On Sunday, February 23, 2020, I boarded a United Airlines flight at New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International Airport that was destined for Seattle, Washington. A month earlier, the first case of Covid-19 had been confirmed in Washington State. But to me, and to most of the rest of the world that was continuing to live life normally, the novel coronavirus was not yet a cause for major concern—and it mostly remained barred from my mind during my five-hour plane ride until a fellow passenger began to sneeze into his open hand, over and over again, seemingly ignorant of the fact that this was unacceptable behavior, even during normal times.
Still, most of my mental focus was on preparing for something that Amazon representatives had tipped me off to just a few days earlier. I was one of a select group of journalists invited to take a sneak peek at a new retail concept the tech giant had developed and would unveil to the public later that week: a grocery store.
Of course, it wasn’t just any grocery store. It was, according to the Gospel of Amazon, the grocery store of the future: outfitted with cameras, sensors, and computer vision, this Amazon grocery store eliminated the need for shoppers to fork over cash or payment cards before walking out the door with their groceries. Amazon called it Just Walk Out Technology—or JWOT to industry geeks. No cashiers needed. Convenience reincarnated at the altar of Jeff Bezos.
While Walmart’s No. 1 customer priority has long been to save people money, Amazon’s has long been a prioritization of convenience. This store was the manifestation of what Amazon thought convenience could look like if someone had to step out from behind a computer to shop for groceries in person.
Two years earlier, Amazon had first introduced the idea of high-tech cashierless shopping with a store that I had described as “a cross between a 7-Eleven and a Pret A Manger sandwich shop.”1 Now, with the new grocery concept, Amazon was bringing the concept to a 10,000-square-foot supermarket that was more reminiscent of a Trader’s Joe’s than a Kroger, Walmart, or even Whole Foods. There was no deli counter, butcher, or bakery—the computer vision couldn’t accurately track those items yet. Produce items were sold by the unit or bundle rather than by weight, so that the cameras and computer could handle the price computations.
Nonetheless, the new store concept highlighted Amazon’s unsated appetite for gobbling up market share in the $900 billion US grocery industry, despite having spent nearly $14 billion in 2017 to acquire Whole Foods2 and making same-day grocery delivery a free perk for Prime members in 2019.3 Even with the acquisition of Whole Foods, even with the popularity of delivery startups like Instacart, and Shipt, which Target purchased, Amazon executives knew that only a small percentage of Americans were regularly ordering their groceries online. Amazon was taking another giant step toward infiltrating the world of physical retail it had long shunned—the one Walmart had long owned. The testing and learning had just begun. Little did the Amazon officials I met with that day know, though, how daunting the internal and external hurdles to come would be.
Walmart Plus
Around the same time, in conference rooms at Walmart’s home office in northwest Arkansas and the retailer’s e-commerce digs in Hoboken, New Jersey, and the San Francisco Bay area, company executives were planning their own secretive launch. Until I caught wind of it. Just a few days after returning from the Seattle trip, I broke the news that Walmart was finally gearing up to unveil its own innovation: a competitor to Amazon Prime.
Walmart Plus (stylized as Walmart+)4 was expected to launch as a rebrand of Walmart’s existing Delivery Unlimited service, which was already charging customers $98 a year for unlimited, same-day delivery of fresh groceries from one of the 1,600-plus Walmart stores in the US where the program was available. But the Delivery Unlimited service didn’t have a real internal champion behind it or, as a result, any significant marketing muscle. Walmart’s US CEO, Greg Foran, despite the urgency created by Amazon’s Whole Foods acquisition, still preferred that Walmart’s focus be placed on the grocery pickup business, a much more profitable service, rather than delivery. Delivery Unlimited also never felt like a membership, something that several executives, including Doug McMillon, believed Walmart could benefit from.
As internal conversations about if and how the service might transform into a membership ensued, Marc Lore stressed to his senior counterparts that Walmart should consider pricing the membership below cost. His theory was that if the price remained at $98 a year, that would lead to comparisons with Amazon Prime, which, at the time, cost only a bit more at $119 a year. Lore doubted how many Americans would pay for two subscriptions, especially when, in areas such as same-day delivery and video streaming, Amazon’s membership offered more value. In his view, most Americans would pick one or the other, and he wasn’t confident Walmart+ had enough going for it to win out.
