LAST TIME, we discussed a few of the possible elements of a future ’90s nostalgia craze.
One such trend, now rapidly becoming part of the past but due to become the topic of hip-ironic remembrance, involves the devil-may-care spending, Nietzchean-superman self-images, and income-be-damned operations of dot-com startup entrepreneurs.
The stock markets have gotten rather sick of such prolifigate money-wasters this past year, and have let Net-related stocks sink faster than John Denver’s airplane.
Therefore, Amazon.com boss Jeff Bezos has decided to show those Wall Streeters he means business. He’s going to turn his sprawling, far-flung Net-based retailer from an ever-growing, always-money-losing behemoth into a lean-‘n’-mean profit-making machine. He wants Amazon to no longer be perceived as just a bigger version of your basic dot-com catastrophe but as a solid, respectable firm and a safe investment.
The problem is, he’s going about it all the wrong way.
Instead of shedding questionable product lines (cars, small appliances) and even more questionable investments in other dot-coms (such as its past involvement in the infamous Pets.com), it’s slashing 1,300 workers, two-thirds of them here in Seattle and the rest at a Georgia warehouse.
About half the local layoffs are in the customer-service department, housed in Amazon’s former HQ offices on 2nd Ave. above the Art Bar. It just so happens (coincidence or dot-dot-dot?) that this was where a unionization effort had begun late last year, organized by the
Washington Alliance of Technical Workers. Now, instead of getting their pleas for shorter hours and saner working conditions routinely ignored by management, these folks will get to draw unemployment while their jobs are exported to “right to work” states or even to India.
If I were to ever meet Bezos, I’d set him aside and tell him that kind of screw-the-staff attitude might work in getting him seen as a Real Boss-Type Executive by investors, but it won’t necessarily save the company. A retailer (even, or especially, a Net retailer) is a people business. Getting and keeping good people, treating them right and not like disposable commodities, is key to getting and keeping repeat customers.
To really become a solid, dependable, in-it-for-the-long-term company, Amazon has to start acting neither like a free-spending startup nor like a fire-everybody-but-keep-the-executive-perks “re-engineered” company; but like the great business institutions of old, companies that earned respect because they showed respect. Even if it took union organizing efforts to persuade them to show that respect.
NEXT: Public transit down Mexico way.
ELSEWHERE:
