Does Amazon Think Employees Are Stupid?
Corporate response to Customer Service concerns produces more questions than answers
Saying something to a person that both you and they know is absurd not only makes you dishonest, it insults the other person’s intelligence. Because for you to expect them to believe an obvious absurdity means you think they are stupid.
I think most of us get this. But clearly not all of us. Let’s come back to the notion in a few moments after a digression to establish some context.
I've been writing about Amazon a lot lately. I've been critical in my tone. I’ve been unflinching in what I’ve exposed and proposed. The approach is conscious.
I see one of the world’s most consequential employers sliding off the rails in many ways. I see its actions becoming rapidly more distant from the value system and founding vision which made it great.
It’s becoming difficult to discern Amazon’s identity, much less its strategy or vision. Most alarming is a radical shift in how Amazon treats, supports, and regards the rank and file who create its value. There seems to be an active effort to piss all of them off.
Believing the company’s conduct is not only important to 1.5 million Amazonians, but will shape norms for the entire labor market, I’m concerned and observing closely.
And I'm not the only one.
In the wake of recent revelations here at The Radar of ambush layoffs in its Customer Service (CS) divison, a Fortune magazine report has exposed a raft of serious issues. All is clearly not well within Amazon CS.
If you have even a passing interest in Amazon, the online retail sector, or the general trend in working conditions among big employers, Jason Del Rey’s article is for you. I encourage reading every word. It’s important.
The issues he uncovers in talking to a dozen employees currently serving in Amazon’s CS division include:
Confusion surrounding layoffs, resulting workloads, and job security
Anxiety about the future of Amazon CS and whether AI will replace humans
Serious mental health concerns among CS staff amid massive job stress and abusive interactions with frustrated customers
Declining CS job satisfaction driven by resource and policy constraints
The article should be taken by Amazon as a body of useful facts and indicators which it can leverage to improve the employee and customer experience. A healthy company maintains, even when confronted with uncomfortable or contrary information, the capacity to listen and learn.
What instead emerges from the article is an arrogant, dismissive, and ultimately disingenuous corporate response.
Time after time, Fortune gives Amazon the chance to set the record straight, talk straight, and be transparent. Time after time, it is given constructive, actionable anecdotes which should simply be taken away for further investigation. Time and again, corporate representative Margaret Callahan gets chances to demonstrate empathy, transparency, and the humility that should attach to recognition of the valid public interests implicated.
Time and again, Amazon chooses deflection. Opacity. Evasiveness.
Dishonesty.
Examples.
Fortune raised questions about unseemly tactics which left people not knowing for certain whether they were fired.
Amazon’s claims group meetings were required before notifying impacted individuals, but doesn’t address why managers used weaselly Orwellian lingo instead of plain language. Word salads are popular Amazon staples and I get that, but when you use them to fire people, it’s just cruel.
There’s also no response to the impersonal manner in which people were fired, with some getting a call from HR after realizing they’d been kicked from Amazon’s computer network.
This is the kind of stuff that can exceed resiliency and drive people past coping. There is no excuse for it, and it should have been acknowledged as wrong.
Amazon refused to even admit how many CS managers were let go. Insiders have said around 600 lost their jobs and many more were moved laterally to other roles. This is a sensible estimate. The company insists on the vagary “more than 100.” What the Hell does that even mean? More than 100 could be 101 or 10,000. Why not just talk straight?
Obviously, this evasion tacitly admits that big layoff numbers are bad press and could create perceptual harm. Layoffs can be interpreted as cost-effective (share price goes up) or they can be interpreted as reflections of anxiety about the business model (share price goes down). The bigger the number, the more danger of the latter.
But this is something executives should have considered before making people jobless. If you’re not willing to say how many people you fired, you don’t have the necessary conviction to fire them.
Callahan also seemed to say that Amazon corporate headquarters isn’t responsible for CS downsizing. But that we should sympathize with whoever did it because of the challenges of COVID19.
Unserious.
I can tell you first-hand that using the pandemic as a shield has officially been an expired take for at least 30 months. If anyone responsible for a team in the field is considering using it, I recommend double-checking your share vesting dates first. So you can time your dismissal properly.