If, on the other hand, Walmart priced its membership low enough, he reasoned, a large pool of Amazon Prime customers might be willing to simply purchase a Walmart+ membership in addition to their Prime subscription, utilizing Walmart+ mainly for grocery delivery while continuing to rely on Amazon, at least in the short term, for fast delivery of general merchandise and its entertainment perks. Then, little by little, as Walmart added more value to the Walmart+ program, the retailer might have a better shot at convincing Amazon Prime customers to drop the more expensive program altogether.
The move would require short-term losses by charging just $49 a year for unlimited grocery deliveries, but in exchange for the long-term prospect of chipping away at Amazon’s biggest retail strength. And, the truth was, Walmart was never going to turn much of a profit from the membership fee alone and would, either way, need to eventually convince Walmart+ shoppers to order more items that had higher profit margins than groceries, such as household décor or apparel.
Lore knew that making this case would be an uphill battle, and it probably didn’t help that his own strategy team had pushed a $98 membership years earlier in a 2018 strategy white paper crafted for the company’s board of directors. Also, by the time talk of Walmart+ picked up steam, Lore’s voice didn’t carry as much weight as it once did. Despite this, Lore tried to make a compelling case that the lower membership price and resulting lower membership revenue might be offset by Walmart needing to spend less on marketing to attract new members. A better deal, Lore knew, would lead to more free, word-of-mouth marketing, which could reduce how much paid advertising the retailer might need to boost sign-ups.
Lore believed that his boss, McMillon, understood the thinking, but it didn’t fly with others, like the company’s chief financial officer, Brett Biggs. Even some e-commerce leaders working for Lore believed that the $98 price point was more than fair considering how much lower Walmart’s prices were on individual grocery items than competitors like Target, or Kroger, or Amazon, for that matter. If a Walmart+ customer placed a large grocery order on a weekly basis, the thinking went, they could expect that they would save at least $10 a week on actual grocery prices compared to other competitors with delivery offerings. If you added those savings up over the course of the year, that amounted to more than $500 in grocery savings, in exchange for just the $98 membership fee to have those savings delivered to your door.
From that point of view, some wanted to make the case publicly that the $98 price point was a steal. But when the service did eventually launch in September 2020, the corporate messaging didn’t focus on that. A top Walmart executive, instead, referred to it as “the ultimate life hack.”5
“It was always about convenience,” one of these people said, disapprovingly. “Convenience? Amazon’s convenient. Instacart’s convenient. Saying that we’re convenient is not something new.”
The membership also included discounts of 5 cents per gallon at Walmart gas stations, as well as access to a service, called Scan & Go, that allowed shoppers to check out in Walmart stores without waiting in line—a tool Walmart had briefly tested but discontinued several years earlier. But the long-term vision for Walmart+ was for the program to add more perks, like discounts on prescription drugs at Walmart pharmacies, which it eventually did. In 2022, Walmart also added an entertainment perk to the membership: a free subscription to Paramount+, which included TV shows from networks such as CBS and Nickelodeon, as well as movies from Paramount and Miramax.
But back in February 2020, when I broke the news of Walmart+, the program was still a month or two from its scheduled public launch. Before it could get out the door, though, the entire world was turned upside down by a pandemic, the scale of which the world hadn’t experienced in over a hundred years. Walmart executives would find themselves firefighting on myriad fronts, including trying to keep up with demand for a volume of online grocery orders that they could have only dreamed of in preceding years. Amazon, too, was about to face a string of disruptive crises, some outside its control—and some self-inflicted.
Prime Pandemic
Ever since Amazon launched an online marketplace in 2002 to allow outside merchants to sell merchandise through its website, the massive product catalogue that it helped create proved crucial to propelling the Amazon flywheel. But as online shopping exploded during the pandemic, that same strength transformed into a major complication. While urgent necessities like soap, toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and masks were in high demand on Amazon.com, Amazon warehouses were also stocked with merchandise that seemed less important: everything from dress clothes to video game consoles. And space was running low.
In mid-March of 2020, Amazon instituted sweeping changes in which products it would store and ship from its warehouses, in a move it said was aimed at keeping essential items in stock and speeding up orders. At the time, Amazon said it would be “temporarily prioritizing household staples, medical supplies, and other high-demand products coming into our fulfillment centers so that we can more quickly receive, restock and deliver these products to customers.”
By “prioritizing,” Amazon meant it would no longer accept new shipments to its warehouses for discretionary items from marketplace sellers, or bigger vendors, through early April of 2020. During that time, Amazon would still sell all types of products, including nonessential ones, through its website, but outside sellers offering discretionary goods would have to store and ship this merchandise on their own, rather than having Amazon handle those tasks, as it did through its ultrapopular Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) service.
Even with the changes, Amazon’s website and shipping services practically ground to a halt. Not only was top merchandise in short supply, but the company’s warehouse workers were calling out, either because they or their loved ones were falling ill, or for fear of contracting the virus in Amazon facilities that employed thousands of workers each. Worker attendance fell by as much as 30 percent.6 While Amazon did lead many of its competitors in rolling out safety measures like social distancing, mandatory masking, and temperature checks, some workers said at the time that they still often had to hit their quotas, making social distancing difficult or impossible. Another common complaint in the pandemic’s earliest days was that Amazon leadership was not being transparent enough about the spread of the virus inside their facilities.
“It affects your nerves, your mental state, your way of thinking—because you have to be cautious in everything you do now,” a worker at a Staten Island, New York, Amazon facility said at the time.7 “It’s like I’m risking my life for a dollar.”
Amazon workers weren’t alone. At Walmart, workers were agitating for better health precautions, too. In early April of 2020, Walmart had to temporarily close a Pennsylvania warehouse after a rapid rise in Covid-19 cases. Covid-19 outbreaks also hit several Supercenter stores, including a Massachusetts location that Walmart temporarily closed after about a dozen employees there tested positive. A dozen US state attorneys general wrote to Walmart in early June of that year to denounce what they said were unsatisfactory precautions to protect both Walmart employees and customers.
A few days after Amazon’s announcement about prioritizing essential merchandise, some goods, even though in stock in Amazon’s warehouses, were showing delivery times of more than a month—even for Prime members.8 For several weeks, such delivery delays prevailed, as the ripple effects of the pathogen seemed to be the only external force capable of bringing Amazon’s services to their knees. On social media, Prime members wondered whether Amazon might refund them a portion of their membership fee, since Prime’s core perk of express shipping was essentially nonexistent. Yes, there were once-in-a-generation extenuating circumstances, but would Amazon reduce the price of Prime for a customer if the situation was reversed? Unlikely. Yet no Prime refund was coming. Despite the fact that Prime’s main benefit was essentially unavailable at the most crucial time in the company’s history, company executives chose to basically look the other way.
I asked Jamil Ghani, the head of Prime, if there were internal debates over the right move to make for a company that boasts about its “customer obsession” to, at times, a nauseating degree.
“I’m not going to comment on internal conversations and meetings,” he said. “But what I can say is that [Prime member] engagement levels, and [customer] acquisition and retention performance, and then also anecdotes from members around the world, just substantiates that Prime was doing an essential service for members, regardless of the state of supply chain disruptions globally for everybody.”
Translation: People were still using Prime benefits, sticking with the service, or signing up for the service if they weren’t already members, so why would we refund anyone? Customers voted with their wallets and actions, the reasoning went. Still, the decision seemed unbecoming of a corporation with the self-proclaimed mission of being “Earth’s most customer-centric company.”
The move, or lack thereof, was another proof point of how crucial Prime was to Amazon’s domination, and how much Walmart suffered from lacking a counterattack. Over time, as Covid-19 variants and resulting lockdowns whipsawed across the country, sending retail, hospitality, and restaurant workers into unemployment lines en masse, millions of Americans found themselves worse off financially than they had been just a few months earlier. With e-commerce surging in popularity—necessity, even—something counterintuitive happened. Even among those low-income households struggling to make ends meet, Prime membership surged during the crisis.
“The pandemic has been, unfortunately, a real accelerant there, as the overall population of households on some form of government assistance has increased significantly,” Ghani told me.
