Torrent Explain Pain Amazon
Well, they are right about the difficulty reading the digital version if you don't have the reader. You can do it on the computer, but it would be nice to be able to enlarge it (maybe the ibook one might work). That aside, I hate the illustrations mostly (except the diagrams). They seem part of the other thing I hate - the way it talks down to the reader all the time.
Don't panic - well, do really because there aren't a lot of other books like this yet, so you may have to read this meandering stuff, that says the same thing over and over. I am absolutely sure they could have said this with less pages.
I'm not finished reading it yet, so it may get better, but I disliked the tone enough to review it before even finishing my first skim. Which is unfair and I don't remember having done it before, so you should judge for yourself (just be prepared for 'Don't panic'. Why do topical books have to be 'super entertaining'? Just what were the editors thinking? Well, they are right about the difficulty reading the digital version if you don't have the reader. You can do it on the computer, but it would be nice to be able to enlarge it (maybe the ibook one might work).
That aside, I hate the illustrations mostly (except the diagrams). They seem part of the other thing I hate - the way it talks down to the reader all the time. Don't panic - well, do really because there aren't a lot of other books like this yet, so you may have to read this meandering stuff, that says the same thing over and over. I am absolutely sure they could have said this with less pages. I'm not finished reading it yet, so it may get better, but I disliked the tone enough to review it before even finishing my first skim. Which is unfair and I don't remember having done it before, so you should judge for yourself (just be prepared for 'Don't panic'. Why do topical books have to be 'super entertaining'?
Just what were the editors thinking?
The Leadership Principles were never paraphrased; when a question over wording arose, the laminated cards were often whipped out. PowerPoint was discouraged. Product proposals had to be written out as six-page narratives—Bezos believed that storytelling forced critical thinking—accompanied by a mock press release. Meetings started with a period of silent reading, and each proposal concluded with a list of F.A.Q.s, such as “What will most disappoint the customer on the first day of release?”Tech companies are often profligate, but Amazon had an ethic of thrift. Freed learned to anticipate the eye rolls that greeted new employees who printed on just one side of paper, or the admonishment coming to anyone who wanted to book a business-class seat. Whenever Amazon moved to new offices, Bezos had them furnished with cheap desks made from wooden doors.
Whereas other tech companies supplied employees with an array of free meals and snacks, Amazon offered only coffee and bananas. (In a statement, Amazon said that it is “frugal on behalf of our customers.”)Freed and other Amazonians were delighted by the company’s quirks. Bezos amused his colleagues when he humble-bragged about being such a sci-fi nerd that he owned a Jean-Luc Picard uniform from “.” And staffers loved it when Amazon offered a promotion, known as Share the Pi, in which customers were given a discount of 1.57 per cent (3.14 divided by two). When Amazon leaders joined the low-carb craze, they ended meetings debating the finer points of ketosis, and raced one another up the stairs. It wasn’t fair to call Amazon a cult, but it wasn’t entirely unfair, either.
“We never claim that our approach is the right one,” Bezos, in a 2016 letter to shareholders. “Just that it’s ours.”Above all, Freed loved Amazon’s focus on spinning its flywheels faster, and finding new markets where they could whirl. “Amazon’s culture is designed to prevent bureaucracies,” he told me. “Everything Jeff does is to stop a big-company mentality from taking hold, so that Amazon can continue behaving like a group of startups.” Among the worst sins was doing anything that slowed the company down. (As the Leadership Principles put it, “Speed matters.”) Freed was soon assigned to help oversee the creation of a new e-reader, the Kindle. His team expanded quickly (“Hire and Develop the Best”), came up with dozens of concepts and prototypes (“Invent and Simplify”), and, in just a few years, delivered a device of startling simplicity and elegance. When the Kindle was launched, in 2007, it sold out in less than six hours, and soon became one of the most popular gadgets of the past quarter century.As Freed learned, it was also fine to stumble at Amazon, as long as the experience yielded strategic insight.
After overseeing the Kindle, Freed was asked to help lead a team developing the company’s first smartphone. Bezos had become enamored of a sophisticated display that approximated 3-D. For four years, Freed oversaw a group that grew to a thousand employees, and spent more than a hundred million dollars.
But when the Amazon Fire Phone was released, in 2014, it was a flop. No matter: when Freed had presented an early prototype of the phone’s software to Bezos, he’d shown him how it included voice recognition that could hear, and then play, any popular song whose title a user said aloud. “I can ask for any song?” Bezos asked. “What about ‘Hotel California’?” The tune began playing. “This is fantastic,” he said.A few days after that presentation, Bezos asked Freed to help build a cloud-based computer that responded to voice commands, like the one in “Star Trek.” Freed started amassing a team that eventually reached two hundred people, and was given a fifty-million-dollar budget.
