Word: making
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...constantly told not to get too attached to our office," says Marcus, who has 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...
Rewards like money make it easy for most Amazonians to embrace the company's hyperyouthful, workaholic Weltanschauung. "Everybody's always talking about books, music, videos, computers," says Moe. "And everybody works really, really hard. It's that exhaustion-exhilaration feeling you had in college in finals week. But here, it's 24/7...
Amazon trains an elite group of gift wrappers to "make it look like Mom's." Each worker processes 30 packages an hour (those who fail are reassigned to other jobs). For its busiest season yet, Amazon's warehouses are stocked with 4.4 million yards of ribbon and 7.8 million sq. ft. of wrapping paper--which if laid flat would more than cover Disneyland...
Online auctions have their limits. Auctions are most useful for setting the price of goods of indeterminate value. (Some of the earliest ones were held by Roman soldiers selling off battle loot.) Auctions make more sense for items whose worth is uncertain (an antique chair or a used forklift) than for commonly sold goods (a new pair of name-brand blue jeans...
That was the genesis of the Feedback Forum, one of eBay's most distinctive and popular features. Omidyar kicked it off with a Founder's Letter in February 1996 in which he laid out a philosophy that still guides eBay: that people are basically good, that they make mistakes, and that they should be given the benefit of the doubt. "I was afraid it would turn into just a gripe forum, but as I watched it develop, I was amazed to realize that people enjoy giving praise." In fact the feedback eBayers posted about one another was overwhelmingly positive...