Yet, thanks to the disruption caused by the pandemic, Walmart’s counterattack would be delayed from a possible launch in February or March 2020 to a new launch date in July. But July came and went, and the launch was pushed back once again. This time to September.
In the meantime, each company had a lot more to worry about than just new initiatives, or customer demand and whether they could fulfill it during the first few months of the pandemic. Store and warehouse employees started to speak out, accusing company leaders of not taking enough precautions to protect them from contracting the novel coronavirus and not being transparent enough about how many coworkers were getting infected. For Amazon specifically, the resulting internal showdown would have the potential to alter the company in myriad ways for years to come.
Union Avoidance
For the first decade and a half of Amazon’s existence, working conditions inside the company’s warehouse network were not a hot topic of media or governmental scrutiny. Amazon was not yet hugely popular and had fewer than ten US warehouses for more than a decade. Labor activists and union supporters also were busy attacking their Public Enemy No. 1: the much bigger, and more powerful, small business killer, Walmart. Plus, in its early days, Amazon wasn’t always so intensely preoccupied with quotas and performance metrics that would later draw scrutiny from both within and outside its warehouse walls.
A former longtime corporate employee, who worked as an HR manager for the warehouse division, told me they saw a major shift in that direction at Amazon around 2010. “When I joined, it was very apparent to me that the leaders in the facility really cared about the people,” they said.9 “The Amazon that I left in fulfillment was . . . not that way.”
This former manager attributed part of the change to an increased reliance on performance data, as well as the implementation of so-called standard operating procedures. “We almost overindexed on processes,” she told me, while also acknowledging the business upsides to adding more structure to warehouse work. But another key factor was the type of warehouse leaders the company recruited as Amazon expanded to meet exploding customer demand. “It was all about just drive, drive, drive.”
This timeline also aligns with the internal rise of a pull-no-punches leader named Dave Clark. The former HR manager noticed warehouse culture shifting around 2010, which was the same year Clark was appointed to run the company’s North American operations, chief among them its warehouse network. Under Clark’s leadership, Amazon’s logistics prowess increased, but some say the harshness of conditions did too. Early in his career, as a warehouse general manager, Clark was known to lurk in the shadows so he could catch, and terminate, frontline workers he considered to be slacking on the job. The tactic earned him the nickname the Sniper.
“He’s a driver to the point that he leaves bodies in his wake,” the former HR manager told me, while at the same time acknowledging Clark’s high intelligence.
In Amazon’s earliest days as a startup, the company was also especially frugal and only wanted to pay the market rate for warehouse work in its first few locations. But over time, as the company matured, executives in its operations division began to see the benefit of paying more than rivals for warehouse associates, especially when hiring in a new state for the first time.
“There’s an existential threat to not paying above market,” was how the company started thinking about it, according to a longtime former senior leader in Amazon’s human resources department. “We certainly don’t want the most talented folks to go down the street to Target or Walmart.”
What came with the pay—and better-than-average benefits—was taxing labor. A dozen miles or more of walking across the hard warehouse floor all day. Strict quotas, punishing performance rules, and a grueling climate, literally. An investigation in 2011 by the Morning Call, a Pennsylvania newspaper, revealed that one local Amazon warehouse kept an ambulance parked outside during the summer because so many workers were falling ill from high temperatures in the facility.10
In the wake of the exposé, Bezos quickly announced a plan to spend more than $50 million retrofitting its large warehouses with air-conditioning. But it was a huge black eye for the company and served to galvanize activists and labor groups who, along with online shoppers of the time, had long saved their major labor criticisms for the Bentonville behemoth.
“Walmart was evil among particular urban, Democratic kinds of customers that Amazon was going after,” says Stacy Mitchell, codirector of the nonprofit Institute for Local Self-Reliance and a longtime critic of both Walmart’s and Amazon’s business practices. “And that’s interesting because they sort of got away with having horrible labor practices and a bunch of other stuff that Walmart got a lot more PR blowback on because [Walmart was] red-state and country music, and culturally different.”
