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Amazon.Heartbreak
Mike Daisey's Amazon wasn't really a good place to work in. He had doubts when the interviewer asked him for his college board scores and GPA (the company made a big point of seeking out highly-educated freaks and geeks), and when he noticed all the desks were fashioned out of used doors.
The company, he soon found out, was a bizarre corporate/yuppie/geek shell-game, equal parts myth, BS, and Yes, some idealism and innovation. Remember those lonely pundits, analysts and prophets wandering the talk shows, wondering aloud whether it was really okay for a company that hadn't ever turned a dime's profit to be valued so highly by stockholders and so loved by media? They were quickly shouted down or ignored by the geek digerati and bewildered journalists and analysts, dismissed as clueless old farts and reactionaries. We wanted so much to believe that people like Bezos and companies like Amazon were re-shaping the world (I sure thought the Net would revolutionize politics and business, though I never could see how Amazon would make money with those discounts and shipping costs.) We have yet to fully acknowledge that if it survives at all, Amazon will make it as any other company has, not as part of any revolution.
Daisey, who writes in an original, bitingly funny voice, nearly went mad at Amazon and long ago fled Starbucks-land for Brooklyn (the surprising new universal destination point for hip and creative seekers of fortune), where he has prospered, adapting his book into a successful off-Broadway play. On one level, his story is a pure riot, especially his accounts of life as a customer service phone rep and of the hero-worship of "Jeff" throughout the company. Daisey escaped from customer service to become a toy evaluator (the description of an Amazon employee storming his Seattle apartment to try to get back the toys he was late reviewing for the site is a classic) and then into corporate HQ, the gothic mansion housing avocado sandwiches, slaves to fetch laundry, Jeff and Business Development. His anecdotal profiles of geeks who were not nearly as smart as they thought they were, and of Seattle, for a couple of years the smug, red-hot center of the new-kind-of-company-that-was-reshaping the world are also piercing and well written. He describes Amazon's headquarters as "Lex Luthor's Freak House on the Hill ... it squats like an art deco toad over the city of Seattle, its insides all scooped out and replaced with IKEA and geek central -- a trifecta of Batcave, Fortress of Solitude, and supervillain lair."
But Amazon, Daisey suggests, was mostly a weird idea hovering in the brains of Bezos and his many camp followers in media and business. Well, it was more than an idea.
But however bad you thought companies like Amazon might be, it was worse. Banks of bored, gerbil-like customer service phone reps alternately took orders (at the time, nobody trusted sending their credit card numbers over the Net, although they rarely hesitated to turn them over to teenaged cashiers in restaurants) and soothed legions of enraged customers. They pretended to be managers when customers demanded to talk to one, pretended to be sorry for their troubles, pretended to get their problems sorted out right away.
The American consumer, Daisey perceptively points out, is a creature of entitlement, expecting instant satisfaction from somebody whenever something goes wrong, even though (in the tech world at least) they rarely get any. CS and tech support reps are the sacrificial lambs placed between furious buyers, bad service, poor products and craven corporate execs. At Amazon, software-wielding managers counted the time the reps spent on the phone, the length of calls (there was great pressure to resolve problems in seconds, not minutes), the number of customers they were "handling," the number of problems "resolved."
For all the monitoring, though, reps like Daisey were curiously unaccountable. They hated their work, and were numbed by it. Customers took their chances.
Daisey and other CS reps, pretending to be courteous to hordes, faked efficiency by dialing themselves and then hanging up, raising their efficiency numbers to the point where many got promoted. During Amazon's frequent early server crashes, Daisey and his fellow workers would take credit card orders and numbers down by hand, with many of the slips then lying around in piles for days or inadvertently brought home. All Amazon employees dreaded Christmas, when the overextended company struggled to deal with demand it simply wasn't equipped to meet. (It was during Christmas shopping periods that the cracks in Bezos's public relations blitz began to show.)
