seen a wasp. You’d then get an assortment of eerily cheerful responses, always appropriately regretful:
“Jack is no longer with us.”
“Jack has chosen to no longer be with us.”
“Jack had to leave.”
And this particularly creepy phrasing: “Jack elected to cease operations.”
The trainers decided to address the whole Amazon.cult debacle right from the top. It went down like this: we’re sitting in class, and the trainer comes to us and says, “Hello, I’m trainer Mandy, and I want talk to you about an article you may have read? The Amazon.cult article? Yes? Okay? I want to address any concerns that you might have about this? Does anyone have any concerns? Yes?”
Trainer Mandy has bright eyes, an impish smile, and the apparent inability to speak in anything other than rising intonations, making her patter sound like a stream of unanswerable questions. “Yes? You? What is your concern? Tell us?”
A straw-haired kid in an REI fleece: “Um … I was, I was … was … concerned that, uh, about that, the part where, uh, you said, it said you were a cult? It kinda freaked me out?” Apparently Mandy’s disease was infectious.
She was Dramamine on an empty stomach. “OK, let’s talk about those feelings? What do they mean by ‘a cult’? Are they talking about our work ethic? What does that mean in their personal context? Their own point of view? The way we get things done?”
She made us feel better. She gave us the talk every day. Every single day. And so by the seventh or eighth day, when Mandy came out and said, “Today let’s revisit the Amazon.cult—”
“No! Actually, that’s cool, uh, Mandy, that’s really, that’s, uh, cool. Does anybody, any of you guys wanna—?”
“Fuck no.”
“Nope.”
“I’m good.”
It was our first sign of consensus.
“We’re all cool, Mandy. Let’s just learn another UNIX tool or more about Jeff’s vision or something. We’re cool, we’re really fine with it.” And in our hearts, we were fine with it. Because we’d heard it over and over again and then made it part of ourselves. That’s how corporate training works: whip, reward, repeat.
The trainers did mean well, that much you could be certain of. All day long they radiated goodwill, a palpable flow of bonhomie that threatened to drown everyone in the training room in which we were all locked together from eight to five.
And it was out of the goodness of their hearts that they shared with us a vision, a vision of what Amazon.com really was, and the part that we might play in its magnificent destiny. They did that by showing us training films like this one.
Imagine the American West as it appears in collectors’ plates from the Franklin Mint, resplendent in grain, mountains, horses, buffalo, and barely sketched details. From the east, across the plains, come settlers, pacing relentlessly toward the camera à la Reservoir Dogs. John Williams is playing, underscoring everything. This is Amazon.com, Earth’s Most Customer-centric Company. More than just a dream, more than an idea, it is a religion, and like any good religion it has an origin myth of equal parts fear and awe. This is its story.
The year is 1995. We begin with Jeff Bezos—geek savant, investment banker, and entrepreneur, like a latter-day Johnny Quest. You can see his face, determined and resolute, as he drives across America in a Toyota hatchback. His wife is at the wheel and he’s composing their business plan. They don’t know what it is they’re going to sell. They don’t know why they’re going to sell it. They don’t even know what city they’re driving to—they’ve told the movers that they will call them from the road to let them know where to go. But they know they’re going to do it on the Internet. They have seen the future and they are going to grab it by the horns.
Jeff Bezos has vision and he’s got moxie, he’s got stamina, he has very little hair, and he’s rolling his way into Seattle, City on the Sea. His wife and he have taken an enormous risk, abandoning high-paying jobs to chase a dream of 400 percent annual growth, which is what the net was doing in those days. All he needs to change the world is a large garage in which he will build a lot of desks made out of doors—flat, cheap doors from Home Depot, thus showing with one sharp symbol that this new company values money, eschews comforts, and has a warm, friendly atmosphere in which the CEO helps the new people build their desks.
You can sell anything on Jeff’s Internet: books, CDs, DVDs, lawn furniture, cat litter, used medical waste, elephant ivory, lunch meat, slaves, anything. Jeff will be there, plugged right into each and every consumer, giving personalized recommendations, and people will find that just what they wanted has been brought right to their door and they will love it.
Thank God for this—before Jeff we were all concerned about the future of commerce. Who knew what they were going to buy next? Who knew what book would go best with their veal? Amazon will be there to guide us, to tell us what our favorites were, are, and have always been, to keep us fed with fresh things.
The army of settlers, outfitted with wagons, babies, and Palm Pilots, hail Jeff. They say, “Yes, you’ve got a vision,” and they have purple hair and piercings and MBAs and greed and hunger and want, and they all crowd into that one garage! No one can stop it from growing and growing until it boils over into the city of Seattle, then America, then the world.
Market analysts, stunned and staggered, kiss the hem of Jeff’s robe. The settlers build huge warehouses with backhoes and bulldozers. CEOs of old-school companies are impaled on spikes beside the road where children from Yahoo!, DoubleClick, and iVillage laugh at them. The digital village celebrates.
Everyone gives thanks that they are selling things, that they are getting big fast and never forgetting their humble origins. “It’s still Day One,” Mao once said—actually that was Jeff Bezos, but it sounds like something Mao would have said about the egalitarian workplace Amazonians now call home, where bureaucracy vanishes and only the best come to work each day.
At night, the settlers huddle around their fires as crotchety old-timers recount stories of the old days to growing masses of eager newcomers. A man eerily reminiscent of Lorne Greene speaks: “We’d sit by the fire, every day after work, cookin’ a pot of beans, just thankful for the hard, hard work we’d done, makin’ history. Thankful for the stock options. Ah … the stock went up twenty-five points today. Why?” He grins. “Nobody knows why. It’s a mystery, just like the stars above are a mystery. Just like Amazon.com is a mystery.”
And if we look up into the digitally enhanced stars, we can see Jeff Bezos himself, as a great Prudential ad, appearing as a seven-hundred-foot-high, googly-eyed Jesus, telling us, “You know, it’s more than that—it’s our dream. If you dream hard, if you work hard, and if you believe hard, you can make anything happen. Everybody who works at Amazon knows that. It’s what brings us back to work every day.”
Now we can see the workers and owners of Amazon.com triumphant, standing on the bodies of their enemies. Drunk and magnificent, the employees chug microbrewed beers and drive SUVs recklessly across the prairie, hitting buffalo. These noble workers were brave enough to say, “Goddamn yeah, we’re gonna work hard” and “Goddamn yeah, get rich too!” They put their hearts and souls on the line, and the world did listen, and the markets did listen too. And the stock did rise and rise and rise and Amazon had a bright future ahead of it for at least the next twelve fiscal months.
You hear the sweeping power chords, watch the slowmotion doves flying into the sky like a bad Hong Kong flick. As we head off into the future it seems certain that Amazon.com will be the single-most customer-intensive company in the history of the world. Amen and hallelujah, praise Jesus and God and Shiva, and may the market forces bless and protect us in infinite growth, all our charts running up and to the right in infinite progression, amen.