A couple of years after the warehouse heat exposé, in 2013, a union in Germany sparred with Amazon over bonuses and other issues. The next year Amazon faced its first real threat of unionization in the US when a small group of equipment technicians and mechanics—not rank-and-file pickers and packers—chose to go forward with a union vote at a warehouse in Delaware. In the end, a majority of the twenty-seven workers voted against unionization in the face of a fierce union-busting campaign by Amazon.
A few years later, Amazon defeated another unionization drive of similar workers at a warehouse in Virginia before it even reached a vote, the New York Times reported in 2021.11 But Amazon later agreed to a settlement with federal regulators after the union accused it of breaking labor laws during its fight against the union drive. On the break room walls, Amazon had to post a notice in which it agreed not to engage in certain union-busting behavior. “‘We will not threaten you with the loss of your job’ if you are a union supporter, Amazon wrote,” according to the Times.12 “‘We will not interrogate you’ about the union or ‘engage in surveillance of you’ while you participate in union activities. ‘We will not threaten you with unspecified reprisals’ because you are a union supporter. ‘We will not threaten to “get” union supporters.’”
This was not especially surprising behavior for Amazon. Amazon’s anti-union efforts went way back, just like Walmart’s. Over the years, Sam Walton’s company was fierce in its opposition to labor organizers, pulling out stop after stop to disrupt any sliver of momentum. In 2000, a small group of meatcutters voted in favor of unionizing at a Texas Walmart. Shortly thereafter, Walmart said it was going to begin carrying only prepackaged meat, eliminating the work of butchers, in a decision supposedly made prior to the union vote. The company also shut down a Supercenter in Canada after a majority of workers voted to unionize.
“It has struggled from the beginning,” a Walmart spokesman said of the store’s supposed financial troubles at the time.13 “The situation has continued to deteriorate since the union. The store environment became very fractured because there were some people who were part of the union and some who were not.”
Union-busting behavior has been so common throughout Walmart’s history that a former top executive, named Tom Coughlin, who was caught misappropriating company funds, had tried to cover up his misdeeds by telling underlings the moneys were being used to pay off union members for intel.
“Sam always fought the union; we all have,” said Burt Stacy, the retired executive once hired by Sam Walton to run the Bank of Bentonville, and the best friend of Walmart’s second CEO, David Glass. “Because we can’t see how anything the union could do would be good for Walmart.”
Amazon leaders felt the same way. In the 2000s, Amazon began tracking the threat of unionization at each of its warehouses, according to the former senior human resources manager, building a heat map in Excel to identify unionization “hot spots.” These danger zones were calculated based on dozens of metrics, including the frequency of worker pay raises and the safety record of the warehouse.
The thinking was, if management could identify discontent at a warehouse early enough, the company could intervene before workers began considering unionization. “If my workforce has to band together and go into collective bargaining, I have failed as an employer,” the former senior HR manager said of the company’s thinking.14 Walmart executives had long said a similar thing. Eventually, though, Amazon would find itself facing the prospect of that very failure.
Not Smart or Articulate
In the earliest days of the pandemic, many employers were failing to adequately protect their workers from the virus, and some Amazon workers felt like their company was one of them. At the time, a longtime Amazon warehouse worker named Chris Smalls was growing concerned. Several of his colleagues were sick, possibly with Covid, but the facility remained open, and he didn’t believe that managers were being transparent. So, in late March of 2020, Smalls led a small walkout at his Amazon facility in Staten Island, New York, to protest and call on Amazon to temporarily shut the warehouse down. He briefed some media on the plan, and outlets like CNBC and Vice covered the walkout, which involved about fifty workers.
“Amazon is a breeding ground for the coronavirus,” Smalls told Vice at the time.15 “We’re going to be the second wave. Right now, I’m trying to prevent that.”
Shortly thereafter, Amazon made a grave error: the company fired Smalls. The company’s official line was that Smalls was fired for violating quarantine by showing up on property for the walkout when Amazon had sent him home because he had been exposed to a coworker diagnosed with Covid-19. But to many, including an HR manager at the warehouse, the termination wasn’t warranted and reeked of retaliation. Sure enough, New York State attorney general Letitia James later ruled that Amazon’s firing of Smalls was illegal.