As for CS being empowered to do its own firings, I wouldn’t believe for a second that this was an uncoordinated decision lacking S-team visibility. If it was, then Amazon should send a spokesperson who can represent an actually responsible decision agent to answer questions about it.
Unfortunately, it gets darker.
Confronted with claims that CS employees are at mental health risk and declining in their job satisfaction, Callahan selectively provides a fractal of data suggesting everyone’s wrong, including the employees sitting in the middle of the situation. The response is that overall job satisfaction is good.
She doesn’t express concern or commit to further exploring the claims, which is the bare minimum leadership response for Amazon.
Callahan also paints an incomplete and therefore deceptive picture.
Amazon collects data every month, directly from employees, on how stressed they feel in their roles. The question was about stress levels, not the more nebulous measure of overall job satisfaction. Callahan didn’t mention stress data, which would have been an easy way to dispel notions of excessive pressures on the CS team.
We can easily think why.
Amazon says team engagement budgets haven’t been cut. That’s just false. Unless CS got a better deal than operations, those budgets definitely have been reduced. In the fulfillment network, the GM Assistant (GMA) coordinates engagement activities. In my part of that network, we lost some superb GMAs over this precise issue in 2023. They left when Amazon dialed down engagement spending to a joke-worthy level.
Amazon says it hasn’t reduced the concessions CS employees can give customers when they raise valid complaints about their orders. This is 180 degrees at odds from what everyone inside the CS division is saying.
CS insiders are painting a picture of tightly controlled interactions and deliberately increased friction and hassle to discourage customers recovering monetarily from a substandard transaction. They’re telling Amazon that this added friction is really pissing off customers, who are then becoming toxic with CS employees and degrading their mental health.
If you’ve interacted with Amazon CS recently, you might have already formed your own view.
I recently contacted CS to complain that I’d been double-charged for Prime. Someone was using my credit card without my knowledge. Rather than apologize for compromising my credit card data, they told me to call the police and file a fraud report.
When I challenged that this was not the level of support I had grown to trust in my 16 years as a loyal Prime customer, the CS manager — stop me if you’ve heard this one recently — said she really wished she could help, but policy wouldn’t allow her to do so.
If we believe CS employees, Amazon has put them in a policy cage surrounded by snarling, rabid wolves. Then reduced their support by chopping hundreds of managers. Then engaged them less. Then expressed a blend of mystification and denial that they might have mental health issues and be stressed out.
But there’s still one more thing which could make their jobs worse. And it’s the most grimly disturbing bit of the Fortune piece.
Del Rey asks Amazon for its response to anxiety CS associates are feeling about mandated use of AI tools to conduct their customer interactions.
CS employees are worried that Amazon is forcing them to use the tools in order to develop and train bots because it wants to replace CS humans with AI tools completely. It’s an understandable worry and deserves to be addressed.
What was Amazon’s response? You can find it in the box below.
Nothing. So in the absence of transparency, logic will have to do.
There’s only one reason Callahan would decline to answer such a question, and that is to avoid making a knowing misrepresentation which could come back to bite later. It would have been dead easy to say “we have no intention of replacing our incredible CS associates with AI tools.” That would have calmed the herd.
The dodge makes it reasonable to assume Amazon is doing exactly what CS employees fear. It’s what the evidence in Del Rey’s reporting indicates. And if it is the intent, Amazon should be honest with its people. Tell them they are indeed helping develop a system that will one day replace them. Deserve their trust. Accept the impact of whatever leverage and bargaining power they gain from the truth.
I've been warning that recent Amazon behaviors go beyond run-of-the-mill profit hoarding or garden variety worker neglect.
The common features of Amazon’s conduct in recent months are nothing less than arrogance and dishonesty.
Throwing parties for senior leaders while squeezing costs for everyone else.
Pretending pay freezes are necessary when they're not.
Pretending layoffs are necessary when they're not.
Ignoring or dismissing unhealthy working conditions or remaining purposely aloof to them.
Firing people ambush style just because you can.
This all defies Amazon’s Earn Trust leadership principle, which expects leaders to “listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully.”
Executives at Amazon are behaving as though they are unaccountable. To employees. To customers. To the public who own the company. To the principles expected of every leader.
