The FRONTLINE Interviews
James Marcus
Former Amazon.com Editor
Hired as a writer for the website, James Marcus joined Amazon in 1996 as employee #55. He is the author of Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut.
Following are excerpts of an interview with James Marcus conducted by James Jacoby on July 9, 2019.
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Jeff Bezos’ Ambitions
And what did you get a sense of—I mean, you mentioned, you know, this idea that in some ways, the clothing and the persona, that you’d also gotten a sense of his ambition, of Jeff’s ambition at the time.When—when did that start to present itself to you, what Jeff’s ambitions really were?
Jeff’s global ambitions for the company were evident even during the interview process.It wasn’t so much from Jeff himself, but one of his sort of second-in-command people who I spoke to said to me while I was being interviewed: “You have to understand that Jeff wants to sell many more things than books.And Jeff’s idea is that in the near distant future you could buy a kayak from Amazon, and after you bought the kayak, you could figure out good places to kayak and buy travel services from Amazon, and you could be put in touch with a whole network of other kayakers through Amazon.”So those ambitions were very clear.I mean, this guy had heard them from Jeff.And this was when Amazon was simply a bookstore.And this was very early on, but he was clearly thinking in those terms from the get-go, and very intelligently, I have to say.
And when you heard the anecdote from that colleague about kayaks, I mean, what did that—how did that ring to you at the time?
A little bit exciting and a little bit nutty, just because of the breadth of it, because he was already thinking that this store could sort of be all things to all people, and beyond just selling things, but supplying services, becoming a sort of hub and community.The breadth of the ambition was—was amazing and refreshing, but it also, in a way, seemed comically unrealistic.
Yeah.I mean, you often describe him in the book as almost like pie in the sky; that there was this aspect of him that seemed completely divorced from the reality of where things were.Can you elaborate on that a bit?
Well, I mean, Jeff didn’t think he was pie in the sky at all.He thought he was, you know, hardwired into reality.And to give him credit, he was.But if you signed on to work at a kind of futuristic bookstore, and the guy who owned it was suddenly talking about selling, you know, every object in the universe, you just weren’t sure how seriously to take it, you know, because it involved such a quantum leap beyond the initial venture that you thought you had been hired for.But he was right, and I was wrong insofar as I was chuckling at his insane ambitions.I mean, most of them have been realized.Many of them that he didn't even have at the time have been realized.So he was quite realistic about where this was leading.
Amazon and the Business of Data
… But in terms of the culture of metrics, I think—I mean, in terms of the power of data.I mean, one of the things that we’re going to be delving into a little bit is that books were a way of actually gathering quite a bit of data on people, on your predilections.
Yeah
So was that something you were aware of at the time?
How do I put it?It was made clear from the beginning that data collection was also one of Amazon’s businesses.It was made clear to us that all customer behavior that flowed through the site was recorded and tracked, and that that itself was a commodity; that it wasn’t simply that a customer came into the store, bought a book, and left; that knowing exactly how they behaved was itself a valuable commodity.Again, I was a bit of a naif.I didn’t know how valuable, nor did any of us really, because the sort of the surveillance culture we are in now was in its very nascent stages.So maybe there, too, I thought, Jeff, what do you care if that person looked at, you know, a Teletubbies book before buying Tolstoy?Who really cares?But again, he understood that that data was in fact very valuable and might ultimately be more valuable as a commodity than selling Dostoevsky or Teletubbies.
And what did you actually—did you think about that at the time?Did you have any concerns or thoughts about that data collection, implications of privacy, any of those things?Did those sorts of things come up in your mind at the time or internally?
That data collection did not strike me as sinister at the time.It seemed like maybe it—it was a business technique that might on the one hand enable you to, I suppose, target customers more precisely and steer them to other books that might be of interest.Again, I was seeing this through my humanist and literary culture lenses, and thinking that it might be a kind of service to the customer, but now it all looks very different.I mean, now, in the age of surveillance, where Google, Facebook, Amazon and the other big tech companies are collecting endless and sinister quantities of data on every single person in the world, now it seems sinister to me.It did not seem sinister to me at the time.
A Culture of Domination
… Was domination a big part of the culture, or at least Jeff’s vision of things?
I think Jeff—domination was on Jeff’s mind from the beginning.It seemed like a weird idea when we started out because Amazon was tiny, and e-commerce as a share of the economy was tiny.So to really feel like you were going to conquer the world through this miniature business seemed a little bit funny.But yes, domination was very much the idea.I remember very specifically that at the end of 1997—so I had been there just about a year—you know, some numbers came down.Amazon had done just a little shy of $150 million in total revenue.Now that is now a rounding error for Amazon, but that seemed like an enormous amount of money at the time.But the statistic that blew my mind was that the total sort of maybe North American book market then was $150 billion.So Amazon now had 1% of that entire market.Arguably that’s a tiny number, right?But really, a little more than a year after going into business, one out of every 100 books in the United States was being sold by Amazon, and I found that mind-blowing.I mean, now Amazon sells I think close to five out of 10 books in the United States, but even that they’d gone from basically nothing to 1% in little more than a year was astonishing, and that was the first step toward a kind of domination of the book market domestically and even to some extent globally.