Things only snowballed from there. Shortly after Smalls’s firing, the company’s top lawyer, David Zapolsky, a white man, referred to Smalls, a Black man, as “not smart or articulate” in notes summarizing a meeting with top Amazon leaders, including Jeff Bezos. Zapolsky also encouraged colleagues to make Smalls the focal point of unionizing efforts when communicating with the press. Zapolsky’s notes from this meeting leaked to the press after he mistakenly emailed them to Amazon’s entire legal division.16 Outraged, Amazon corporate employees began to question the company’s actions and what some saw as racist comments from Zapolsky. The tech workers fumed on an internal Listserv that included thousands of employees, and later in smaller groups on Chime, the company’s workplace messaging system, after a Listserv moderator squashed one of the email threads.17
Smalls told a reporter that the leaked notes “exposed who Jeff Bezos is as a person, who’s around him, who’s giving him counsel—the types of conversations that they have about their employees, and their focus on smearing me.
“That tells you right there they don’t care about us,” Smalls continued. “It’s never going to be Amazon v. Chris Smalls. It’s Amazon v. the people.”18
After the leak, Amazon issued a statement on Zapolsky’s behalf, but it did not include any of the words typically associated with a sincere apology, such as sorry, apologize, or regret, for the comments made about Smalls.
The statement read, “My comments were personal and emotional. I was frustrated and upset that an Amazon employee would endanger the health and safety of other Amazonians by repeatedly returning to the premises after having been warned to quarantine himself after exposure to virus Covid-19. I let my emotions draft my words and get the better of me.”
An Amazon spokesperson, Dan Perlet, told reporters that Zapolsky did not know that Smalls was Black when he wrote up the meeting notes, even though photos of Smalls protesting outside the warehouse were commonly included in media coverage of the event.
Despite the internal and media firestorm that Zapolsky’s comments incited, Amazon officials kept a target on Smalls’s back. Less than two months after Smalls’s firing, I interviewed Dave Clark and came away stunned. During the interview, Clark twice brought up Smalls—unprompted—to use him as an example of wrongdoing among dissenting workers. Clark insisted that Smalls was fired for his breaking of quarantine and no other reason.
“I’ve been here twenty-one years, and I have never seen anybody punished or terminated or anything for speaking out or having a contrary opinion or debating something,” he told me back then. “And that continues to be the case.”
Clark may have believed that, but the facts suggested the truth was more complicated. Just in the first few months of the pandemic alone, Amazon fired or reprimanded at least a dozen employees who were involved in worker protests or who spoke out about warehouse working conditions. Smalls, though, was not going away. In early 2021, Smalls, along with friend and coworker Derrick Palmer, traveled to Bessemer, Alabama, where the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union was gearing up for a union vote at a giant Amazon warehouse that employed six thousand workers. Smalls came back to the Northeast invigorated by the workers’ efforts in the notoriously anti-union South, vowing to “bring it back up here to New York, and try to organize even my former facility.”19
Within a few months, Smalls and Palmer decided to do just that, but not with the help of the RWDSU, which they “found less than welcoming to them and thought the professionals seemed like outsiders who had descended on the community,” according to the New York Times.20 Instead they founded their own union, called the Amazon Labor Union, which would eventually, against all odds, make labor history.
While all of this was going on in the early spring of 2021, tensions were rising inside Amazon’s executive ranks. While the mail-in voting for the Bessemer union election was happening, Amazon’s leadership created an unnecessary media storm of their own. It started with a tweet from Clark, who had since been promoted to CEO of Amazon’s worldwide consumer business. Senator Bernie Sanders, a longtime critic of Amazon, had announced that he would be visiting Alabama to attend a pro-union rally in Birmingham and meet with Amazon workers attempting to organize the nearby warehouse.
I welcome @SenSanders to Birmingham and appreciate his push for a progressive workplace, Clark posted, before unleashing a snarky punch line. I often say we are the Bernie Sanders of employers, but that’s not quite right because we actually deliver a progressive workplace.
Clark went on to compare Amazon’s minimum hourly pay at the time—$15—to that of Sanders’s home state of Vermont—which was less than $12. But the insults didn’t stop there. In fact, that’s when things went haywire. A few hours after Clark’s ill-advised thread, the “Amazon News” media relations Twitter account, with more than 170,000 followers at the time, went after Congressman Mark Pocan, who had called Clark’s “progressive workplace” assertion into question.