Practically speaking, this is true. Notwithstanding a pair of pending Federal Trade Commission lawsuits, the company is not really forced to answer to anyone other than its major shareholders.
At least for now. But two things are true.
First, Amazon is disrespecting employees, which will at some point be costly.
Second, experience counsels that such levels of hubris and dishonesty usually associate with more serious and more self-injurious conduct. My guess is we’re only getting a glimpse of overall dysfunction. Which means we may someday find ourselves looking back on this moment as one of a series of steps toward ruin.
After all, Amazon’s raison d’etre, what made it special, what made it distinctive, was its unshakable commitment to providing the best customer experience on the planet.
Like many other companies punctuating the well-worn history of self-actuated tailspinning, Amazon seems to be tempting its own ruin by stepping away from its core identity. Whatever is replacing that identity, whether by intent or default, doesn’t look too good.
Did Amazon’s founding vision and spirit leave when its founder left? It’s not yet clear. If it did, maybe that’s alright.
Maybe we’re in a long-winded transition between steady states, and someday soon Andy Jassy will wow us with brilliance and erudition in revealing a master plan we can’t yet see. Heck, maybe he’ll even throw in some empathy, which wouldn’t go amiss.
But one thing’s for sure. No company will prosper if it treats its own employees like they’re stupid. Their collective response to disrespect, arrogance, and dishonesty is capable of laying financial waste to nations and worlds, never mind companies.
I sure hope Amazon’s S-team gets that.
TC is an independent writer and expert in organizational leadership.
Corporate capitalism is the free market version of Orwellian totalitarianism. I used to teach English to Adobe employees and heard things very similar to what you mention here, especially in the use of language. A couple of examples:
Each year employees were asked to give an "honest satisfaction appraisal" of their jobs. One year, one of my students actually did. Here local office manager dragged her in to tell her she absolutely could not say those things (complaining about lack of compatibility with childcare, among other things). The only valid responses were along the lines of "I just don't have time to pursue all the career advancement that Adobe provides" and such nonsense.
One year, a number of employees were laid off. I was told that it immediately became taboo to even mention their name.
What is the solution? As far as I can see, it comes to good old trade union membership. It worked 100 years ago...
Unfortunately I don't even know where to start....
I had very close working relationships with Amazon CS and their leadership, and spent considerable time working closely on site with agents at one of the call centers. I have the outmost respect for the old guard of Amazon CS.
But today's version of it is all but a small shadow. I've documented some of it in previous writing.
The most recent incident was after we had cancelled our Amazon Prime membership and I was in a chat with Amazon CS (which by the way they make very hard to find). I asked if they had a feature to disable the constant upsell of Prime in the checkout pipeline, as I obviously cancelled Prime for a reason and didn't want to click 'no thank you' three times every time I checked out.
The agent had to constantly check with his supervisor, and then first resorted to suggestion I sign up for the trial and then cancel it and they would refund it. And when I insisted, and another consultation with the supervisor resorted to a deflection of 'there is a global outage, and it was being addressed'. Not the CS I'm used to, but the same 'go away' we're used to from other retailers.
A few years ago I had a long conversation about the dilution of the Prime promise. When Prime launched it was 2 days from time of order, as long as order was placed before fast-track cut-off. These days Prime is 2 days from when it leaves the Amazon FC, not counting inter-FC transfers. A small but very consequential change that saves Amazon a lot of money, and they never told loyal customers about.
So Prime promise can be 3-4 days on the calendar. Part of the value of Prime shipping promise was that you didn't have to think or read ship promise details in the cart, you just knew. I even dug up the original announcement to verify (which my team put on the Gateyway during launch) and had a CS agent look up the order ship details. It was a frustrating endeavor how step by step the slipped on the old promise and fed you a load of bull.
There's a reason we cancelled Amazon Prime. It wasn't worth it anymore, despite the emotional attachment. And honestly, it has left no hole behind, so diluted has it been.
In the old days the WSJ would write about how Amazon saved the day on the holidays. And we would get regular emails with the infamous '?' to address customer issues. These days Amazon CS is tasked with saving cost, not delighting customers. I feel bad for the agents that have to execute on that task. No wonder they're stressed to the limit.