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.