The Fire Phone’s voice-recognition technology had been licensed from another firm, and wasn’t an exact fit for what Amazon was seeking. So Freed and his team hired speech scientists and artificial-intelligence experts, and created new software that could comprehend someone from Louisiana as well as someone from Liverpool—and distinguish the babble of a toddler from parents talking with food in their mouths. The team chose a name (and a “wakeup” word) for the device by considering hundreds of possibilities, before landing on Alexa—a name that was sufficiently familiar yet unusual enough to avoid too many accidental commands. Just four months after releasing the disastrous Fire Phone, Freed revealed the Echo, a voice-activated speaker that can tell you the weather, compile a grocery list, remind you to take a pie out of the oven, and play “Hotel California.” The initial price was a hundred and ninety-nine dollars. Today, you can buy one for half that, and fifty million homes have them.Around the time of the Echo’s launch, Amazon wrote off more than a hundred and seventy million dollars in costs associated with the Fire Phone.
Bezos told Freed, “You can’t, for one minute, feel bad about the Fire Phone. Promise me you won’t lose a minute of sleep.” By 2015, Freed was a vice-president and Amazon was the most valuable retailer in the world.Identifying and building flywheels became second nature to Freed. When a junior executive came by his desk with an idea—“What if we made a streaming device that you could plug into a television?”—Freed invited him to lunch, coached him through writing a mock press release, and took him to pitch the idea to Bezos. They reminded Bezos that, with existing streaming devices, searching for content was difficult. “It’s really hard to type ‘Gene Hackman movies from the nineteen-seventies’ when you’re using a remote control,” Freed explained. Amazon’s product, he said, would allow customers to simply say what they wanted to watch.
The flywheel began spinning. If Amazon sold a streaming device, it could collect more data on popular shows; if Amazon had that data, it could begin profitably producing its own premium movies and television series; if Amazon made that content free for Prime members—customers who already paid ninety-nine dollars per year for two-day delivery—then more people would sign up for Prime; if more people signed up for Prime, the company would have greater leverage in negotiating with UPS and FedEx; lower shipping costs would mean bigger profits every time Amazon sold anything on its site. The Amazon Fire TV, as the device was named, soon became one of the most popular streaming devices on the planet. Amazon Studios began producing premium shows, and before long it had won two Oscars for “” and eight Emmys for “.” In 2017, the number of Amazon Prime subscribers surpassed a hundred million.Although Freed was thriving at Amazon, he could see that there was something dizzying about its flywheel mentality. “It was hard,” he said. “That’s the culture—do whatever it takes, even if it seems impossible.” Amazon’s obsession with expansion made it the corporate equivalent of a colonizer, ruthlessly invading new industries and subjugating many smaller companies along the way.
In 2006, the company had launched Fulfillment by Amazon, an initiative in which outside sellers—everyone from mom-and-pop venders to major Chinese manufacturers—housed inventory inside Amazon’s giant warehouses and paid a fee for Amazon to handle logistics, such as packing and shipping products and fielding customer-service calls. Companies enrolled in Fulfillment by Amazon often appeared in the Buy Box, the top search listing on Amazon.com. To participate, many venders had to pay about two dollars per item. They also had to let Bezos collect valuable data on which products were becoming popular and which companies were having trouble satisfying demand. Soon, some venders felt as though they had to participate in Fulfillment by Amazon; they couldn’t otherwise attract much attention on Amazon.com, or ship products inexpensively enough to compete with rivals.Today, Amazon.com lists more than three hundred and thirty million products sold by other companies.
Scott Needham, whose company, BuyBoxer, sells about seventy thousand products on Amazon, ranging from toys to sporting goods, paid the company roughly twenty million dollars in fees last year. “There’s really no other choice,” Needham said.
“There’s a lot of things I don’t like about Amazon, but that’s where all the customers are.” Recently, the U.S. House of Representatives and the European Union began scrutinizing Fulfillment by Amazon and similar programs, out of concern that they impede competition. “Amazon is the gatekeeper,” Needham said. “It makes all the rules.”Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia, said, “Amazon is a microeconomist’s wet dream. If you’re a consumer, it’s perfect for maximizing the efficiency of finding what you want and getting it as cheap and fast as possible.
But, the thing is, most of us aren’t just consumers. We’re also producers, or manufacturers, or employees, or we live in cities where retailers have gone out of business because they can’t compete with Amazon, and so Amazon kind of pits us against ourselves.”.
Freed loved how things whizzed along at Amazon headquarters, but he understood that the “Speed matters” credo meant something different at the warehouses. “Is it the role of a company to only do what’s best for shareholders?” he asked me. “Yes, shareholders are critical, but it’s also important to understand the impact on employees.” More than a hundred thousand people work at Amazon’s fulfillment centers, and nearly everything they do is digitally tracked and evaluated, meaning that if someone falls behind—even for just a few minutes—it can be grounds for reprimand. Many employees carry handheld scanners that deliver a constant stream of instructions, such as a countdown clock detailing how many seconds remain until the next item must be plucked from a shelf. Workers can walk more than fifteen miles a day, and their breaks, including trips to the bathroom, are brief and closely measured.
When Safiyo Mohamed moved from Somalia to Minnesota, in 2016, at the age of twenty-two, she found work at the Shakopee warehouse, sorting products and moving boxes on and off conveyors. The job was taxing and the pressure relentless, she said. One day, when she picked up a heavy box, she tore an intervertebral disk in her back. The pain was excruciating, but Amazon didn’t offer her time off; her managers seemed not to care. “If you can’t work all the time, you are nothing to them,” she said. A doctor told her that the injury was pinching a nerve, and that the discomfort might never abate. She quit Amazon, and got an office job that allows her to pause, or stretch, when her back hurts.
“How am I going to have a baby when I can’t pick him up, when I’m worried about being pregnant?” Mohamed said. “I’m so angry. Amazon doesn’t want humans, they want robots. I will have this forever because of them. They don’t care at all.”At Amazon’s corporate headquarters, many executives’ performances are similarly quantified and ranked. “It can be a hard place for women,” a former executive told me.
Explain Pain Butler
“If you have a kid, it’s a disadvantage to your career, unless your husband is the primary parent.” (Amazon said, in a statement, that it “disagrees strongly with this perspective,” and noted that it offers twenty weeks of paid parental leave.) A former senior female executive told me she counselled younger colleagues that “it’s not the company’s job to create a work-life balance—it’s your job,” adding, “The idea of a company as a caretaker is not our culture.” There is only one woman on Amazon’s S-Team, the group of eighteen executives who largely run the firm. The lack of female representation is a sensitive topic at the company. A current high-ranking executive told me, “I’m not sure it would be any different for a woman at an investment bank or a big law firm.
The pace is fast, yes, and it’s not for everyone or every stage of life, but these are highly compensated people who know they can easily get other jobs. No one works at Amazon—at least, in corporate—unless they want to.”Amazon argues that criticisms of working conditions in its warehouses are unfair. Dave Clark, the senior vice-president for worldwide operations, told me that work expectations at its facilities “are very achievable for folks.” He said that the company has increasingly automated its warehouses, to ease physical tasks. “We make mistakes,” Clark said. “And, when we do hear about it, we learn from it, and we go out and fix it.” Amazon pays all U.S.-based employees at least fifteen dollars an hour—more than the minimum wage in many places—and full-time warehouse workers have access to the same health and retirement plans as executives. A company statement noted that workers at Amazon begin and end every shift with a short meeting and a group stretching session; it also said that employee performance is evaluated over extended periods, noting, “We would never dismiss an employee without first ensuring that they had received our fullest support, including dedicated coaching.”Many Amazon executives have become defensive about the fact that even centrist politicians like Joe Biden see the company as a symbol of capitalism gone awry.
(On Twitter, Biden, “No company pulling in billions of dollars of profits should pay a lower tax rate than firefighters and teachers.”) Jeff Wilke, one of Bezos’s top lieutenants, told me that Amazon “tries to be a good corporate citizen,” and added, “We’ve built a for-profit enterprise that is improving the lives of customers and taking great care of employees. There’s a lot to be proud of.” The company, he said, has committed to spending seven hundred million dollars to train its workers in such subjects as coding and robotics. One senior Amazon executive said of its warehouses, “It’s a hard economy for people without college degrees right now. We can’t run a philanthropy, but we’re trying to be the best of those bad kinds of jobs.” Another top executive suggested that Amazon was merely a cog in the American economic machine—and inevitably reflected how contemporary inequality had created winners and losers. “We’re doing what we can,” he said.
“But ultimately this is a problem only the government can really solve—by changing how the economy works.”Amazon has always been unabashed about being a cutthroat competitor. When the company started, in 1995, with fewer than a dozen employees, Bezos considered naming it Relentless. (The company still owns the URL for relentless.com—it redirects you to Amazon.com.) Amazonians know that outsiders want them to change, but listening to outsiders is not one of the Leadership Principles. One executive told me, with barely suppressed resentment, “What has made us great for so long is suddenly being seen as something we ought to be ashamed of!”. Kahan investigated, and found that numerous companies were selling counterfeit or unauthorized Birkenstocks on Amazon; many were using Fulfillment by Amazon to ship their products, which caused them to appear prominently in search results. “We would ask Amazon to take sellers down—or, at least, tell us who is counterfeiting—but they said they couldn’t divulge private information,” Kahan told me.Kahan also discovered that Amazon had started buying enormous numbers of Birkenstocks to resell on the site.
The company had amassed more than a year’s worth of inventory. “That was terrifying, because it meant we could totally lose control of our brand,” he said. “What if Amazon decides to start selling the shoes for ninety-nine cents, or to give them away with Prime membership, or do a buy-one-get-one-free campaign? It would completely destroy how people see our shoes, and our only power to prevent something like that is to cut off a retailer’s supply. But Amazon had a year’s worth of inventory.
We were powerless.”Kahan spent months trying to negotiate with Amazon executives in Seattle. At the Birkenstock Americas office, in Marin County, California, he and his deputies would spend hours preparing arguments about why stopping unauthorized sellers would help Amazon’s customers, and then they’d crowd around Kahan’s desk and turn on the speakerphone. Sometimes the Amazon executives would let them go on; other times, they’d cut them off midsentence. It wasn’t Amazon’s place to decide who could and couldn’t sell on the site, the executives explained, as long as simple guidelines were met. “They basically didn’t care,” Kahan said. “We’re just one company, and there’s millions of companies they deal with every day. But this is the biggest thing on earth for us.
