- The second program is called Pay to Quit. It was invented by the clever people at Zappos, and the Amazon fulfillment centers have been iterating on it. Pay to Quit is pretty simple. Once a year, we offer to pay our associates to quit. The first year the offer is made, it’s for $2,000. Then it goes up one thousand dollars a year until it reaches $5,000. The headline on the offer is “Please Don’t Take This Offer.” We hope they don’t take the offer; we want them to stay. Why do we make this offer? The goal is to encourage folks to take a moment and think about what they really want. In the long-run, an employee staying somewhere they don’t want to be isn’t healthy for the employee or the company.
Zappos offered it to everyone, and they offered it after a week. Guaranteed - Amazon doesn't offer this to the temp hires that make up up to half of its workforce during rush seasons. Those, they deny unemployment benefits.
I was wondering about how it increases over time, and if they belie another reason why Amazon would rather a 2yo employee to a 5yo employee. Perhaps in some ways their obligations to the workers grow over time, such as unemployment benefits? I would be surprised if the reasoning only included what is stated.
Because if you take a $2k layoff after a year you lose out on 6 months of unemployment benefits and they don't have to write you a reference, is my guess. I know you've got stock in Amazon. I buy from them all the time. But if they ceased to exist I would celebrate. They're evil.
This captures my sentiment exactly. It's almost impossible not to buy from them right now. It's too cheap, too convenient, and the products are too ubiquitous to avoid. A large Barnes and Noble just closed in a highly prosperous, highly foot trafficked part of the Detroit area the other day. Not that BN is any model company, but when they can't even compete anymore, especially in the absence of Borders, you know that retail is fucked...FUCKED. Not just book retail; all retail.I buy from them all the time. But if they ceased to exist I would celebrate. They're evil.
You openly disparage Amazon for not spending money to give their employees a better deal. Yet you buy from them, instead of their many competitors, in part to save money. PEBKAC.It's too cheap...
To my mind, a price is just a piece of information. It is an expression of willingness to trade. When voluntary trade happens, I assume it is because both parties believe they will be better off as a result of the exchange. (They are not always right; people make mistakes, but I also believe that this is part of life, and trying to prevent people from making mistakes can cause more harm than good.)
Have you read The Everything Store? You really should. It'll be a quick read for you. The amount of scumbag shit they pull hovers between maniacal, brilliant and evil. Some of the decisions they made in the early, early days was insane. Taken in the context that they were doing things that no one else had done, the level of innovation and problem-solving is brilliant. The games they played with competitors in the mid-2000s is sickening to read about while being a practical and smart business move. Added bonus, if you've read Isaacson's Steve Jobs, the similarities between Bezos and Jobs are, at times, uncanny. It's not that weird to see how two hugely successful companies were run by guys who were apathetic assholes. It is weird to see how they squeezed innovation and brilliance out of their teams and employees while being apathetic assholes. It's weird to see these employees talk kindly and with a huge amount of respect about their former bosses.
It's been on my list. We started hearing radio ads for Amazon in Seattle about 1997. It was kind of weird. It was like "it's a bookstore that you can't browse. How's that going to work?" The answer, of course, was cut-throat pricing designed to annihilate all competition.