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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.
Who the hell do you mean by "we"?
Speak for yourself, Jon.
I really do like the analogy of these corporations to religious cults. And in some ways, that's very true. But I keep thinking of Hunter S. Thompson:
"You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning... And that, I think, was the handle- that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave."
Consider this against corporate cults...
- Apple: Apple is exactly what Thompson describes. Hell, just look at where Cupertino is on a map.
- Microsoft: Microsoft is less this hippie, dancing-around-a-campfire, karma-rules-all type of atmosphere, and more of the "old and evil". Microsoft is a cult that was militarized from the start. I think much more of McCarthy-ism and the struggle against the evils of communism when I think of Microsoft. Not that Linux is communism in the pejorative sense, but that Linux flies completely in the face of their existing model of practice and they react violently with all the FUD they can muster.
- Amazon: Amazon is like the group of hippies in the middle of some place like Topeka, Kansas, or maybe Salt Lake City, Utah. They see this revolution going on somewhere. And they think they've got the gist of it. And so they join in what they think is going on, but then realize very quickly that they're really just posers who don't understand the essence of the movement and then they sell out without really realizing that they never had it in the first place. Or buy in. Depends on your perspective. (Anybody ever see SLC Punk?)
Anyways, just thought the cult corporation is an accurate characterization.
-jag
http://starboard.flowtheory.net/
I'm not certain what iteration of the show you saw, but while I certainly agree that a person should take their life affirmation from the work they do and not care about their coworkers, I was not that good a person.
I wouldn't describe myself as bitter--in fact, I'd say that the book/show describes the arc of learning to accept the lives we have and figure out what we should be doing. I don't really have a liberal ax to grind.
I was speaking about the investors and the dot-com hype wave that Jeff helped grow and propagate...there was no attempt to connect Amazon with national tragedies, infant death or the Khmer Rouge.
Ignoring the statistic you cite (which I am interested in but isn't really important to my thoughts on this subject), I am reading over what you wrote and here is what I think.
In response to your referencing of Adam Smith, I'd say this to you: The view of capitalism that Adam Smith had is not the one that currently exists in America. I was neither endorsing nor attacking this system - merely pointing out that Daisey should have been aware of the way things are (as you seem to be with the obvious conclusion you're making that a small class of people is exploiting the majority) and not been so surprised or sickened by it. As for your questioning of me as to what the point of making as much money as possible is, I cannot tell you. I didn't claim that this was my view. Again, you have to read what I wrote a bit more carefully. In America, this is what corporations do. They are not very concerned with social progress or development but instead are only focused on the bottom line. It seems to me like you're trying to make an argument against an argument I did not make. Nowhere in my statement did I say that the way corporations operate is right or morally justified but instead was merely pointing out that Daisey should have understood what corporations are and not expected anything but what he got. I hope this clears things up for you as you seem to have missed my main point.
Jon Katz makes a few cents everytime someone clicks on that link he put in the story. Slick bastard. He probably made $50 already.
I wrote the book, and as an ardent /. reader I thought I'd take a moment and post. I've addressed a couple of issues in other postings, and it can be difficult to give clear answers to people who haven't read the book but are working off a review (or less in some cases) but if anyone has any questions I'll give them a shot.
So let's see...
Cheap prices, easy to sue interface vs. quirky?
We sit around and defraud our employer and raise our ratings by cheating and then complain about being outsourced?
People expect to get what they paid for painlessly?
Sounds like the typical world owes me everything without doing work b!tch
"Daisey...long ago fled Starbucks-land for Brooklyn...where he has prospered, adapting his book into a successful off-Broadway play."
Bzzt. Sorry, Jon. Please Play Again. And next time? Try to at least get some of the facts right.
21 Dog Years was a play long before it was a book...Daisey put it on in Seattle in a few different theaters, including the back room of the speakeasy.net cafe! I saw it there about 2 years ago (before the cafe burned down).
As for Brooklyn, Daisey didn't leave for New York until this year. He'd been putting the show on in Seattle for several years by that time...
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
From the start, this guy struck me as a self-promoting, cloying whiner. He still does. Of course so do Bezos, Jobs and Gates, but with them it's a side-effect of changing the world.
;-)
In interviews, he's almost unwatchable - think Quentin Tarantino meets Eddie Haskell - waaaaay too much energy for the pedestrian content and waaaaay to sickly-sweet-cute for anyone who's not got an insulin pump and extra batteries for it.
This guy's apparently doing it just to hear his himself talk, because there are far better stories to be told. As Rob Reiner once related, Don't say it's a hot day today - everyone already knows it's hot and you just reminded us. Don't say you like pie - everyone likes pie and you didn't bring any with you. But say something true, say something original, and the world will beat a path to your door.
As for desks made of doors - what's to wonder about? Could you imagine the Amazon bottom line if every employee had the full Herman Miller setup?
See how annoying one man's superfluous rant can be?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
12-18 months ago, Amazon was going to begin moving sections of their business to Vcommerce in order to start addressing the main criticism of their business model : absurd amounts invested in their warehousing.
...
In the end, they decided not to... why? Because they decided that if Amazon moved to a dropship network like Vcommerce, it would make Jeff Bezos look like he was wrong, and they couldn't allow him to look bad, regardless of what it meant to the company.
That's priorities for ya