Amazon is the shopping mall now, and, normally, if you open a store in a shopping mall, you can expect certain things—like the mall operator will clean the hallways, and they’ll make sure Foot Locker isn’t right next door to Payless, and if someone sets up a kiosk in front of your store and starts selling fake Air Jordans, they’ll kick them off the property.” He continued, “But Amazon is the Wild West. There’s hardly any rules, except everyone has to pay Amazon a percentage, and you have to swallow what they give you and you can’t complain.”Hundreds of other companies have told Amazon about counterfeiting or what they see as unfair competition—some of it generated by Amazon itself. In the early two-thousands, a San Francisco firm named Rain Design began selling an aluminum laptop stand that had a graceful curve, and it became an unexpected best-seller on Amazon. Amazon then released its own stand, with a nearly identical design, under the brand AmazonBasics, at half the price. Rain Design’s sales fell.
In 2016, Williams-Sonoma had started selling a low-backed mid-century-modern chair called the Orb. A year later, Amazon released an almost identical chair, which they also called the Orb. Last December, Williams-Sonoma filed a lawsuit claiming that “Amazon has unfairly and deceptively engaged in a widespread campaign of copying.” Earlier this year, a judge denied Amazon’s motion to dismiss the case, ruling that the company might be “cultivating the incorrect impression” that ersatz products were authorized by Williams-Sonoma.Critics say that Amazon uses the torrent of data it collects each day—how long a customer’s cursor hovers over various products, how much of a price drop triggers a purchase—to divine which products are poised to become blockbusters, and then copies them.
In July, the E.U. An investigation into whether Amazon uses “sensitive data from independent retailers who sell on its marketplace” to unfairly promote its own goods, or to create imitation products.
Europe’s top competition regulator, told me that Amazon is “hosting thousands and thousands of smaller businesses, but at the same time it is a competitor to them.” She added, “This deserves much more scrutiny.”In a statement, Amazon said that many other retailers also produce their own versions of best-selling items, that such goods make up only one per cent of Amazon’s sales, and that Rain Design’s stands continue to sell well, despite competition from Amazon’s stand—which, it insists, isn’t a replica. The company added that it does not use “data about individual sellers to decide which products to launch.” (Company insiders, however, told me that Amazon does use aggregate data from multiple sellers to make such decisions.)Kahan, of Birkenstock, eventually decided to take extreme measures.
He announced that his firm would no longer sell shoes on Amazon, and he sent a letter to retailers declaring that if they listed Birkenstock products on Amazon they would be “severing” their “relationship with our company.” According to Kahan, Amazon began contacting authorized retailers, inviting them to sell their supply of Birkenstocks to the site. Kahan wrote to his retailers, “To me, the solicitation is quite frankly a ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing.’. I take their desperate act as a personal affront and as an assault on decency. Amazon can’t get Birkenstock by legitimate means so why not dangle a carrot in front of retailers who can make a quick buck.”Kahan’s outrage hardly mattered. Today, despite Birkenstock’s refusal to do business with Amazon, there are numerous resellers—some overseas, others with names that obscure their true identities—offering Birkenstocks on Amazon.
Kahan has no idea who these resellers are, and Amazon won’t tell him. Birkenstock requires authorized retailers to charge roughly a hundred and thirty-five dollars for its classic Arizona sandal. On October 8th, Arizonas were going on Amazon for as little as fifty dollars—which is great for customers looking for cheap shoes but potentially disastrous for Birkenstock, which relies on those higher prices to pay for marketing, product design, and the salaries of customer-service employees (who replace defective shoes for free).Amazon says that it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on anti-counterfeiting efforts, including machine-learning technology that identifies suspicious items. Nevertheless, the site remains full of dubious products. A by the Wall Street Journal identified thousands of products for sale on Amazon that “have been declared unsafe by federal agencies, are deceptively labeled or are banned by federal regulators,” including children’s toys containing dangerous levels of lead.
Many of these products were shipped from Amazon warehouses, some through the Fulfillment by Amazon program. And Birkenstock’s customer-service department still gets calls from customers who bought fake sandals on Amazon and expect Birkenstock to provide a refund.Amazon says that it cannot accommodate the demands of Birkenstock and other companies that wish to “limit availability of competitively priced products.” In a statement, Amazon said that it is not its role to decide who is, and is not, authorized to sell various items.
Amazon isn’t a mall, a current executive told me. He described it as a Web site that offers unlimited shelf space for an almost unlimited number of products and sellers. Some might call this a platform. Other tech giants, such as Facebook and Twitter, describe themselves as platforms, partly as a way of justifying spotty oversight of their sites.Kahan told me that, with the rise of Amazon, the give-and-take that has long undergirded the retail economy has become lopsided in a titan’s favor.
“Capitalism is supposed to be a system of checks and balances,” he said. “It’s a marketplace where everyone haggles until we’re all basically satisfied, and it works because you can always threaten to walk away if you don’t get a fair deal.
But when there’s only one marketplace, and it’s impossible to walk away, everything is out of balance. Amazon owns the marketplace. They can do whatever they want.
That’s not capitalism. That’s piracy.”. On January 7, 2019, as public criticism of Amazon’s excesses grew louder, Jeff Bezos received an e-mail from Dylan Howard, the chief content officer of American Media, the parent company of the National Enquirer. “I write to request an interview with you about your love affair,” the message began. Howard then asked dozens of questions about Bezos’s involvement with Lauren Sanchez, a helicopter pilot who had founded a company, Black Ops Aviation, that filmed promotional videos for Bezos’s rocket company, Blue Origin.
