Back in the 90s, Jeff Bezos went on record as hoping his employees would wake up on the wrong side of the bed—for the greater good, or for the customer at the very least.
sigh. I literally know people who will take this to heart, who already mostly believe this is how companies should operate, and don’t need much more " proof" like this.
Yes: if you beat your slaves, they will work harder until they die, at which point you can replace them. It’s true. You can be successful this way.
It bugs me to no end that we’ve created an economic model that measures success by exactly one metric: profit. It’s such a shitty situation with a disastrous, unsustainable end; it’s just taking a long time for it to play out.
This seems a bit disingenuous. I don’t like the guy much, but turning a small loan the size of a house into one of the worlds richest companies, while changing how ALL of us shopped online is still an impressive feat.
You could give $300k to everyone in this thread and no one would produce half an Amazon.
I up arrowed your comment but I disagree a little. You couldn’t reach a capitalist apex like Bezos et al without that kind of ruthless drive. However…I would like to think you and I “could” build a modest empire that treated everyone well and the employees felt valued and validated. And the products were something to be proud of. Good service but not at the expense of shaming. Look at, say, Trader Joes up until a couple of years ago or Patagonia. (Side bar: notice how there was a sudden uptick in unionizing at TJs in the last few years at the same time there is explosive growth in stores? Hmm?)
Dude sucks and is ruining the planet, but this quote is taken out of context and if you read beyond the headline you’ll see that. He’s saying that his employees should “wake up every morning terrified” of losing their customers to competitors. That’s just like… a dumb capitalistic aphorism that doesn’t really mean anything.
How could you say it doesn’t mean anything? They don’t say these words for no reason at all. He meant that. He wanted you to wake up and be 'terrified like he is." This whole game is how can we get the dial to go past 11? How hard can I push these people to extract the maximum amount of value? Listen to them when they speak, they mean it.
“And so, after the Great Factory Atrocity committed against the workers by the Billionaire Grey Shirt Army, all Grey Shirts were forced to flee to their luxury orbitals. Thus the curse ‘may he launch himself into orbit and never come back’ entered the common vernacular, often accompanied by the ceremonial breaking of an orbital landing beacon, many of which had been found in a large cache of Grey Shirt supplies buried on Oahu.”
From Chronicle of the Times Before the Great Bankruptcy Wars of 2055
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