I am asked about my experience at or around Amazon’s ecosphere of products, channels, and culture routinely by friend, family and acquaintances. Not every day, but enough that it made me want to write about my time there and around the brand. I have spent only 13 months of my career at Amazon HQ, but since 2019 I have been either working on a channel that involves Amazon Retail and collaborating with them, competing against Amazon, or working for them. Here’s my take on the state of their brand.
When peering in, from the rain-soaked streets of Seattle to the clean corners of Bellevue, Amazon is portraying itself as clean, cutting edge, and ready to leap into the AI age with both feet— but without legs, in my opinion. They are everywhere, advertising how AWS’ metrics and insights can help your business home in on any strategy. Or in other words, you can count on Amazon to deliver incredible solutions that will give you the top line revenue that’s missing from your channel. Have you seen the AWS advertisements infesting every Sunday football game, and even during the World Series this fall. The ads show how AWS helps the sports teams you’re seeing on Sunday TV to be better at everything by providing more DATA! It’s a simple way of saying if you pay us, we’ll make you more money—guaranteed. Until, let’s say, the journey brings you to year 5 or 6 for said business channel. Things start to surface to the top: arbitrage, lost Buy Box, promotions not working as usual, new product launches not as successful, and loss of pricing control. Those weren’t even a problem when you first started the channel for your brand.
Slowly they trap you with new customers, easy marketing allocations, and cheap promotions. Eventually Amazon wants more, and now they are starting to provide high-level business strategies for your brand on how to succeed on any of their Amazon channels. But it isn’t just for this channel, no, they want to control every aspect of how you sell your brand and tell you how to do it on other e-commerce platforms, too. Here’s a little insight into why it’s happening.
When I departed Amazon after my last contract, the culture I left was fraught with anxiety. It was everywhere. Your co-workers live their lives in isolating silos with zero handholding, and only an online Wiki for directions on where to go. The environment bred distrust and reinforced mutually beneficial partnerships until one party was no longer benefiting—all determined by a level 8 you had no idea about, because there are thousands of them. By the end of my third contract, it started to become clear that Ego would decide if I had a job, not my skills or natural talent. They are at a turning point supposedly, culture-wise. But through the grapevine, what I see is a mixed bag, and it all depends on who your team is or what you work on. While this is somewhat the case for any organization, this rule is especially true when you work at Amazon.
What I saw from a front-end perspective during my time there was the beginning of a total collapse, and a cycle of intense promotion is the only thing keeping the business afloat on the retail side. If I am recalling correctly, Amazon Prime days in the summer make up about 20-30 % of a vendor’s business for the fiscal year, and T-5—Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday—brings in 60 % of the total business for their retail side. They are solely dependent on two key drive times and have created their entire retail business around this model, which drives strategies for most of the year. But I found a better way of explaining it from James Gosling, a former AWS engineer, and I have heard similar accounts multiple times from people who worked on the back end.
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So, what’s my point? Amazon is failing. I think they promote a culture fraught with throwing away things after a few months. It’s classic anxiety. They panic when things don’t initially go right, try to correct course in a rushed and half-baked fashion, and get even more anxious when that doesn’t fix the issue. Every single person besides maybe a few managers had anxiety rippling through their voices. Some of this is due to the goal setting and performance management model they follow, of course, but I think there is also a more nuanced reason for the anxiety perpetuating the entire company: No one knows how a lot of the old tech works.
I have worked with many former Amazonians from the 00s and 2010s period who made Amazon into the powerhouse it is today. All that proprietary knowledge is now gone. When I was there, I ran into a lot of these types of questions, “What does this do?”, “How does this work?”, and “Where do we find this?” I think you get the point.
Another reason why there is anxiety everywhere is that the predators lurk on every corner now, and with that collaboration is dead. Yes, I think they have a culture problem that goes all the way to the top, and I don’t think they understand how much damage they have done by creating an environment that doesn’t value Collaboration. I think Amazon used good people, chewed them up and spit them out when the initial flavor was gone. And good people come in all shapes and sizes; some of us have been hardened by life or illnesses that make us numb and make us think we have to make certain choices. We are human at the end of the day, but I think they took advantage of our competitive nature, and drive, using it in ways that was very Lord-of-the-Flies-like. Instead of collaboration, it felt like you were meant to be in your silo until you’re called out to do gladiatorial battle. Fucking eh, is there something wrong with wanting to see your fellow teammates succeed? At Amazon, I guess there is. I hope people remember the VOX article from 2022 citing an internal memo on Amazon’s own internal issue with respect to churn.
“Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire” (June 17, 2022). It reports internal Amazon research warning that, absent changes, the company would “deplete the available labor supply” for its U.S. warehouses by 2024.
Vox
“Amazon could run out of workers in US in two years, internal memo suggests” (June 22, 2022), noting the risk of “churning through the available labor pool.”
So how do we package what’s happening at Amazon? Whatever you want to call it, at the surface level or in the deepest darkest parts, it’s a company built on taking advantage of others. Nowhere have I seen this culture more than at Amazon. Their entire environment has become a wasteland, and they are stumbling on top of each other as each person scrambles to get out before it’s too late. All the predators have burned out the ecosystem. Amazon needs AI to survive because it’s sitting in a house of cards, with everything balancing precariously inches away from the ledge.
I’m not good with endings, mostly blame my Midwest upbringing, but I’ll leave you with this final sociological observation from my time at Amazon.
They are in an overshoot-and-collapse situation, approaching a tipping point (a regime shift). When predators overexploit prey, the system can cross a critical threshold and flip into a degraded state. This is commonly described as an ecological collapse or a phase (regime) shift.
Thanks for reading,
Matthew
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