Reporters for the Enquirer had been trailing Bezos and Sanchez for months, the e-mail indicated, photographing them in hotels and at airports, and compiling a dossier of trysts. Bezos and Sanchez were both married, and the Enquirer was prepared to expose it all.Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, a novelist, had been together for twenty-seven years. When executives went to their house for weekend meetings, it wasn’t unusual to see them reading the newspaper together or helping their kids with homework.
“They seemed to have the perfect marriage,” a former Amazon executive told me. “I once saw them get out of the car at our holiday party, when they thought no one was looking, and hold each other’s hand. It was that kind of relationship, real inspirational. Like, if they could stay together and keep their family sane, with all the work and money and stress, then the rest of us could, too.”. Around the time that Bezos became the world’s richest man, his life style changed.
He appeared on television at the Academy Awards. He bought a mansion in Beverly Hills, and he threw a party co-hosted by Matt Damon. He was following an intense weight-training and diet regimen.
He was in Seattle less frequently, employees noticed, and he often attended events without MacKenzie. Now the Enquirer was accusing Bezos and Sanchez of hiding their assignations from MacKenzie and from Sanchez’s husband, Patrick Whitesell, a powerful talent agent whom Bezos had socialized with as Amazon expanded into Hollywood. A former American Media executive said of the Enquirer investigation, “It was a kind of weird story for us.
Enquirer readers don’t really care about C.E.O.s. But everyone was all worked up and excited about it—cackling about blackmail and dick pics. It was like the unpopular kids had finally found something embarrassing about the quarterback.”Two days after Bezos received Howard’s e-mail, he posted on Twitter. “We want to make people aware of a development in our lives,” he wrote, in a note co-signed by MacKenzie. “After a long period of loving exploration and trial separation, we have decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends.” Hours later, the Enquirer started publishing articles about the affair, making reference to “sleazy photos” and “X-rated selfies” exchanged by Bezos and Sanchez. The tabloid quoted some texts that he had sent her—“I want to smell you”—which suggested that his or her phone had been compromised.
But the tabloid did not end up publishing racy photographs; it ran mundane images of Bezos and Sanchez, some of which had already appeared online. According to the former American Media executive, the publication might not actually have had explicit images. “If we had pics of Jeff Bezos’s dick, I would have seen them,” the former executive told me. “That’s standard operating procedure—you pass them around. But whenever I asked I was told, ‘Well, we don’t actually have them here right now.’ I was, like, ‘You’re bluffing the richest man in the world?’ ” (A representative of the Enquirer said that the publication had “acted lawfully and stands by the accuracy of its reporting.”)Marriages break up all the time, yet many of Bezos’s colleagues felt disoriented by the fact that he had been so undisciplined as to let his personal life become tabloid fodder. “The basis of Jeff’s stature was a lot of things, but integrity was No.
1,” a former colleague told me. “The way he dealt with his family, and customers, and the people around him—that was at the core of why we respected him so much. And then this thing happened, and it was so hard to make that fit into the picture of the person we knew.” Even Bezos’s friends were concerned. “It was like Jeff had been abducted by aliens and replaced,” one told me.
“It’d been going on for about a year—the bodybuilding stuff, and Hollywood, and just a big change in how he was—and then this came out, and I still don’t know how to process it.”Once Bezos’s affair became public, more mainstream publications began digging around. When the Wall Street Journal prepared a story about how Bezos’s divorce might affect his company, Amazon’s P.R.
Department, which had been known for using mild language, responded acidly. The company’s communications and policy chief, Jay Carney, told the paper, “I didn’t realize the Wall Street Journal trafficked in warmed-over drivel from supermarket tabloids.” Meanwhile, Bezos launched an internal audit of his cell-phone data. If someone had gained access to his private texts, what else had been collected? Business plans? Bezos ordered his personal head of security, the consultant Gavin de Becker, to scrutinize electronic records and to conduct interviews. Was the breach part of a sophisticated attack whose purpose was larger than simply to embarrass Bezos? Bezos had plenty of enemies, and not just aggrieved companies like Birkenstock.
For years, he had been battling various groups, from pro-union organizers to activists critical of Amazon’s tax practices, and some of the clashes had been nasty. Labor organizers had been a particular source of conflict. In 2000, when the Communication Workers of America tried to unionize four hundred of Amazon’s customer-service representatives in Seattle, the company closed down the call center where those employees worked, as part of what it said was a broader reorganization. In 2014, when a group of technicians at an Amazon warehouse in Delaware petitioned the National Labor Relations Board to allow them to vote on whether to unionize, Amazon hired a law firm that specialized in fighting organized labor, and held meetings warning that unionization could be bad for workers’ jobs. Windows 7 installer 5.0 download.
