MY COMMENT: Regardless of Amazon's reasons for these layoffs, I feel Confident the true reason correlates directly with the commencement of DRONES; it might appear from this article that April may be the targeted kickoff.
Should anyone here doubt this, I offer up the following:
We're excited about Prime Air — a future delivery system from Amazon designed to safely get packages to customers in 30 minutes or less using unmanned aerial vehicles, also called drones. Prime Air has great potential to enhance the services we already provide to millions of customers by providing rapid parcel delivery that will also increase the overall safety and efficiency of the transportation system.