A Memo From the Boss

 Dear Amazonians:

     There was a hit piece that came out this weekend in the NY Times, entitled Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace." So when I came in today on my yacht and helicopter, off my private elevator and got to my office, I wished to be the first to officially respond to this unabashed hit piece in this interoffice memo.
     First off, this is not the Amazon I've been leading from Day One since 1994 and the execrable business and management practices detailed in the New York Times never once victimized me or my senior executive staff. And if I could stand to look at you and didn't exclusively know Fortune 500 Chairmen, CEOs and other corporate Chief Officers, I'm sure you'd all tell me the same thing.

 

     No one ever once said to me as I took off for a few months on my yacht that I couldn't play the part of the bored rich man looking to salvage deep sea treasure. The shareholders, my real bosses, never once told me I couldn't take time off from work to negotiate buying the Washington Post for a quarter of a billion dollars.

     And I can assure you, if I ever had to undergo the humiliating experience of an actual performance review, none of those necessary personal functions and responsibilities I'm sure we've all had would've been used as a criteria for or against me.

     Had they been used against me, had I actually people to answer to, I would've summoned my entire executive management staff together at a retreat in New Mexico and strategized the bullet points of a meeting with my friends in the Seattle Chamber of Commerce for some much-needed support.

     No one ever mandated I had to work 70-80 hours a week at the expense of my family. No one ever ordered me to get without a hand truck in under a minute a 55 gallon drum of anal lube on Amazon Prime Day in a stifling 100 degree warehouse fulfillment center in the armpit of the Deep South. No one ever once threatened my job by telling me to fulfill more and more unreasonable performance quotas in brutal working conditions and I'm sure every single one of my minimum wage-earning temp workers would say the same thing.

     Why, I'm sure if they actually had a voice and could get through my army of flacks, they'd say they were perfectly entitled to go off, on request, to play tennis with Bill Gates or hobnob with Warren Buffet at his mansion in Omaha if they but requested personal time 24 hours in advance.

     Secondly, there seems to be a misperception that the way in which I treat our authors, vendors such as Hachette, customers and so forth happens to be the same way I treat the submanagement staff. Nothing could be further from the truth. 

      Just because I bully big publishers into giving me the deep discounts I expect in my undeclared monopoly and make their catalogs disappear overnight if I don't get my way, just because I cheat authors by paying by the page as of July 1st while we still grab our 30% distribution fee on Kindle sales, just because we refuse to hire longterm temp workers and make them work in stifling conditions and just because we hired neo Nazis to control the workers who work in our German fulfillment centers does not mean I'm running a white collar sweatshop operation.

     And now, I'm going to prove everything I just said by taking some time off from my job to buy the New York Times and seriously scrutinizing the actual necessity of everyone on their reporting staff.

     As for the fact of women being excluded from my top management team, that's just incidental and untrue. Look here: Here's one. Now get off my back. C'mon, I'm not sexist. Just look at me! I have a fun, dorky face, sort of like Bobby Darin's retarded kid brother or a special needs Hobbit.

Jeff

PS Unless you wish to be docked for the time you spent reading this, you'd better double your quotas for today. J/K!

PPS Not really...