Employees voted against joining the union., when other workers in Delaware tried to unionize, their manager gave an emotional speech about his youth: after his father had died, steps from his front door, the union had offered no support. The speech apparently worked—employees did not authorize a union vote. After the speech, outside organizers found an obituary of the man’s father: he had been a partner at an insurance agency, not a union member, and had died while jogging, on vacation in South Carolina. Fortunately for Bezos, the labor movement does not have as much power as it did in Sloan’s day. When, earlier this year, Amazon cancelled its plans to open a second headquarters, in New York City, in part because of disputes with local unions, some politicians, rather than attacking Amazon, blamed the unions for scuttling the deal. In an open letter, Governor Andrew Cuomo’s budget director, “Some labor unions attempted to exploit Amazon’s New York entry. The union that opposed the project gained nothing and cost other union members 11,000 good, high-paying jobs.” Amazon currently has more than a hundred and fifty warehouses, and many of them are in economically depressed areas, where employment is scarce and politicians and workers are less likely to complain.
Emily Guendelsberger, a journalist who briefly worked in an Amazon warehouse in 2015, said, “People really want those jobs. It’s gruelling, miserable work—I was taking Advil like candy. But one woman told me she drove an hour each way because Amazon paid more than the pizza place in her home town.”Some economists say that focussing on Amazon’s miserliness or on the conditions inside its warehouses obscures larger, more positive truths. Michael Mandel, an economist at the Progressive Policy Institute, told me, “These are hard jobs, no one disputes that. They are definitely harder than office jobs, and they are harder than working in a clothing store or at a movie theatre. But wages in clothing stores have been declining for forty years, and wages have also gone down in manufacturing, and what I see is Amazon creating tens of thousands of jobs that pay thirty per cent more than competitors, that offer real benefits, that help high-school graduates get skills they need. Eventually, workers will demand that Amazon’s pie gets divided more evenly.
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But the only reason we’re even having this conversation is because Amazon has been expanding the pie for the people left behind.”. Bezos’s personal tumult distracted Amazon’s leaders at a particularly fraught time. The company’s headlong growth has led to a series of scandals, and executives have been unsure how to contain the damage. Like other process companies, Amazon is learning that a flywheel, once spinning, is very hard to stop.Several years ago, Amazon built a vast network of independent couriers to provide what’s known as “last-mile delivery”: the final leg of a package’s journey to a customer’s door.
For years, Amazon had relied upon UPS, FedEx, and the U.S. Postal Service to deliver packages. But in 2013 that system broke down; at Christmastime, tens of thousands of orders were stranded in warehouses. Amazon began constructing a delivery network of its own. Rather than build internally, however, the company signed contracts with hundreds of local drivers and courier firms, in cities across the country.The benefit of outsourcing was that Amazon could build a delivery network quickly. Brittain Ladd, a former Amazon senior manager who specialized in logistics and operations, told me earlier this year that “it was really easy to scale up—there’s thousands of courier services out there, and so once you figure out the model you can expand it almost overnight.”.
Still, some people within Amazon, including Ladd, thought that these partnerships were a bad idea: it would be impossible for Amazon to insure that delivery companies were hiring responsible drivers and using rigorous safety protocols. “Frankly, you have very little control over these individuals,” Ladd told me.
He said that he had hand-delivered to multiple colleagues a memo, marked “ PRIORITY: HIGH,” in which he expressed “grave reservations” about relying on contractors, warning, “I believe it is highly probable that accidents will occur resulting in serious injuries and deaths.” He recommended instead that the company carefully build its own last-mile-delivery network, one with a “zero-tolerance policy” for safety violations. Ladd said to me, “I attended meetings, and I told them that the last thing you want is a newspaper article reading ‘Amazon driver high on drugs hits and kills family.’ But we were growing so fast, and there was so much pressure, and if we tried to build this internally it would have taken at least a year. And so a decision was made that the risk was worth it.”Amazon tried to work solely with courier services that met basic safety requirements, according to a current executive who helped establish the program. But Amazon pushed only so far, deciding that it wasn’t practical to compel firms to give drivers regular drug tests or to require extensive training. Local courier services are often run by inexperienced businesspeople.
Meanwhile, the pressure to expand remained intense. “We were moving very, very fast,” a former manager who helped build the network recalled.
“We were learning as we went.”In 2015, Amazon contracted with a courier company called Inpax Shipping Solutions, and it began delivering packages for the company in Atlanta, Cincinnati, Miami, Dallas, and Chicago. Amazon executives apparently failed to note that Inpax’s chief executive had once pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute cocaine, and had declared bankruptcy after defaulting on debts.
After Amazon signed the deal, its executives seemed not to notice that the Department of Labor was investigating Inpax, or, later, that federal regulators had found that the company had committed numerous labor violations. Amazon also overlooked a lawsuit filed by an Inpax employee against his boss, which was documented in public records.On December 17, 2016, a dispatcher working with Inpax received an e-mail from Amazon declaring that “we are officially into ‘no package left behind’ territory.” Five days later, an Inpax driver, Valdimar Gray, was rushing to deliver Christmas packages in Chicago when he flew through a crosswalk, hitting Telesfora Escamilla, an eighty-four-year-old woman walking home from a hair salon. Escamilla, who was dragged under the van, died.
