Word: amazone
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That even goes for where you sit. Amazon offices are scattered across Seattle: the flagship Art Deco Pacific Medical Center, the Pike Street skyscraper, the original Columbia building and so on. Stunning mountain-flanked views of Lake Washington and Puget Sound are the only luxury the spartan corporate aesthetic allows. Employees are crammed two to a bare-walled office and work at Bezos-designed desks made of old doors with legs stuck on them (design director Helen Owen bets me lunch that she will still have a door-desk in five years, even if Amazon flourishes...
...moved nine times in three years. Resettling in the suburbs might make sense, but the troops keep voting it down, clearly dreading Seattle's horrendous traffic. Instead they huddle outside PacMed in a chilly dusk drizzle, awaiting one of the vans that crisscross the city from one Amazon outpost to another. "Imagine how much they're paying us," a shivering woman complains, "to stand here waiting for a ride...
...Picking" means roaming the aisles of the Seattle distribution center, filling customer orders from shelves packed with titles arranged according to a bewildering strategy called "random stow" that leaves Toni Morrison: A Womanist Discourse abutting Garfield's Extreme Student Planner. This facility is the smallest of Amazon's nine worldwide distribution centers. But today the place is humming with hundreds of pickers pushing around carts piled high with books and other products destined to land under thousands of Christmas trees...
This is how Amazon's other half lives. At least 40% of the work force labors in a distribution center or customer-service center. It's the blue-collar work of the Internet. Neon hair, body piercings and non-Caucasian skin tones are generously represented. And so is the Amazon work ethic. "You have to prove yourself," says Edwards, 30, who came here from a print shop. "But once they notice that you're on time, hardworking and consistent, good things happen. Some people are really motivated," he says, as a headphoned airhead ambles by. "Others aren't motivated...
...that's growing so fast that entire meetings revolve around how to phone-screen the countless job supplicants; recently more than 400 people applied for four openings. "I had five interviews with five people on two different days, and this was for a temp job," says an ex-employee. Amazon detractors are easy to find. The company, like any growing society, has developed a caste system that embitters some in the lower orders. "I hated working there," says the ex-employee. "I was totally underutilized. My bosses were bad managers who just happened to sign on earlier than...