Cruising Inside Amazon

“BMVP2000”

The phrase sits there on the giant monitors, and 2,000 Amazonians packing the Seattle Westin for a quarterly “all hands” meeting listen raptly while Jeff Bezos explains what it means. There are two types of businesses, he tells the troops: baby businesses, which need growth and feeding, and adult businesses, which must pay their own way. This brings him to B, M and V, which stand for books, music and video, Amazon’s three oldest product lines. And the P is the news, for this trinity is nearing adulthood. “By the end of the year 2000,” Bezos says, “we’re going to make them profitable.”

The troops are silent. Stunned. Amazon, profitable? It’s autumn 1999. For years these people have been racing toward a horizon that no one, save perhaps their utopian-futurist boss, even really sees. They know much of the Silicon Valley/Wall Street/media complex believes the commodification of online retailing will lay their company to waste. Amazon the Web’s golden child, darling of NASDAQ day traders who raise its market cap even faster than the company bleeds money, is also Amazon the avatar of all that may be ephemeral and fraudulent about the dotcom revolution. Now Bezos has named a date one year hence that will be the time they find out whether they’re going to make it or not. A chance, after all those 16-hr. workdays, for the company actually to fail.

Their fearless leader notes their angst and offers a beneficent smile. “You can cheer,” Bezos says. So the troops cheer. Imagine it. Amazon, profitable.

“I think we all agree,” says Mara Friedman, “that a groundhog at a podium is funny.”

“What’s he doing at a podium?” her boss, John Moe, wonders.

“Um, he’s lecturing on shadows and diffraction…”

“It’s, like, a groundhog convention?”

“A groundhog convention,” Friedman says, going with it. “You can’t go wrong with a groundhog convention.”

This Thursday afternoon the e-Cards crew is sitting around a conference table, trying to make one another laugh. Today’s subjects are office humor and holidays in February. A “Valentine’s Day, My Ass” card for lonely hearts? Possibly. A motivational groundhog speaker? Probably. A support group for obscure Presidents? “‘I passed the Smoot-Hawley tariff, but do I even get a tire ad?'” Absolutely.

“This is terrible,” Moe warns, “but O.K.–guy in a bathrobe in a lounge chair watching TV. But he’s in an office cubicle. ‘I think Johnson is taking this casual Friday thing too far!'”

Silence. Finally, someone groans.

“It’s kind of New Yorker 10 years ago,” Moe admits.

“Maybe if you put Marmaduke in there,” Kirk Anderson offers.

“Ooh,” moans Susan Benson, Amazon’s editor in chief. “That was cruel.”

This is ground zero of the New Economy? At age five, Earth’s Biggest Bookstore is now Earth’s Biggest Selection, in keeping with Bezos’ plan for world domination. Meaning what, exactly? Well, in a sense, Amazon isn’t about technology or even commerce. Any moron can open an online store. The trick is showing millions of customers such a good time that they come back every few days for the next 50 years. Amazon is, like every other site on the Web, a content play.

Thus e-Cards and the rest of the editorial department, a rich stew of writers, academics and other liberal-arts types. A century ago, millions of brave souls crossed the Atlantic to the land of opportunity. Now their descendants are making their own western migration, and these days many of them are landing in Seattle. Kerry Fried (books) was an editor for the Village Voice Literary Supplement. James Marcus (books) was a literary critic. Jenny Brown (video) has an M.F.A. in creative writing. Simon Leake (video) was a doctoral candidate in Renaissance studies. “I know so many people who got their Ph.D. and cannot find work,” Leake says. “They’re all going into business or journalism.”

Or both. The editorial folks’ job is to create opinionated, entertaining guides to Amazon products: reviews, interviews, gift ideas, etc. They spend their days agonizing over, say, which obscure documentary to name the Pick of the Week and maybe only occasionally pondering the spiritual implications of this whole writing-for-a-shopping-mall gig.

“I draw a distinction between what I did then and what I do now,” says Jeff Shannon, who traded free-lance movie reviewing to become Amazon’s DVD editor last fall. “We’re free to say what we want, but we understand we’re consumer advocates; just because I hated a movie doesn’t mean everybody did.”

