Everything I've read about Bezos indicates that he's a star-spangled asshole. All entrepreneurs have their quirks and well-mannered women rarely make history and all that but Bezos seems to be a special kind of jerk. That, combined with the fact that his grand innovation is "lower margins" makes me extremely bearish on Amazon. I'm hopeful Jet eats their goddamn lunch because the only thing protecting Amazon so far is that nobody else positioned themselves to survive as a profit-averse organization when it was possible to do so. Any organization that makes you cheer on Walmart is unabashedly evil.
I feel like Bezos' major innovation is "if you are fanatical enough about customer service, you can get away with just about anything". Hopefully that's starting to change though. I know Seattle has had enough with that company, this type of graffiti (grabbed a pic earlier this year) is becoming more and more common.
Edited to add: The r/seattle sub is chock full of amazon employees, you can tell by how posts about gentrification are treated. The response to this article is pretty interesting. Warning - it's reddit. Leaving hubski happy place, click at your own risk, ect ect.
I don't think Amazon is fanatical about customer service. I think he does everything he can to obscure the vendor. The same people who recommend the Walmart documentary buy everything Prime. Because they never have to look at the human cost of Amazon's policies and procedures, they get to put on a happy face.
I was referring to their principle of "customer obsession" . They hide some of their shady stuff, sure. But they also make their service incredibly helpful and convenient. People don't want to hear that that convenience comes at a price, so it's harder to spread the word about the human cost behind those services.
I get that. I guess what I'm saying is the way they fuckin' sling boxes across fences with anger and abandon and then get all pissy with you when you imply that maybe you wouldn't have bought "1-day" if you knew it actually meant "3 days and 2 tries later and also fuck you" from customer service... well, they aren't really all that "customer obsessed." They're more "make the customer forget about everything but Amazon so that you can treat them like shit without them noticing."