selling partners, and employees who helped make it so,” said Amazon CEO Andy Jassy in the earnings report.

Amazon tackles a startling issue

As Amazon faces increased momentum from consumers, it has decided to tackle a growing problem in its warehouses.

The online retail giant has just enforced a series of strict measures, which were previously put in place during the Covid-19 pandemic, to crack down on workplace theft.

An Amazon employee working at an Amazon fulfillment center.

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Amazon is now requiring its warehouse employees to go through metal-detector screening before leaving warehouses, according to a new report from Bloomberg.

When Amazon previously required metal-detector screening during the pandemic, it allegedly caused logjams at some facilities. This became the source of many complaints as this caused workers to become stuck in security lines for as long as 25 minutes without pay.

In addition to metal-detector screening, Amazon is also asking employees to register their personal cell phones to ensure that they aren’t stolen merchandise.

To register, employees are required to share the last six digits of their device’s serial number so that they can receive a sticker to place on it, which lets security know that the device is theirs and not stolen.

“We’re always working to make our facilities more safe and secure for our employees and for companies of all sizes that put their trust in us to store their inventory,” said an Amazon spokesperson in an emailed statement to Bloomberg. “As one part of that, we’ve made the decision to restore some practices that we had suspended to support social distancing during the pandemic.”

Amazon suffers losses from a concerning workplace trend

The return of these strict measures from Amazon comes after it recently faced several significant incidents where warehouse employees were accused of stealing merchandise.

In 2023, an Amazon employee was arrested for stealing over $300,000 worth of merchandise from an Amazon warehouse in Memphis, Tennessee, a crime he eventually admitted to after being caught by Amazon’s loss prevention team.

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In May last year, a former employee at an Amazon fulfillment center in Whitestown, Indiana, was charged with theft after he allegedly stole over $86,000 in phones and other electronics from the facility.

Also, a few months later in September, multiple Amazon employees in Fort Wayne, Indiana, were put under investigation by Fort Wayne police for organized retail theft where they allegedly stole 164 iPhone 15s from Amazon, worth over $150,000, and resold them online for cash.

Internal theft, or employee theft, has become a major problem for retailers across the country.

According to a 2023 National Retail Federation survey, internal theft was the second-highest contributor to shrink loss as it accounted for 29% of total loss, falling right behind external theft. The average dollar loss that was reported for an internal theft was $2,180 per investigation.