【An Affair My Wife’s Friend 2 (2019)】

The An Affair My Wife’s Friend 2 (2019)pandemic hit the bodies, hearts, and pocketbooks of most Americans hard. But Amazon did just fine.

Amazon released its earnings report on Thursday for the first quarter of 2021. It gives us a clear picture of how Amazon fared during the pandemic.

So how are Amazon's coffers looking? They are, frankly, overflowing. In January through March in 2021, it reported net income of $8.1 billion. That brings its total pandemic earnings to $26.9 billion. As MarketWatch points out, that's three times as much money as Amazon made in the previous three years combined.

---

You May Also Like

---

---

It also tripled its earnings from the first quarter of 2020, when it reported net income of $2.5 billion

In the call, Amazon executives stated that Amazon customers shopped "with greater frequency and in more categories during the pandemic." Amazon also added 50 million Prime members in the last year, for a total of 200 million, whose $120 annual memberships certainly help its bottom line. Its cloud business, AWS, also grew, and its international retail operations were profitable for the first time since 2016.

Mashable Light Speed Want more out-of-this world tech, space and science stories? Sign up for Mashable's weekly Light Speed newsletter. By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Thanks for signing up!

On Main Street, the story is entirely different. According to a report from Facebook and the Small Business Roundtable, 22 percent of small businesses in the U.S. were closed in February — just one percent shy of the pandemic high, 23 percent, in May 2020.

And a new report from the U.S. Small Business Administration found that "the number of people who were self employed and working was 20 percent lower in April 2020 than in April 2019," with Asian, Black, and Hispanic people hit the hardest. Rebuilding has been slow going, and the current number of self-employed people who are working is still 3.6 percent lower than before the pandemic.

The pandemic hit self-employed Black, Asian, and Hispanic people the hardest. Credit: Office of Advocacy, U.S. Small Business Administration

Amazon often says that it empowers small businesses by allowing them to reach customers through its marketplace.

"In 2020, small and medium businesses selling on Amazon saw an estimated $25 billion to $39 billion in profits," Amazon spokesperson Joel Sider said over email. "We invested more than $18 billion to help them reach hundreds of millions of customers, deliver their products, and grow their sales. It is one of the greatest partnership stories in the history of retail."

Then again, Amazon takes a cut of those sales, and even copies the products of independent sellers when they happen to do especially well. As the world gets back on its feet, Amazon's profits probably won't escape the attention of regulators.

UPDATE: May 3, 2021, 2:43 p.m. EDT This story was updated with a comment from Amazon.

Topics Amazon

• Digital Culture
• Games
• Deals
• Entertainment
• Social Good
• Science
• Life
• Tech

• Looking for Twin Peaks
• Missing Perspectives
• The Musk of Success
• Stranger than Fiction
• Social Media Forensics
• Conspiracies, War, and Democrats
• The Whimper of Democracy
• Who Framed Augmented Reality?
• The Saran-Wrapped Soul
• Why You Can't Buy Books from the Kindle app on iPhone or iPad in 2018

• Willow Smith says she once walked in on Will and Jada having sex
• Guillermo del Toro's 'Nightmare Alley' is derailed by Bradley Cooper
• Read these masturbation horror stories at your own risk
• Never forget that Donald Glover achieved early internet fame with a sketch about pooping his pants
• TikTok launches viral food takeout business, but the idea has holes
• Mercedes' first electric AMG is a show
• 14 of the most anticipated electric vehicles of 2022
• Beyoncé was everyone's favorite part of the Met Gala and she wasn't even there
• Meta's Portal to support live American Sign Language interpreting apps
• Pigs in a blanket are great when cooked in the air fryer

• Stranger than Fiction
• Small Man in a Memory Hole
• Keeping Education on the Radar
• 7 Tech Predictions for 2018
• Poodles, doodles, and memory-challenged gnomes
• The Whimper of Democracy
• Techies and Tankies
• What Comes After Resistance?
• Bridging the Healthcare Divide in West Virginia
• Battle of the Brands

• Uniting Against White Supremacy in Charlottesville
• The Secret Policeman at the Marathon
• PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds Graphics Performance Revisited: 44 GPUs Tested
• Missing Perspectives
• Complicity, Not Tyranny
• 25 Great Games You Can Play on Laptops and Budget PCs
• We Are All at the Table Together
• It All Comes down to Real Estate
• A Great, Soulless Get
• Remembering Philip Levine’s Poetics of Labor