Escamilla’s grandson Anthony Bijarro, who was at the scene, told me, “Amazon killed my grandmother because they wanted packages delivered a little faster. Amazon doesn’t care who’s driving, they don’t care if they’re reckless.” Escamilla’s family has sued Inpax and Amazon. Amazon, in a statement, said that it regularly audits its delivery partners to insure that they are in compliance with the law and with Amazon’s policies, and takes action “when they aren’t meeting our high bar for safety and customer experience.” The company has terminated its relationship with Inpax.
(Inpax and Gray declined to respond to questions.)ProPublica more than sixty accidents involving Amazon, all since 2015, that resulted in serious injuries or deaths. Reporters at BuzzFeed naming Amazon in at least a hundred lawsuits related to accidents involving package deliveries, which have included at least six deaths. Those are likely just a fraction of such collisions, because in many cases delivery vehicles were unmarked, and victims weren’t aware of Amazon’s role.
Ladd, the former senior manager, said, “Amazon could have built this network in-house, or they could have acquired a logistics company to really teach them last-mile delivery, or they could have chosen partners more slowly, to make sure the right safety procedures were in place. But this was not a well-oiled machine—this was a bunch of people thrown together. They asked me for advice, and I was saying, ‘There’s another way to do this.’ ” If Amazon had found another way, Ladd said, “it would have been a hell of a lot better for the people who were killed—but once the machine starts moving it takes on a life of its own.”As Amazon executives were becoming increasingly worried about the hazards of warp-speed growth, other pressures inside the company kept ratcheting up. Earlier this year, Amazon announced that it would soon start guaranteeing to many customers delivery in one day, rather than two, putting even more stress on couriers and workers.
A growing number of regulators in Washington, D.C., and in Europe argue that Amazon, along with other tech giants, needs to be reined in. Until the nineteen-seventies, many process companies were constrained by a fear of U.S. Antitrust enforcement. Alfred Sloan always kept a close eye on the size of G.M.’s market share. “Our bogie is forty-five per cent,” Sloan told a reporter, in 1938. “We don’t want any more than that.” His trepidation was justified.
The federal government repeatedly sued G.M., once charging Sloan personally with criminal antitrust activity. Almost none of the suits prevailed in court, but they cowed the company.Sloan died in 1966, and, in the decades that followed, the government’s attitude toward antitrust enforcement changed. During the Reagan Administration, regulators and courts decreed that antitrust decisions should largely be based not on a company’s size or on its bullying tactics but, rather, on any price hikes imposed on customers.
By the time Facebook and Google appeared, giving away their products for free, and Amazon arose, with its devotion to keeping prices down, antitrust enforcement was a remote concern. The legal scholar Lina Khan, writing in the Yale Law Journal in 2017, “It is as if Bezos charted the company’s growth by first drawing a map of antitrust laws, and then devising routes to smoothly bypass them.”Things began changing earlier this year. In June, the head of the U.S.
Department of Justice’s antitrust division, Makan Delrahim, a Trump appointee and a respected authority on economic competition, gave a speech declaring that antitrust regulators would no longer be constrained by “the incorrect notion that antitrust policy is only concerned with keeping prices low.” Delrahim’s address was the equivalent of firing a starter’s pistol. In a recent conversation, he told me that tech companies “should think very seriously about their conduct,” adding, “If you’re one of the big guys, you should be careful to make sure you don’t snuff out competitors because you think that’s good for your business. That’s not what free markets really mean, and we’re going to come down on you like a ton of bricks if that’s what you do.”Soon after Delrahim’s speech, it was reported that the F.T.C. Had issued subpoenas for data regarding third-party sales on Amazon. In July, the E.U. Declared that it was investigating Amazon, and the U.S.
House of Representatives held a hearing and interrogated an Amazon lawyer about how the company harvests data. Representative David Cicilline, a Democrat from Rhode Island, asked the lawyer, “You’re saying that you don’t use that in any way to promote Amazon products?
I remind you, sir, you’re under oath.” The attorney replied that the firm shows customers only the best product, regardless of who profits from the sale, and that Amazon did nothing untoward.Many members of Congress suspect otherwise. Cicilline, who chairs the House’s antitrust subcommittee, told me, “There’s bipartisan consensus that we have a responsibility to get these markets working again. More competition means better protection of privacy. It means better control of your data. It means more innovation.”, one of the most forceful critics of the tech industry, has said that, if she wins the Presidency, she intends to break up Amazon, Facebook, and Google. She has proposed making it illegal for companies such as Amazon to own online marketplaces and at the same time to sell goods on those platforms. “Amazon crushes small companies,” Warren wrote, in a plan for expanding online competition.
If she is elected, she said, “small businesses would have a fair shot to sell their products on Amazon without the fear of Amazon pushing them out of business.”Other regulators and lawmakers are more measured in their proposals and their rhetoric, but a loose consensus has emerged around a group of concerns, which some people refer to as the Four “C”s. The first is concentration. A high-ranking F.T.C. The next area of concern is contracts. Big tech companies often make highly restrictive deals with smaller venders. Amazon retains a contractual right to hold sellers’ revenues for long periods after a sale, and imposes limits on what data sellers can share with other companies. Another F.T.C.