Paying workers $15/hr doesn’t make you a ‘progressive workplace’ when you union-bust & make workers urinate in water bottles, Pocan wrote.
You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? the official Amazon News account replied. If that were true, nobody would work for us.
As it turned out, peeing in bottles wasn’t common among Amazon warehouse employees other than on very rare occasions. But it’s a different story for Amazon delivery drivers. No, these drivers are not technically Amazon’s direct employees, but they deliver out of Amazon-branded vans, wear Amazon-branded attire, and are managed by Amazon technology and quotas. These quotas can be grinding, pushing drivers to blow past potential bathroom breaks for fear of being reprimanded or losing their jobs. Amazon has said that the average delivery route includes 250 packages during a ten-hour shift and that 90 percent of drivers complete their routes on time; that’s in contrast to reports by some drivers that routes can total as many as 375 packages, not even counting the busiest shopping weeks. To much of the outside world, they are rightfully viewed as a key part of the Amazon machine and are essentially Amazon workers.
Amazon ended up apologizing for the specific blunder after an investigative news site published internal Amazon documents showing that it was common knowledge inside the company’s logistics division that their delivery drivers often left behind bottles and bags full of human waste.21
Later, the Amazon News account also targeted Senator Elizabeth Warren after she posted a tweet and video that called out Amazon for its tax-avoidance strategy. After Warren’s response, Amazon’s Twitter account twisted Warren’s counterattack and claimed Warren just said she’s going to break up an American company so that they can’t criticize her anymore.
Inside Amazon, alarm bells were ringing both within the communications division and across the rest of the company. Suddenly, some Amazon officials who had never been willing to take my calls before seemed eager to talk. To them this behavior crossed a line, counterproductive at best and supremely embarrassing and damaging at worst. No one I spoke to could believe what they were witnessing: one of the most powerful companies in the world, a model for so many others, engaging in a virtual pissing match with top government officials, including two senators, both of whom were onetime presidential hopefuls.
The tweets were so out of character that a security engineer at the company filed an internal support ticket that was either trying to alert others or perhaps simply pointing out the absurdity of what was taking place.
“Suspicious activity on @amazonnews Twitter account,” the alert read.
“The tweets in question do not match the usual content posted by this account . . . [and] are unnecessarily antagonistic (risking Amazon’s brand) and may be a result of unauthorized access.”
The only thing that made sense to many insiders and outsiders was that, at a minimum, Jeff Bezos must have been okay with the approach. But within a few days, I had discovered that it was more than that—the Twitter outbursts were a direct result of the CEO expressing his frustration to his deputies that they weren’t more aggressive in combating allegations and criticisms that he and other Amazon leaders found misleading or false.22 As it was later revealed, Bezos and his spokesman at the time—former Obama White House press secretary Jay Carney—actually penned some of these tweets themselves.23
While the company’s top leaders might have been celebrating their sophomoric tit-for-tats, some members of Amazon’s public policy team—those responsible for the company’s relationship with lawmakers—were beside themselves. Amazon was already a target of powerful Democrat and Republican politicians in an antitrust probe into the company’s power and business practices. Amazon staff members in Washington, DC, already knew that the company’s standing inside the nation’s capital had deteriorated in recent years. Now Bezos and team were seen as unnecessarily antagonizing powerful senators with large followings on another high-profile topic. This lack of self-awareness was painfully obvious to everyone except the company leaders who should have known better.
Within a few weeks, though, the labor tide seemed to be moving back in Amazon’s favor—Amazon came out victorious in the Bessemer union election by a significant margin. But inside the company, the feeling of victory was muted. The company’s main spokesperson during the Bessemer union campaign exited Amazon shortly after the vote. And despite the win, there were signs Amazon’s reputation had suffered during the pandemic. In May 2020, the share of people who said they had a positive impression of Amazon dropped to 58 percent from 74 percent in January, according to two separate polls of more than one thousand people conducted by Survey Monkey for the media outlets Fortune and Recode.24 Jeff Bezos seemed to recognize as much in his final shareholder letter as CEO, which was published in the same month as the Bessemer victory.