The Day One Credo
… What does “Day One” mean?
“Day One” was one of the other—maybe the great credo of Amazon was Jeff’s constant articulation of Day One.Day One meant that there was never a moment to sit complacently on your laurels no matter how great you were doing and that you would never settle into any fixed version of what you or Amazon was doing.Jeff liked to constantly say that, in the early years of the sort of internet gold rush, that brands and company identities would dry like fast-drying—they would fix like fast-drying cement.And so, for instance, he did not want Amazon to mainly be known as a bookstore even though for its first two or three years, that was its cultural identity very much.He was fleeing from that as fast as possible, because he always knew he wanted to sell everything.So you had to be constantly reinventing what you did and what the company did.Your identity and the company’s identity were supposed to be in constant flux, and it was supposed to never stop.
And that’s still going on there.I mean, they’re still launching new businesses it seems every 24 hours.They’re going into markets and into places that I don’t know or understand.And Jeff meanwhile, you know, perhaps as a hobbyist, owns a major American newspaper, a space exploration company, and God knows what else.So he’s true to his own credo.He has not stopped.He has not reached a point, which you might think he would, in his mid- to late 50s, where he takes a deep breath and says, “This has been an amazing adventure for more than two decades now, and what shall I do with the rest of my life now?”He’s not there.I mean, he’s still reinventing Amazon every god damn day.So you have to give him credit.It’s still Day One for him, whereas for me I feel that Day One ended the day that I walked out of Amazon headquarters.
Jeff Bezos and the Accumulation of Power
… But what about the accumulation of power in his hands?
Oh, well, that’s different.
Right, that’s different.And you knew this guy early on, and you know—I think you probably have a good sense, because people don’t change all that much in terms of their moral code and their—their ethical direction.I mean, when you’ve seen the behavior and the centralization of power, what’s—what comes to mind for you?
What comes to mind for me when I see the amount of power in Jeff’s hands is that the better angels of his nature will be speaking up at some point.It’s not that I feel that everything he does is evil.In fact, most of the things he does are—some of them are demonstrably good; many of them are demonstrably mixed.I mean, he bought The Washington Post.He’s poured an enormous amount of money into it and has made it a better newspaper.Of course the fact that he is the wealthiest person in America and one of the most important businesspeople in America makes you worry about his ownership of one of the primary newspapers.But so far, is that a net plus?Is the survival and the buttressing of The Washington Post as a major newspaper good?I think it is.You know, in the biography that came out by Brad Stone a couple of years ago, four years ago maybe, he found this sort of document of Jeff’s where he had a list of things that were cool and uncool, and, you know, succeeding was cool; beating big, bad, ugly competitors was cool; tromping on smaller competitors was supposedly uncool, though Amazon does that every single day as far as I can determine.I hope that ultimately his notion of what is cool will prevail because he’s the possessor of just enormous power.
Employee Compensation
… And what about the wealth disparity?I mean, we talked earlier about workers and about, you know, when we see $15-an-hour wages and things of that nature.I just kind of want to go back to what you were saying before we started rolling, and what you’ve sort of been observing over the years about how they’re wielding—how not just Jeff is wielding his power, but how Amazon and Jeff are wielding their power.
Look, in terms of wealth and income disparity, Amazon, whatever they say, will continue to be a driver of it and not a solver of it.Amazon has proudly touted the fact that I think in November of 2018 they decided that they would fix $15 an hour as the minimum wage across the board for their employees.I celebrate that; I think it’s a great thing.I think they were pressured into doing it to a large extent by people like Bernie Sanders and other people talking about income inequality.The fact remains, though, that if you do the math, which is quite easy, if you work 40 hours a week for $15 an hour and you do that every week, you take no vacation, you come out at the end of the year with an income of a little over $30,000 before taxes.I think we understand that in a lot of places in America, it is very hard to live on that much money, and if you have a family to support, forget it.Now, that’s not just Amazon’s problem; that’s a problem across—the way our economy is set up.But Amazon plays an outsize role in America’s economy, so what they do—they have a lot of weight to throw around.It would be fabulous, I think, if at some point Jeff, as incidentally the wealthiest person in the world, said, “I’m going to be a leader on this, and I’m going to raise a lot of our wages to something closer to a living wage.”That would cut into Amazon’s margins.It would make it a less profitable company.Maybe Amazon would have to raise some of its prices in order to do that, and then it’s an affront to the customer, who’s always supposed to be number one.But I would pay two more dollars for a book if I felt that that would trickle down to better wages for the hundreds of thousands of people that Amazon employs.
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