In 2015, Amazon had roughly two hundred thousand employees. Now, a recently retired Amazon executive told me, “people are worried-we’re suddenly on the firing line.”Īmazon executives were also concerned about dramatic changes within the company. Company insiders were accustomed to complaints from rivals at book publishers or executives at big-box stores.
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In recent months, inquiries by news organizations have documented Amazon’s sale of illegal or deadly products, and have exposed how the company’s fast-delivery policies have resulted in drivers speeding down streets and through intersections, killing people. This past summer, at a debate among the Democratic Presidential candidates, Senator Bernie Sanders said, “Five hundred thousand Americans are sleeping out on the street, and yet companies like Amazon, that made billions in profits, did not pay one nickel in federal income tax.” And Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary, declared that Amazon has “destroyed the retail industry across the United States.” The Federal Trade Commission and the European Union, meanwhile, are independently pursuing investigations of Amazon for potential antitrust violations. Everyone from Senator Elizabeth Warren to President Donald Trump has depicted Amazon as dangerously unconstrained. Critics say that Amazon, much like Google and Facebook, has grown too large and powerful to be trusted. You probably contribute to Amazon’s profits whether you intend to or not. Amazon’s Web-services division powers vast portions of the Internet, from Netflix to the C.I.A.
it owns Whole Foods and helps arrange the shipment of items purchased across the Web, including on eBay and Etsy. (Walmart is the largest.) It traffics more than a third of all retail products bought or sold online in the U.S. At Amazon’s headquarters, in Seattle, the company’s fourteen Leadership Principles-painted on walls, posted in bathrooms, printed on laminated cards in executives’ wallets-urge employees to “never say ‘that’s not my job,’ ” to “examine their strongest convictions with humility,” to “not compromise for the sake of social cohesion,” and to commit to excellence even if “people may think these standards are unreasonably high.” (When I recently asked various employees to recite the precepts, they did so with alarming gusto: “ ‘Frugality breeds resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention!’ ”) A former executive said, “That’s how we earn our success-we’re willing to be frugal and egoless, and obsessed with delighting our customers.”Īmazon is now America’s second-largest private employer. Such a willful act of vanity felt like a bad omen. Bezos, who had built an empire exhorting employees to be “vocally self-critical,” and to never “believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume,” issued a command: Make it Thursday.īezos’s power play was so mild that it likely wasn’t noticed by Gates, but within Amazon the story sparked a small panic (and, later, an official denial).
The assistant informed Bezos of the invitation, and told him that both days were open. In 2017, a few months after Forbes named Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, the world’s richest man, a rumor spread among the company’s executives: Bill Gates, the former wealthiest person on earth, had called Bezos’s assistant to schedule a lunch, asking if Tuesday or Wednesday was available. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.