“I think we need to do a better job for our employees,” he wrote, in a paragraph sandwiched between otherwise strong defenses of the company’s labor practices. “While the voting results were lopsided and our direct relationship with employees is strong, it’s clear to me that we need a better vision for how we create value for employees—a vision for their success.”
Later in the letter, he added a new mission for the company he had shepherded for so long as CEO, but was now handing over to a longtime protégé named Andy Jassy.
“We have always wanted to be Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company,” he wrote. “We won’t change that. It’s what got us here. But I am committing us to an addition. We are going to be Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work.”
As it turned out, though, the Earth’s Best Employer mission was going to soon face another roadblock: a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) official called for a redo of the union vote after ruling that Amazon’s placement of a USPS mailbox in the parking lot of the Bessemer warehouse, and its encouragement for workers to use it to submit their mail-in ballots, had unfairly influenced the election. Amazon’s retail CEO, Dave Clark, among other leaders, had pushed for the installation of the mailbox, thinking it would encourage apathetic workers, who would likely favor the company, to vote. But the move instead resulted in union organizers in Bessemer getting another shot at a vote.25
Back on Staten Island, Chris Smalls and the Amazon Labor Union accumulated enough support among workers to qualify for a union election to take place in the first half of 2022. All the while, Amazon’s self-inflicted blunders continued. A month before the Staten Island union vote, Amazon officials called the police on Smalls when he showed up to deliver lunch to warehouse workers. The New York City Police Department arrested him and charged him with trespassing, saying Smalls had ignored several requests to leave the property.26 More media coverage soon followed. Smalls said that he and other organizers still working at Amazon often brought food to feed workers when their budget allowed, and that Amazon was well aware.
“I drop off the food, I pick up the food. I drop off literature,” he said. “I should have been treated like any other visitor leaving the parking lot. But on this day,” he added, “Amazon decided to escalate things and, unfortunately, that kind of backfired on them as well.”27
Finally, in March 2022, the tallying for both the second Bessemer election and the first Staten Island election began on the same day. The general public, including reporters, could watch the ballot counting via livestream. Based on Amazon’s history of defeating unionization attempts, a union win seemed like a long shot.
To many following along with these events, including me, the Staten Island vote seemed like an even longer shot than a union win in Bessemer. Yes, it was taking place in a borough of New York City, where unions are far more popular than in the South. But the employees who formed the Amazon Labor Union seemingly had little to no experience organizing workers. Their track record was nonexistent, and Amazon management and anti-union consultants made sure to hammer that message home in mandatory worker meetings.
But on the day of the simultaneous elections, as I switched between livestreams, something quickly caught my attention: “Yes” votes for the Amazon Labor Union in Staten Island were significantly outpacing “No” votes, and the trend would continue all the way to the end of the counting the following day. Amazingly, the underfunded, inexperienced Amazon Labor Union won their election, 2,654 to 2,131.
Results for the redo election at the warehouse in Bessemer, however, were still undecided six months after the vote; the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union was trailing by a little more than 100 votes, but the two sides contested more than 400 ballots that needed to be scrutinized and potentially recounted before a winner could be determined.
Back on Staten Island, Amazon quickly announced it was contesting the results there, accusing both the Amazon Labor Union and the NLRB, which oversees US union elections, of more than two dozen infractions combined.28 But that summer, an NLRB official who oversaw the objection hearing recommended that all of Amazon’s objections be thrown out and that the Amazon Labor Union win be certified. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy later indicated at a tech conference that he was still not ready to accept defeat, and would continue to challenge the results.
“I think [it’s] going to take a long time to play out because I think it’s unlikely the NLRB is going to [rule] against themselves,” Bezos’s successor said.29
The Amazon Labor Union’s landmark victory, the first ever at an Amazon warehouse in the US, would have to wait to be finalized. But on the day that the election results were first announced, Chris Smalls took a Twitter victory lap. Everyone, including Amazon’s leaders, had vastly underestimated him.
@amazon wanted to make me the face of the whole unionizing efforts against them, Smalls tweeted. welp there you go! @JeffBezos @DavidZapolsky CONGRATULATIONS.