They laid people off because they had gone on a hiring spree when the fed had quantitative easing. They over hired. Now, the fed stopped the gravy train and they had to scale back.

Jeff Bezos or his successor in Amazon are smart enough to realize that you need customers to make a profit. Profit, innovation and a strong demand economy are intertwined. It may be that a millennia from now, humans will have moved beyond any economic model today. But we won't be living Wall-E for the remainder of this century at a minimum.