And on top of all of their humiliations and degradations, Daisey and many of his colleagues showed up at work one day to learn that many of the CS jobs had vanished from Seattle, farmed out to India where phone workers earning $1 an hour assured frustrated customers their books were on the way.
In between the descriptions of insanity inside Amazon, Daisey portrays a picture of a company whose ambition from the first outstripped its resources. Wall Street was traumatized by the prospect of e-commerce, and Bezos seemed to them to grasp what the new world order would be like. So Bezos, like Gates, became one of the Net's mini-Gods. As soon as it became common knowledge that Amazon had whipped bn.com, the next logical step was that Amazon would have to take on the mothership -- Barnes & Noble itself. "If Amazon was going to justify a market cap larger than most third world countries," writes Daisey,"it was going to have to trounce Barnes & Noble and all the other physical booksellers," since books, after all, were Amazon's core product.
That, of course, never happened. Instead, Bezos panicked and swerved. "Reporters would ask about the rivalry, the dueling press releases and other PR efforts of the past, and Jeff would shrug and smile his smile. He talked about entering new markets, how Amazon was so much more than a bookseller that it seemed book sales hardly mattered. It was as though he could hold up a hand puppet and tell the press, 'Look at the puppet ... don't look over there, look at this shiny puppet,' and the press watched the puppet, wondering how on earth he made that little guy talk. You wouldn't even know that Amazon sold books anymore from some of the stories coming out, much less that they were the vast majority of its sales."
Bezos, Daisey theorizes, knew Amazon would never be able to compete with Barnes & Noble in the non-virtual realm, and the company soon lost identity, focus, even the confidence of gullible journalists and analysts. Employees knew all along what those crank analysts had been saying -- because of shipping costs, the company had to discount its products too heavily to be competitive. This was a dilemma the new economy thinkers and gurus at Amazon have never solved.
In the meantime, Daisey had hilarious confrontations with geek, yuppie and hippie bosses, all of whom he outmaneuvered or outsmarted; helped himself to a generous supply of Post-its and company pens; and referred to his fellow employees and friends by their Amazon e-mail names -- "bsmith," "hjones" and so on-- as was Amazon tradition.
But he never really knew what any of his jobs required of him, nor did he ever witness anything at Amazon working rationally or well. Employees were obsessed with their stock holdings and with Amazon's almost desperate efforts to expand into new realms to justify the fanatic faith of early Net-believers.
Daisey's book underscores something that ought to have been apparent for some time: Net companies are often corporate cults -- Gates, Jobs, Yang, Bezos -- revolving around eccentric, self-styled geeky gurus who profess to be changing the world and who have a genius for convincing the always-gullible media that they are. For all their arrogance and savvy, geeks and nerds seem to crave leaders to follow. At least Gates rewarded his with lots of successful stock.
At Amazon, employees sat around their desks e-mailing one another about Jeff:
- He was worth billions but rented an apartment and drove a Toyota hatchback (true.)
- He worked in investment banking before starting Amazon.com (true).
- He slept only three hours a night (false).
- He still responded to e-mail at his public address, jeff@amazon.com (true.)
The problem with cults, of course, is that they foster disconnection with the real world. Amazon lost touch with the rest of the planet as its hapless employees, many doomed to be laid off, obsessed over their stock value and counting the days to becoming millionaires. When the followers discover their gurus are all too human, bitterness and disenchantment seem inevitable.
What makes this an especially significant book is that Daisey has written a story about a generation and its values; as well as a riveting business yarn. The kids working 90 hours a week at Amazon, and the execs and white-collar workers sleeping on motel-room floors and hauling boxes in warehouses during the holidays, (Amazon built giant warehouses in remote places where there were no available workers to hire) thought they were re-inventing the world. Instead, they were simply pawns in one man's high-stakes gamble. Suspicious of authority and corporate values, they succumbed anyway -- mostly because of the aura of hipness and the promise of wealth -- to both, though in new guises. Geeks, it turns out, are as greedy as anybody. Daisey discovered, as so many of his generation were about to -- that Bezos and the other cult leaders had simply dressed up the hog.
