Amazon.com Inc, seeking to portray itself as a job creator fuelling small-business innovation rather than an out-of-control corporate beast that needs to be tamed, said it helped mom-and-pop companies create 1.6 million jobs in 2018, up from 900,000 the year before.
The company released a report May 7, during the US National Small Business Week, for circulation to elected officials as part of a charm offensive aimed at steering the conversation away from its e-commerce dominance and the damage it’s inflicted on competition. Almost 2 million small businesses partner with Amazon, including authors who get royalties on book sales, merchants that sell products on its website and engineers who build for the Alexa voice-activated platform, according to the report.