So the editors perpetually balance the sacred and the profane. “Right now I’m trying to come up with gift lists,” says video editor Jenny Simon. “It’s a challenge trying to figure out what people will want. Ooh. Pride and Prejudice! That’s my favorite. It’s this wonderful BBC adaptation.” But, hey, what about Sturgis 1999: 300,000 Motorcyclists Take Over the Black Hills, which also graces her groaning shelves? Simon sighs. “I don’t cover everything,” she says.

“How often do you use Amazon?” asks Phillip Van Rooyen. Maybe once a month, I say. “How do you usually get to the store?” he continues. We discuss my surfing habits while Van Rooyen noodles around a page featuring James Bond posed amid various Bond-related links like Music, Video and Gadgets. “What do you think will happen,” he asks, his cursor alighting on Music, “if you click right here?”

What happens is I get offered multiple products spun off from one branded pop-culture image–in this case, a bunch of Bond sound tracks. Van Rooyen is part of the Amazon design team, which differs from the rest of the company in that its members use Macs, have trippy Christmas lights slung across their ceiling and are cuter than the real geeks. They spend their time thinking about what Everyman thinks about when he visits Amazon and designing pages to meet those expectations.

It’s a daunting task. For three years, defining Amazon was easy: it sold books. Then it sold books, music and videos. Now it sells toys, home-improvement products, consumer electronics and software as well. Then there are the equity stakes in start-ups like drugstore.com pets.com and Gear.com and struggling eBay-wannabe divisions: zShops and Auctions. Who are these guys now? What does Amazon represent? And will the company’s more than 13 million customers stick around for power drills and wide-screen TVs? “No one’s sure where all this is going,” says Carrie Johnson, an analyst with Forrester Research and an Amazon optimist. “Initiatives like zShops and Auctions are distracting to the brand. They need a tab on the home page that says, OTHER CRAP.”

What Johnson and other believers agree on is the wisdom of the company’s relentless reinvestment in new markets in lieu of banking premature profits. Bezos’ strategic analysis goes like this: customer acquisition is only going to get harder tomorrow, so you have to grab every customer you can today. For those 13 million customers translate into dominant market share. And dominant market share means the power, for instance, to strong-arm suppliers for better deals, which could lead to profitability. BMVP2000.

So, since mid-1998, the company has grown from one online store to more than a dozen, and from 1,100 to more than 5,000 love-it-or-leave-it, multitasking nomads. Ask the average Amazon employee for his or her business card. He will stammer and pat his pockets, explaining that, well, his number changed; she has a new job title; their group just moved; the new cards aren’t in yet.

Marcus, who joined Amazon in ’96, recalls learning Web coding on the fly in order to get his reviews online. Kerry Fried sardonically references “my assistant” to refer to her endless clerical duties. Almost every Amazonian spends half his time each December wrapping packages and manning customer-service lines. “It doesn’t matter what you’ve done before and what you’re going to do later,” says Moe. “You figure it out as you go along.”

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).

“We’re 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.”

“When I started I was one of the fastest pickers here,” says John Edwards. “But now that I do other jobs, some people have passed me by.”

“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 at all. And they usually don’t last long.”

Sky-high expectations pervade a company 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 I did. There was this arrogance, like, ‘I’m employee No. 117, and I’m going to be a multimillionaire, so do what I say.'”

Yes, the money. Oh, to be one of the Amazon anointed, those who signed on early and are enjoying multimillion-dollar payouts. You hear about Gen Xers turned philanthropists: the woman who signed up out of college and plans to retire at 30; the guy who launched a dog-biscuit business on the side. “We get told not to watch the ticker,” says Marcus, a three-year vet who, one imagines, does so anyway.

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.”

They go to movie screenings and rave about their fierce broomball rivalry. They throw Friday-night keggers, Valentine’s Day parties and masquerade balls. Last fall’s Halloween party was so huge that PacMed security guys were checking IDs at the door. WELCOME CAMPUS RECRUITS reads one note scrawled on an elevator whiteboard, summing up the prevailing spirit. AMAZON UBER ALLES!