Commissioner, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, told me, “There are a lot of terms that go into boilerplate contracts that consumers or workers don’t really have an opportunity to negotiate. It is absolutely appropriate for us to be thinking about banning those.”Lastly, regulators worry about the complexity of current antitrust law. “You really have to be an expert, or hire an expert attorney, if you feel like one of these companies is acting inappropriately,” an F.T.C. Official said. “The law only works when it is simple enough for the little guy to bring an action on their own.”Senator, the ranking member of the Senate’s subcommittee on antitrust, told me that such reforms are bound by a central idea: “The big tech companies are completely reshaping the way we buy goods and sell goods in the marketplace, our privacy rules, and our democracy rules, without any checks and balances from the government.” She continued, “So many people are finally getting tired of the dominance. When Amazon starts owning Whole Foods, when they control the producers, when they control all the parts of the supply chain—people deserve a level playing field.” American history, Klobuchar said, shows that such imbalances can spark widespread activism.
“This goes back to the Founders and the Boston Tea Party,” she said. “These are highly emotional political moments.”. Bezos, after attracting scandal earlier this year, has lately sought to recede. His media appearances have become rare and highly scripted.
When he was onstage this past summer at one of his few recent public outings—an Amazon conference in Las Vegas—the performance was studiously boring, a clear attempt to rob himself of glamour. While Bezos was droning on, a protester jumped on the stage, shouting something about chickens and terrible conditions on industrial farms. Bezos froze, as if worried that the smallest bacterium of controversy might prove contagious. After the woman was removed, he glanced around and said, “I’m sorry—where were we?”Within Amazon, there are concerns that, no matter how strenuously Bezos embraces banality, he can’t be dull enough. “We have all this attention now,” a former executive complained.
Since Bezos and Lauren Sanchez went public with their relationship, they have regularly appeared in gossip columns. The New York Post’s Page Six has reported on the swimsuit that Bezos wore in Saint-Tropez (“quirky, octopus-print trunks”), and how he met Sanchez’s parents at the N.F.L. Hall of Fame (“This all leads Amazon sources to ponder how long it will be before the couple say ‘I do’ ”).The government’s scrutiny of General Motors never scored any fatal hits—one antitrust lawsuit dragged on for years, ending in a dismissal—but the scar tissue was damaging enough. David Farber, a University of Kansas historian who wrote a biography of Alfred P. Sloan, told me that the G.M. Executive “didn’t see himself as someone that needed to be loved or respected by the public, but eventually even he gave in.” He noted a pattern in American history: “There’s an economic revolution, it creates amazing new opportunities, and then the companies that seize those opportunities become so powerful that the people revolt—they say the winners have become too powerful, they start attacking the people who are the embodiments of winning, sometimes with gossip, sometimes with facts. And then we have an era of constraint enforced by the federal government.” We may be at a breaking point now.
“It’s like the eighteen-eighties or the nineteen-thirties all over again,” Farber said. “The pressure is going to continue building, the powerful are going to continue being watched and criticized and gawked at, until something pops.”Jeff Wilke, the Bezos deputy, told me that all process companies eventually falter.
The challenge is to stave off decline as long as possible. Day Two, he said, “is inevitable—the question is when.” When Day Two does arrive at Amazon, at least Ian Freed, the executive who oversaw the Kindle and the Echo, won’t have to suffer through it. A few years ago, he consulted an internal Amazon application called the Old Fart Tool, which shows employees how many new people have been hired since their first day, and discovered that more than three hundred thousand workers had joined Amazon since he started there. Freed had come to Amazon because he loved being at a place that moved fast and did the impossible. He was proud of his work—once, while on vacation in Mexico, he had peeked into his sons’ hotel room and seen their Game Boys lying on the nightstand while they read on their Kindles. “That was pretty special,” he told me.
“For the rest of my life, I can tell my grandchildren that I built the Amazon Kindle and the Amazon Echo.”Yet Amazon had changed, and Freed missed the old days. He wanted to spend more time living by Leadership Principles that were loftier than simply selling everything as fast and as cheaply as possible.
He wanted to see if his next flywheels could power a project with higher ideals. Such goals wouldn’t likely have satisfied Amazon’s constant hunger, but to Freed they seemed satisfying enough. And Freed no longer had to worry about earning a salary: during his tenure at Amazon, its stock price had gone from forty-three dollars to $1,052 a share. And so in 2017 he quit Amazon, and not long afterward he founded Bamboo Learning, a company that builds voice-activated education software. One product teaches kids how to do division when they say, “Alexa, open Bamboo Math.” The startup has only two full-time employees. Freed just signed his first big contract, with the publisher Highlights for Children.
“It just got to the point where I wanted to do something different,” he told me. “I wanted to work with nonprofits and feel like I’m contributing in a different way. If this succeeds, we’ll bring education to parts of the world where you can’t get print books, where companies don’t deliver things overnight, where it’s not even guaranteed that people are literate.”Freed is building something that is neither strictly a product company nor a process company. It will be both grander and more modest in its ambitions than Amazon, which Bezos has famously described as “the everything store.” Freed told me, “It’s another chance to change the world. A smaller change, but it’s real, and it feels important to me.
It’s something that deserves all of what I’ve learned.” ♦ Published in the print edition of the, issue, with the headline “The Unstoppable Machine.”.