space for Mary's Place, a local charity in 2020. As 2017 came to a close, Amazon had over 566,000 employees worldwide. According to an August 8, 2018 story in Bloomberg Businessweek, Amazon has about a 5 percent share of US retail spending (excluding cars and car parts and visits to restaurants and bars), and a 43.5 percent share of American online spending in 2018. The forecast is for Amazon to own 49 percent of the total American online spending in 2018, with two-thirds of Amazon's revenue coming from the US. Amazon launched the last-mile delivery program and ordered 20,000 Mercedes-Benz Sprinter Vans for the service in September 2018. Amazon generated $386 billion in US retail e-commerce sales in 2020, up 38% over 2019. Amazon's Marketplace sales represent an increasingly dominant portion of its e-commerce business. On November 14, 2022, it was announced that Amazon had plans to lay off 10,000 employees among its corporate and technology staff. HQ2 In November 2018, Amazon announced it would open its highly sought-after new headquarters, known as (HQ2) in Long Island City, Queens, New York City, and in the Crystal City neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia. On February 14, 2019, Amazon announced it was not moving forward with plans to build HQ2 in Queens but would instead focus solely on the Arlington location. The company plans to locate at least 25,000 employees at HQ2 by 2030 and will invest more than US$2.5 billion to establish its new headquarters in Crystal City as well as neighboring Pentagon City and Potomac Yard, an area jointly marketed as "National Landing." The announcement also created a new partnership with Virginia Tech University to develop an Innovation Campus to fill demand for high-tech talent in National Landing and beyond. COVID-19 At the end of March 2020, some workers of the Staten Island warehouse staged a walkout in protest of the poor health situation at their workplace amidst the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. One of the organizers, Chris Smalls, was first put on quarantine without anyone else being quarantined, and soon afterwards fired from the company. The pandemic caused a surge in online shopping and resulted in shortages of household staples both online and some brick-and-mortar stores. From March 17 to April 10, 2020, Amazon warehouses stopped accepting non-essential items from third-party sellers. The company hired approximately 175,000 additional warehouse workers and delivery contractors to deal with the surge, and temporarily raised