Yet Daisey, along with his increasingly bewildered co-workers, really wanted to believe. At first, he felt he had finally kind a new kind of work culture, one he could spend the rest of his life working in and for. In a way, he was heartbroken when the truth finally dawned, and his account is touching as well as comic. Anybody who experienced the Net in its early days, or is struggling to deal with new notions of truth, economics and work in the digital age, will understand.
Would it have been so hard to build a cool and quirky bookstore instead of a soulless virtual megamall?
Would it have been so hard to sacrifice making money to make something "cool" for a smaller market? LMAO!
However ludicrous (sp?) that statement may be, I still disagree with many of Amazon's practices. Yet, I still think that building a business might be based more on capitalism than "coolism"
:nod:
:p
Shame on you Katz, trying to sneak in every little affiliate program you can.
I guess you'd like to see a "Slashdotting" turn into a "BIG ASS PAYCHECK on one of those $.05/click deals".
You're damned straight. If I've given a business my money, I'm entitled to a reasonable exchange in products and/or services.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
This is really funny. On top of being a pointless rant about the rise of an industry giant, the fact that this book can be found on Amazon.com is even funnier.
I think this guy must be smart, I mean he had the discipline to sit down a write a book about it, but it's simply just whining when you talk about a corporation losing it's vision.
Time and time again we see people like this, launching 'watchdog' books about a corporation for whom, for one reason or another, they were formerly employed by. Most of the time all something like this tends to do is give publicity to a company. (And if you know anything about business, any publicity is good publicity.) I think that such books like this only help to contribute to a larger problem.
I guess it's just important for these people to get something off of thier chest. I know as a consumer that I could care less about the intricate workings of many corporations of which I am a customer, as long as their prices stay low and their service remains acceptable.
Linux is dead.
LU
Jeff Bezos built the business he wanted to build, not the one Mike Daisey wanted. If Mike Daisey wants a different kind of business, he should build it himself.
It's easy to bitch, not so easy to build a business.
I won't debate for a moment the idea that Amazon is a massive, greedy, corporate mega-mall. To wander around their site is to be bombarded with advertisement after advertisement, ad nauseum.
They are also by far the best major book distributor out there.
More to the point, they're still in business
The way I see it, "selling out" may have been the only real way to survive the dot-com crash. Now I know, they STILL havn't turned a profit, but unlike the legions of now defunct companies, they still have something of a chance of doing so. Survival, much as we may not like to admit it, occasionally depends on watching the stock value, and digging up some operating costs.
That isn't to say that the compitition doesn't have a few things going for them. I always found B&N's site useful for out of print books, and Books a Million's usually pennies cheaper, but both use somewhat shallow imitations of Amazon's site design.
I might not like everything about it, but I use Amazon VERY often, and until there's a clearly better alternative, that will not change.
p.s. fictionwise.com comes in a close second for my favorite literature site. I still cling to an absurd sense of optimism in regard to e-books.
"Isn't that the sweetest little well-balanced undergraduate-level philosophy of life."
Sorry, but I don't want a "cool and quirky bookstore". The souless virtual megamall works just fine - if I want a book, it's there. I don't go to Amazon to have fun, I go there when I need something.
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But but but, but I'm used to schlepping over there and getting it NOW, and I don't really give a damn about the consequences of what I support.
The internet boom was about GREED, plain and simple. What excited people were the lottery-like dizzying ascents of companies like Amazon that happened to be in the right place at the right time. Everyone I knew who was in it was not interested in sticking around to make a great company: they were interested in making a big pile of money cashing in options. Like any lottery there can only be mostly losers in the end. It was certainly never about a better (or even significantly different) way of doing business or about a kinder, gentler anything.
So why not skip the book about what Bezos did to the internet and take a close look at what you all are doing to yourselves. OR alternately, slap an ecology sticker on your SUV, put on your f*ck microsoft t-shirt, and drive down to Starbucks for a Latte.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries