By Shira Ovide
The big numerical reveal on Wednesday was Amazon.com Inc. finally spilling the beans on the number of Prime members (more than 100 million). It also disclosed another number that shows how much it relies on an army of people moving physical merchandise around the world: $28,446.
That’s the median annual compensation of Amazon employees. Amazon reported this number for the first time under a new requirement that companies disclose the gap between pay for the rank-and-file and the person in the corner office. (Amazon Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, reported total compensation of $1.68 million last year. As in prior years, he didn’t take a stock bonus, collected a salary of $81,840 and had $1.6 million in personal security costs that Amazon covered.)
That median pay figure is skewed by the large number of Amazon’s more than 560,000 employees who work in its package warehouses, distribution centers, Whole Foods grocery stores and other places far from the ping-pong tables, endless free kale chips and yoga rooms of…
